A vivid moment from the past. It made me cry and cry, but in a good way.
This fellow up in Jupiter got arrested for letting his son wrestle a bit with a gator.
The boy was 14 and the alligator wasn't but 4-foot long. They got him for two different things: interfering with a gator and putting his kid in danger. What nonsense.
We had an alligator in a tub out in the backyard when I was a kid. My dad brought it home from the water plant where he worked. They'd come in through the big pipes sometimes. I was feeding the gator a hotdog one day and it bit me good. I looked in its alligator eyes and realized that I and it were never going to connect. So it went to live on the farm.
NPR has interesting commentary by a lady named Ruth Stonesifer on what it means for her to be a Gold Star Mother.
Also, from Farm Accident Digest:
Today is our national "funeral". For some it is direct and so dearly immediate. We celebrate those who died for the specific purpose that we may continue to live as we would. They died so that we can continue to argue. They died so that we can continue to try to perfect this nation and ourselves. They died so that there can be life and life well lived.
In celebration of their sacrifice, I will continue to live my life in defiance. I will live in defiance of anyone who thinks they can tell me how to live. I will live in defiance of anyone who wants to kill me because I refuse to bow to their demands when all I want to do is be left and leave alone. I will live in defiance of all who hate people who live and act in their random freedom. I will live in defiance with all thanks to them who gave their ultimate for their nation.
Nick Cutinha was from a tiny little town in Lee County called Alva. His Medal of Honor is on permanent display at the American Legion in the nearby town of LaBelle, where a tribute is held for him each year on Memorial Day. He is buried at Fort Denaud Cemetery. I am proud that a man like this could come from my county, and I'm grateful for the sacrifice he made for us.
Thank you, Nick. Thank you so much.
NICHOLAS J. CUTINHA
Rank and organization: Specialist Fourth Class, U.S. Army, Company C, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Gia Dinh, Republic of Vietnam, 2 March 1968. Entered service at: Coral Gables, Fla. Born: 13 January 1945, Fernandina Beach, Fla. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. While serving as a machine gunner with Company C, Sp4c. Cutinha accompanied his unit on a combat mission near Gia Dinh. Suddenly his company came under small arms, automatic weapons, mortar and rocket propelled grenade fire, from a battalion size enemy unit. During the initial hostile attack, communication with the battalion was lost and the company commander and numerous members of the company became casualties. When Sp4c. Cutinha observed that his company was pinned down and disorganized, he moved to the front with complete disregard for his safety, firing his machinegun at the charging enemy. As he moved forward he drew fire on his own position and was seriously wounded in the leg. As the hostile fire intensified and half of the company was killed or wounded, Sp4c. Cutinha assumed command of all the survivors in his area and initiated a withdrawal while providing covering fire for the evacuation of the wounded. He killed several enemy soldiers but sustained another leg wound when his machinegun was destroyed by incoming rounds. Undaunted, he crawled through a hail of enemy fire to an operable machinegun in order to continue the defense of his injured comrades who were being administered medical treatment. Sp4c. Cutinha maintained this position, refused assistance, and provided defensive fire for his comrades until he fell mortally wounded. He was solely responsible for killing 15 enemy soldiers while saving the lives of at least 9 members of his own unit. Sp4c. Cutinha's gallantry and extraordinary heroism were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.
Arab Report: Iraq Situation Improving
Despite war and occupation, Iraq has seen a surge in human rights organizations, political parties and independent newspapers -- entities almost unheard of under Saddam Hussein, said a report by an Arab think tank.
The report by Egypt's Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies welcomed the promise of elections, the freedom of expression and independence of the media but was careful not to credit the Americans for the progress.
"Even though all indications of political rights and human rights mentioned in this report clearly illustrate that the situation in Iraq after occupation is much better than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the truth remains that any situation would have been better than Saddam Hussein," the report said.
This handsome fellow is my dad. He always said that during WWII he thought any guy writing in a journal was a goldbrick. There was always work to be done, and it annoyed him to see guys hunched over writing. So it's ended up his kids have had to jot things down as we heard them. He was in the service for 30 years, first in the Navy, then in the Army, then back in the Navy, and he fought in three wars. That's too damn much information. He should have kept a journal.
The stuff I remember most about is the first part of his service, with the Navy Armed Guards. Even then, there are too many stories.
My dad enlisted at 17 in June 1941, during Lend-Lease. He and his buddy were going to join together, but the buddy chickened out. My grandfather gave dad $5.00 spending money and he hitchhiked 120 miles up to Tampa to join up.
We were already at war before Pearl Harbor. Merchant ships were being attacked, then Navy ships doing convoy. The Kearny, Greer, and Reubin James were hit. The Reubin James went down. The first man from Lee County, Florida to die in the war was Allan Burdick, on September 4, 1941. He was on the Greer.
Dad was home on Exodus at the time and watched Allan's mother from his livingroom window. She was a widow and he was her only son and she did not take the news well. She went up and down the road hollering until some neighbors brought her inside.
Dad became a Navy Armed Guard. These were Navy gun crews placed on merchant ships to protect them. He was just finishing up school in Norfolk when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He pulled the worst duty, the Murmansk Run, many times. You didn't bother about picking up survivors of ships that were going down. The guys were dead as soon as they hit the water anyway. The convoys kept moving. On top of being attacked, he never liked any of the cargo. He'd get on one ship and the whole cargo was TNT. He'd get on another and there'd be nothing but trains strapped down all over the deck and glycerine in the hold. He always wanted to pick up his seabag and try a different boat. Maybe one of those Spam ships.
He's very excited about the WWII Memorial and we'll be taking him to see it next month.
This is just a little post to say "Good job, dad. You rock."
America doesn't need any toupee. If it comes to that, I'd rather us have the Yul Brynner look.
(Via FR.)
Canada's stupidly allowing sharia law within its borders has predictably put justice out of the reach of Muslim women there.
Homa Arjomand knows what it's like to live under sharia law. In Iran, she endured it until someone tipped her off that she was about to be arrested and imprisoned. Many of her activist friends had already been tried and executed. She, her husband and two small children (the youngest was barely one) escaped on a gruelling trip by horseback through the mountains. That was in 1989.
Today, she lives in a suburb northeast of Toronto. Her job is helping immigrant Muslim women in distress. And now she is battling the arrival of sharia law in Canada.
"We must separate religion from the state," she says emotionally. "We're living in Canada. We want Canadian secular law."
She gets that nice 7th Century religious law instead. Maybe she should escape on horseback one more time.
From the Boston Herald:
How dare Al Gore disgrace this nation
He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl. Or a single person killed in the World Trade Center. Nor did former Vice President Al Gore talk of any soldier by name who has given his life in Iraq. And he has the audacity to condemn the Bush administration for having ``twisted values?''
Gore spent the bulk of a speech before the liberal group MoveOn.org Wednesday bemoaning Abu Ghraib and denouncing President Bush's departure from the ``long successful strategy of containment.''
Yes, the very same strategy that, under Gore's leadership, allowed al-Qaeda operatives to plan the horror of Sept. 11 for years, while moving freely within our borders.
Gore even had the audacity to defend the perpetrators of the prison abuse - by name - while denouncing President Bush for ``humiliating'' our nation.
How dare he. How dare a former vice president of the United States go beyond disagreeing with the current president's policies - a right of anyone in this free country - and denounce Bush as ``incompetent.''
How dare Gore say that Americans have an ``innate vulnerability to temptation... to use power to abuse others.'' And that our own ``internal system of checks and balances cannot be relied upon'' to curb such abuse.
And this man - who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people - wanted to be elected to lead it?
It is Gore who has brought dishonor to his party and to his party's nominee. The real disgrace is that this repugnant human being once held the second highest office in this great land.
Pack it up and go home, Al. You're persona non grata.
The Sentinel has a lovely article on a busload of 50 local vets headed up to the WWII Memorial dedication. One of the fellows is a survivor of the Bataan Death March. They're a tough bunch and are determined to be there despite their age and medical problems. For most of them, it will be the last hurrah.
They're expecting 800,000 people up in D.C. for the occasion. I know my folks will be watching it on the television. I'll be thinking of the 17-year-old kid my dad was, hitchhiking from Fort Myers to Tampa just so he could enlist. That was some stepping up to the plate.
Eager to put the Great Depression behind them, they rushed toward their destiny on buses, on trains, on ocean liners, even on foot if they didn't have the money for a ticket. They were young, and they traveled light.
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World War II vets' make a journey of pride to new Memorial
Eager to put the Great Depression behind them, they rushed toward their destiny on buses, on trains, on ocean liners, even on foot if they didn't have the money for a ticket. They were young, and they traveled light.
A class photo. A lock of their sweetheart's hair. A pair of boxing gloves. These were the things they carried from home to boot camp and across the sea as they headed out to save the world.
"When I joined up, my father said, `Son, I'm proud of you. But I'm never going to see you again,'" recalled Frank Laiacona, of Plantation, who was so small he barely qualified for officer's school when he joined the Army in late 1941.
He packed his newly tailored uniform and a black rosary given to him by his priest, then took a train to California, a boat to the Philippines -- where, within a year, he found himself a prisoner of the Japanese, watching his captors bayonet men who stumbled as they marched nonstop for 10 days up the Bataan Peninsula.
His father was proved right. Laiacona came back, weighing only 62 pounds, but his dad had died in his absence.
Six decades later, Laiacona and 19 other South Florida men and women, all World War II veterans, set off again Thursday. They weren't heading out to meet the war that shaped them, but to remember it and the lives it claimed. Their chartered bus is scheduled to pull into Washington, D.C., about noon today after an 18-hour overnight trip to the National World War II Memorial dedication weekend.
In a way, it's a journey back to a more straightforward time for them, and the nation: before heart attacks and widowhood, before Vietnam and Iraq.
"It was a time when we were all innocent kids. We were all so young," said Marion Burnard, 83, who lives west of Boynton Beach.
Burnard was restless and bored when she said "yes" to the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. She spent the next two years in an Indiana military hospital as a surgical assistant tending to men mangled by the war.
The vets on the bus are old now, and no longer travel light. The bus luggage compartment was rearranged to accommodate two wheelchairs. Amanda McConner, a former counselor for a Broward County veteran's center and one of the trip organizers, repeatedly reminded travelers to take their medications.
Dr. Enrique Aguilar, the center's associate chief of staff for geriatrics and extended care, acknowledged that an extended bus trip would be tough on the old soldiers and sailors.
"But they have coped with so many different things in their lives, I think they will be strong," he said. "Finally, they are getting some recognition for the sacrifice they went through."
Laiacona, 85, just had a tumor the size of a paperback book removed from his chest. The incision had started bleeding several days before the trip, after he fell while trying to adjust the U.S. flag that flies perpetually outside his front door.
"But I can make it, I can make it. This is going to be something big and I want to be there," Laiacona insisted. Tucked inside the bag he put on the bus was the black rosary that, like him, survived three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. As he worked the rice fields, Laiacona would say the same litany he does today: "I can make it. I can make it."
Tear-filled eyes
Fifty veterans from all wars, some accompanied by family members, filed slowly onto the bus late Thursday, taking the medical release forms the organizers handed out.
Like a proud parent seeing a child off to summer camp, Stephanie Leigh lingered outside the bus, spying through the window as her father, 81-year-old Navy veteran Leo Leibowitz, settled in.
"When I was growing up, he rarely talked about the war. But as he gets older, I am hearing more stories," said Leigh, a high school principal in Miami-Dade County. Her eyes filled with tears as she waved a small U.S. flag, watching the bus pull away.
About 200,000 people are expected in Washington for the weekend, which will culminate with the memorial's dedication on Saturday. Many will be from Florida, home to about 500,000 World War II vets and the state with the highest percentage of veterans over age 65.
From the moment they marched home almost 60 years ago, the 15.5 million who made it were greeted with parades and treated with patriotic respect. The 3.5 million left today have been dubbed "the greatest generation."
But while monuments to less popular wars have filled Washington's Mall, there has been nothing there for World War II. Until now.
"It's about time. I'm anxious to look at it," said Lawrence Makler, 84. He boarded the bus carrying his favorite hat: a black baseball cap emblazoned with a red numeral one, the sign of the Army First Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One.
Makler, who saw 443 consecutive days of action that included the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, never misses a division reunion.
"You know why I do these things? It keeps me alive. Seeing my buddies keeps me alive," said Makler, of Deerfield Beach. He considers his intense military tour the best four years of his life.
So it's not surprising that the bus trip, organized by the Professional Women Veterans Association in Broward County, is almost a pilgrimage for Makler and the others. Some have been packed since early this week, carefully folding their military hats, medals and battalion jackets among their street clothes.
For the men and women who served in what's been called the "last just war," this is the final hurrah they thought they might not live to see. World War II veterans are dying at the rate of about 1,100 a day.
The anxiety of the Depression closely followed by the intensity of combat extraordinarily bonded this generation. The new enemy is age.
Time takes toll
I'm the last one left alive," said Anthony Giallanza, 83, part of a five-man crew that drove the Sherman tanks the soldiers nicknamed "burning coffins." It was one of war's more hazardous duties, and Giallanza's crew drew one of the worst tours with the Fourth Armored Division-Eighth Tank Battalion, following Gen. George Patton up through the Battle of the Bulge and into Germany.
All five men rolled intact into the war's end, although they had lost two tanksand Giallanza was wounded. It was time that eventually cut the crew down. Giallanza, of Pompano Beach, frequently gets e-mails from the children of Fourth Armored veterans, wanting to know more about the war.
What will he remember this weekend as he stands before the memorial's bronze wreaths and a granite wall splashed with 4,000 stars, one for each 100 Americans who died? What will he feel as he looks for the name Bailey, a comrade he recalls by last name only, who died in a tank at the back of the line, on the radio with Giallanza when a German snuck into the turret and shot him?
"I don't know, dear. That's why I'm going," Giallanza said.
They're having a Weird Al Roundup over at Country Store with lots of pics and stories.
A little three-year-old boy was given the old heave-ho in front of a Miami McDonald's this evening. They left him standing there holding his birth certificate and health records. The restaurant workers brought him in, fed him a Happy Meal, and called the cops.
Words fail me as I look at that little face.
UPDATE:
They've found the mother and arrested her for felony child neglect.
Here's a site for my fellow Blue Dog Democrats.
So you thought only republicans could be conservative? Well let us introduce ourselves. We are the Blue Dog Democrats. A coalition of conservative & moderate democrats. The coalition was originally formed in the 104th congress as a policy-oriented group to give moderate & conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives a common sense, bridge-building voice within the Institution.
Blue Dogs are the descendants of the "Boll Weevils." This new name's just a tad cuter. These legislators are the voices crying in the wilderness at this point, which is a shame. It didn't used to be that way.
More on Captain Clinton Musil, the Vietnam-era MIA who will be buried tomorrow at Arlington.
The family is celebrating. They've spent decades in limbo and now their guy is finally home. God bless all the other MIA families who are still waiting. What a tough row to hoe.
Larry Musil said his wife asked him what she should wear to the funeral. "Nothing dark," he said, but something "bright and colorful."
After all, he explained, "This is a celebration to say we finally get to have a burial."
I'm glad they're having it this weekend. The Old Guard will have the whole place looking beautiful for Memorial Day.
The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating (and horrifying) article on maternal mortality in Afghanistan and the midwife-training program that Johns Hopkins has established there to try to alleviate the situation. It's a drop in the bucket to what's needed, but it's a start.
The pregnant woman died surrounded by snow-swept mountain peaks, yet in a terrible sense she was far from alone: 23,000 Afghan mothers die in childbirth each year, making it the nation's leading cause of death for women.
"It's not a clean death, a clinical death," said Dr. Jeffrey M. Smith of Johns Hopkins' Bayview Medical Center, an adviser on maternal health to Afghanistan's health ministry. "It's death in a pool of blood. It's death in incredible pain. It's death on the top of a mountain."
It's also the single biggest health threat that Afghan women face, claiming the lives of more expectant mothers each year than malnutrition and war. It is a public health catastrophe with few parallels elsewhere in the world.
In the United States, the lifetime risk of death in childbirth is one death out of every 2,500 women - the risks for any individual depending greatly on the number of times she gives birth. In Afghanistan, the figure is one in six.
We're bringing Captain Hook over and it's not to give him a new prosthetic hand.
The parents of wanted terrorist Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah live here in Miramar.
In an interview in the Sun-Sentinel, his mother gives an example of how her boy couldn't be a bad guy because he has such positive feelings for America:
"You know something," she said, "he and I used to say, `If this country had Islamic law it would be the best country on the Earth.'"
From Ann Coulter:
"Liberals may see Saddam's mass graves in Iraq as half-full, but I prefer to see them as half-empty."
She must hug herself after she writes a sentence like that.
"How dare they! Yeeaarrgghh!"
I would say Al Gore should resign, but he doesn't even have a job.
Here's Duane in the studio taking a break. Those are some wild threads he's got on.
Wail on, Skydog!
While Chalabi snaps "Get me Wolfowitz", Florida Senator Lee Constantine's got his own thing going with "I'd like to talk to (Sheriff) Kevin Beary"- saying it ten times in the four-minute video of his DUI arrest.
No grand poobah came to the rescue of either man. I'll consider that good news for all us little people.
A state senator suspected of drunk driving repeatedly asked to talk with the local sheriff and refused to answer officers' requests that he take a breath-alcohol test, according to a videotaped recording.
Lee Constantine, R-Altamonte Springs, was arrested early May 9 after a Maitland police officer spotted Constantine drifting in and out of lanes and smelled alcohol on his breath, according to a police report.
In a four-minute videotaped session at Orange County's DUI test center, a visibly despondent Constantine asked 10 times to speak with Sheriff Kevin Beary. The tape was released Monday.
Any of y'all ever partied with Skynyrd? Arklahomboy has and he's telling the tale.
Here's an old but illuminating article on Charles Jenkins, the soldier who went over to North Korea in 1965. His family has a website for him and, of course, they don't want to believe he's a traitor. They don't have any trouble believing Kim Jong-Il signs online petitions, though.
If he doesn't want to come home, he doesn't have to - but he doesn't get to go live in Japan either.
"How do you evaluate Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's second visit to North Korea?"
"Sorry, I cannot comment on this issue. I don't know anything about it because I am an anarchist. Besides, I don't think the Japanese government has the power to do anything. Japan is just like a part of America. I'm sure we must have registered as America's 51st state somewhere. Koizumi is just like a governor of the state of Japan, not the prime minister. That is why I do not watch TV or read newspapers for news. What I care about is the inner side of people and nature like the phases of the moon rather than the depressing reality because I am an artist. I just wish for a peaceful existence."
I won't go on again about what I think of General Janis Karpinski. She's not Army material. She's not officer material.
I'm glad she's been suspended and I look forward to her court martial.
Everytime she opens her mouth she further underscores her complete lack of understanding of what it means to command.
The Army general who was in charge of the U.S. prison guards accused of abusing Iraqis has been suspended from command of the 800th Military Police Brigade, officials said today.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski and other officers in her brigade were faulted by Army investigators for paying too little attention to the prison's day-to-day operations and not acting strongly enough to discipline soldiers under her command for violating standard procedures.
For those of you who didn't see it, the Detroit News had a great op-ed yesterday on the reprehensible behavior of the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows people.
Tick-tock, ladies. Your time is up.
A group calling itself September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows exploits its victim status to attack the Bush administration on issues ranging far afield from the terrorist attacks.
They are leftists and peaceniks in mourner’s clothing. But they’re presented simply as September 11 families, allowing their rantings and ramblings to go out unfiltered.
Currently, family members are demanding a seat on the September 11 commission that is exploring whether the terrorist attacks might have been prevented.
The families have a unique personal interest in the outcome of the report. But they don’t own the tragedy. It belongs to all of America.
Family members are entitled to our sympathy, as is anyone who loses a loved one.
But they aren’t entitled to an elevated political platform or to interfere in the work of the experts examining the attacks, and certainly not to inexcusable rudeness like that displayed toward Giuliani last week.
Grief doesn't entitle Sept. 11 families to their entitlement attitude
America adopted the families of the September 11 terrorism victims, showered them with support and sympathy, and lifted them up as a living emblem of the national wound suffered.
But now, some of the family members are wearing thin.
Some groups have morphed into quasi-political organizations, using their mourner status to gain a platform for pushing their views on everything from immigration laws to the Patriot Act to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Others express their grief in the form of endless protest, rallying against the design of the September 11 memorial, carping about the inadequacy of the family compensation fund and demanding scapegoats at the highest level of government for the deaths of their loved ones.
Wednesday, family members erupted at a hearing of the September 11 commission in New York City, heckling former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as he tried to testify.
Giuliani suffered as much as anyone on September 11. He was devastated by what happened to his city and his citizens. The strength and grace he displayed helped rally the nation. Yet on Wednesday, family members treated him like he was one of the terrorist hijackers, greeting him with derogatory signs and angry shouts.
Giuliani endured the assault calmly, excusing the extreme rudeness as a byproduct of grief. Of course — the families are off-limits to criticism.
But grief doesn’t explain the increasingly inappropriate behavior of some September 11 family members. Greed might. Nearly as soon as the federal government established the $6 billion compensation fund — an average $1.3 million per victim — some survivors began squabbling over its size, who would be eligible and how much they’d get.
The fund was set up as an alternative to the families filing questionable lawsuits against airlines and building owners, and as a gesture of the nation’s sympathy. Other private funds provided for college scholarships for some of their children.
All this is good. But some family members forget that thousands of Americans die each day, many in incidents equally tragic and senseless, and their survivors get nothing.
The lack of gratitude by some September 11 families is unseemly. As is their venture into politics.
A group calling itself September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows exploits its victim status to attack the Bush administration on issues ranging far afield from the terrorist attacks.
They are leftists and peaceniks in mourner’s clothing. But they’re presented simply as September 11 families, allowing their rantings and ramblings to go out unfiltered.
Currently, family members are demanding a seat on the September 11 commission that is exploring whether the terrorist attacks might have been prevented.
The families have a unique personal interest in the outcome of the report. But they don’t own the tragedy. It belongs to all of America.
Family members are entitled to our sympathy, as is anyone who loses a loved one.
But they aren’t entitled to an elevated political platform or to interfere in the work of the experts examining the attacks, and certainly not to inexcusable rudeness like that displayed toward Giuliani last week.
Oh. I did not know that. It must be true though, since Martin Luther King III of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said so.
And he gets to run Palm Beach County ragged looking for the melanin-deprived individuals who must certainly have hanged a black gentleman. A suicidal black gentleman. A suicidal black gentleman who said he was going to go hang himself. And did. In his grandmother's yard, with a sheet from his grandmother's house.
But don't try to tell that to Martin Luther King III and the SCLC. They don't care about the inquest or the investigations. They're too busy trying to ascertain just how many times they can cry "wolf" before nobody listens to them anymore.
Civil rights group's focus is offMartyrdom comes cheap in Belle Glade.
Ray Golden was depressed. Muddled by drink and cocaine. Twice divorced. Violent with women. He was a neglectful father. Unemployed. Nearly $50,000 behind in child-support payments.
And suicidal. His cousin told the Florida Department of Law Enforcement that Golden had frequently talked of committing suicide, once suggesting that he might hang himself in his grandmother's yard.
One year ago this week, Feraris ''Ray'' Golden, 32, did just that. His body was found hanging from a schefflera tree by his grandmother's house -- a miserable life that ended on a rainy night in near anonymity.
Death, however, has anointed Ray Golden with a peculiar celebrity. Golden's hanging suicide on May 27, 2003, recalled horrible images of racist lynchings that were once epidemic in the Old South. And Belle Glade can still pass for the Old South.
In the western reaches of Palm Beach County, the farm town is desperately poor and racially divided, having more in common with the Mississippi Delta than with metropolitan areas 30 minutes east. It's a place apt to nurture talk of a lynch mob.
INQUEST HELD
A few opportunistic politicians exploited the rumors, suggesting that local cops were covering up the truth. An inquest, the first in Palm Beach County in 18 years, was called to replace rumors with facts.
In two days of testimony, it was revealed that Golden had been found hanging from a bedsheet taken from his grandmother's nearby house. His hands were not tied. The body was not bruised. No cuts. No burns. No signs of a struggle. No one along the quiet residential street where he died saw anything resembling a lynch mob.
The presiding judge asked that anyone with information contradicting a finding of suicide come forward. No one did.
But the inquest hardly discouraged the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The SCLC sailed into Belle Glade late with the same loose grasp of the facts the organization demonstrated in Broward County last week, when it came to champion Miriam Oliphant, the incompetent county supervisor of elections who was ousted, oddly enough, for incompetence.
Martin Luther King III, president of the SCLC last fall (he has since left the post), came to Belle Glade promising to deliver the real truth about Golden's death. King offered no new information, just this morsel of blind faith: ``Black folks don't hang themselves.''
In September, the FDLE opened yet another investigation, interviewing 20 witnesses, chasing down even the thinnest of leads. FDLE reported that it found ''no credible evidence'' that contradicted suicide.
Yet the lynching of Ray Golden reverberates through the Internet like a biblical revelation. Cyber conspiracy stories refer to King's charge of a possible coverup as fact. The stories note that SCLC promised an investigation and hell-raising marches through the streets of Belle Glade.
The SCLC, however, has been a scarce commodity around those parts since last fall. Instead, the venerated civil rights organization has turned its attention to Miriam Oliphant, yet another cause with scant merit.
REAL INJUSTICE
What's maddening is that the fields around Belle Glade have long been ripe with real injustice.
Just days before Martin Luther King III showed up in Belle Glade, trying to transform a pathetic suicide into a racist lynching, The Herald ran a gut-wrenching series on the perpetual plight of farmworkers in Florida's fields.
These workers, The Herald's Ronnie Greene documented, are cheated of wages, abused by their bosses, housed in shacks and kept locked up in virtual peonage.
Surely, the word ''slavery,'' documented by hard reporting, should have piqued the interest of a crusading civil rights organization.
Slavery, unlike the faux lynching of Ray Golden, seems like an evil truly worth pursuing.
It's a darn shame that Chase Me Ladies resorts to Google-baiting tactics such as this:
ORAL!
Lynndie England sex video download up-skirt all nude wrestling lesbian.
[Note: for those who might wish to know: I haven't seen Troy; I've never watched American Idol; I've no interest in basketball, including the Lakers; and I think Orlando Bloom has butterfly-wings for arms.]
Dustin Tuller returns home to Milton, Florida to a hero's welcome.
Good luck to Dustin and his family. Thank you for your service, Dustin.
Wounded soldier goes home in style
By Pamela J. Johnson
Sentinel Staff Writer
May 23, 2004
MILTON -- While his amputated legs were still healing, Army Staff Sgt. Dustin Tuller told his doctors he would be home by Father's Day, surrounded by his four young children.
Doctors at the military hospital in Washington told him that was impossible. Tuller, who lost his legs in a shooting attack in Baghdad two days before Christmas, would never be fit enough by then, they told him.
On Saturday, the 28-year-old infantryman stood on prosthetic legs in front of cheering well-wishers who lined the streets in this small town near Pensacola to welcome him home.
Flanked by his wife, Alisha, and their children, Tuller told the crowd that he had to work hard to prove the doctors wrong. He beat his own deadline by nearly a month.
"Never tell an infantryman that something is impossible," Tuller told the gathering outside the Santa Rosa (County) Administrative Center. "Because he's going to do it. When doctors told me I wasn't ready to stand up, I said, 'Let's try it.'
"And I stood up. Of course I was 4 feet tall," joked Dustin, who was about 6 feet before his injury. "But I was standing up and my butt wasn't killing me anymore. When I started using the parallel bars before doctors said I was ready, they told me, 'You know, you have to stop defying everything we say."'
After five months in hospitals, where he spent time in a coma, undergoing operations and then painful physical therapy, Tuller arrived at his welcoming ceremony sitting atop the back seat of a convertible. His wife was at his side, holding a flower bouquet.
A motorcycle officer led the procession, followed by sheriff's cars and wailing fire engines. They passed cheering revelers waving handmade signs, and Chubby's Steaks and Barbecue, which posted "Welcome Home Dustin" on its marquee.
Wearing dark sunglasses, shorts and a T-shirt with an American flag pictured on it, Tuller smiled, waved and mouthed "thank you" at the adults and children, who reached to shake his hand. He climbed out of the convertible driven by Rep. Jeff Miller, and walked with canes to his wheelchair.
Toby Keith's "American Soldier" blared from loudspeakers:
I'm just trying to be a father,
Raise a daughter and a son,
Be a lover to their mother,
Everything to everyone.
Alisha Tuller, 23, pushed her husband's chair up a ramp to the stage, while their children, ages 51/2 to 11/2, trailed behind in matching handmade flag-patterned outfits. Soon after Tuller lost his legs, his oldest son, Dillyn, was afraid and wouldn't go near him. Early on, Dillyn pulled the legs off his GI Joe, trying to come to terms with this new version of his daddy.
But on Saturday, Dillyn was affectionate with his father. He cheered with the rest and joined in when someone sang "God Bless the U.S.A."
The 90-degree heat prompted Don Salter, the Santa Rosa County chairman, to joke with the people standing in the sun for two hours.
"I guarantee you one thing," Salter said. "If you weren't a redneck when you got here, I guarantee you will be one before you leave today."
Lawrence "Reb" Tatum, 57, of Milton had been standing in the hot sun much longer than most. He arrived at the county building about an hour before Tuller was scheduled to be there. A Vietnam War veteran, he wanted to be among the first to welcome home the badly wounded soldier whom he had never met.
Tatum, who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969, stood with two prosthetic legs similar to Tuller's. He says his exposure to "Agent Orange," a herbicide used by the military during the war, caused him to develop diabetes. Both legs had to be removed about 10 years ago because of his illness, he said.
Tatum, who rode his Harley motorcycle to the event, said his artificial legs have not changed his lifestyle.
"Instead of putting on my shoes in the morning," said Tatum, his shaggy gray hair hanging from the sides of a baseball cap, "I put on my legs."
He was thrilled by the outpouring of love from the community for Tuller. Tatum said he thought it was great that people were building Tuller and his family a new home as a gesture of gratitude for his sacrifice.
"When I got home," he said, "I just got off the plane and went back to work."
Some exhibitionists have found each other and channeled their mental illness into support for John Kerry. Now as the Axis of Eve they get to go out in public and show their crotches as political dissent, while simultaneously advertising their new line of slogan underwear. The only downside for them is that none of the Eves find Kerry sexy:
In any case, the Axis has been doing a brisk business. The most popular model by far, said Tasha, is "Give Bush the Finger." And they've also designed panties for first-time voters that read "My Cherry for Kerry." "We think Kerry needs a little help in the sex-appeal department," said Tasha. Elizabeth and Zazel nodded vigorously.
I thought we had the whole sex-as-political-dissent thing thirty years ago, but you know how fashions come back in style.
(Via Lucianne.)
At work we got in a new domestic violence booklet from the state. I read through it looking for a mention of female violence. I didn't see it.
That's too bad. The first film I saw in school on the subject way back when had both men and women perpetrating the violence. Something changed over the years, however, and there's little mention of what women can get up to when they have a mind to it. That is, unless their violence is being portrayed as heroic.
I'm sure the man is most often the abuser. But there are women out there who also do some dishing out. Here are some of the stories.
The best post hands-down on Teddy K.'s Abu Ghraib comment.
It was Jordan's King Abdullah who dropped the dime on Chalabi.
First he tells Arafat to look in the mirror and now the flying drop-kick.
Jordan's King Abdullah fueled the U.S. move against Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi by providing bombshell intelligence that his group was spying for Iran, The Post has learned.
An explosive dossier that the Jordanian monarch recently brought with him to White House sessions with President Bush detailed Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran, diplomats said.
JORDAN TIP EXPOSED CHALABI AS IRAN 'SPY'
May 22, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - Jordan's King Abdullah fueled the U.S. move against Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi by providing bombshell intelligence that his group was spying for Iran, The Post has learned.
An explosive dossier that the Jordanian monarch recently brought with him to White House sessions with President Bush detailed Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran, diplomats said.
That new information led to the Bush administration's decision to stop its $340,000-a-month payments to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and back an aggressive Iraqi criminal probe into his activities.
The file was compiled by Jordan's intelligence service, which has had an interest in Chalabi since the 1990s, when the Iraqi exile leader was convicted in absentia for embezzling millions of dollars.
The scandal stemmed from the collapse of the Bank of Petra, which Chalabi controlled, the diplomatic officials said.
Just months ago, Chalabi had been favored by Bush administration hard-liners as the next leader of Iraq and sat behind First Lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union Address in January.
The Pentagon airlifted Chalabi and members of the INC into Iraq the day after Saddam Hussein fell and gave them prominent roles in the new governing council, in charge of the Finance Ministry and ridding Iraqi government agencies of Saddam's Ba'ath Party.
But the U.S. already felt burned by the INC's involvement in passing on questionable pre-war intelligence on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.
On Thursday, the relationship came to a bitter end as Iraqi police, backed by U.S. troops and FBI agents, raided Chalabi's palatial Baghdad home and issued arrest warrants for 15 members of the INC.
Officially, the raid was described as part of an Iraqi probe, launched by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.
Among the charges being pursued is that INC members on the government's "de-Ba'athification committee" instead ran a scheme in which they demanded payoffs from ex-Ba'ath Party members. In return, those Ba'athists were allowed to avoid arrest or to stay off lists the INC was preparing of people banned from jobs in the new Iraqi government, sources said.
Chalabi aides running the new government's Finance Ministry are also accused of ripping off $22 million from the Iraqi Treasury when Iraq issued new currency late last year, U.S. officials said.
King Abdullah's dossier provided critical confirmation of U.S intelligence gathered elsewhere that the INC was playing a double game with Ba'athists and that Chalabi and his security chief were passing sensitive information to Iran.
That was when the Bush administration decided to break all ties with Chalabi, sources said.
Chalabi accused the United States of trying to intimidate him at a time when he is speaking out against the U.S. occupation and threatening to go public with bombshell files on the U.N. oil-for-food scandal.
Yesterday, he called an emergency meeting of the Governing Council seeking to get official condemnation of the raid.
A clever nurse noticed that patients' moods seemed much improved after a visit from the chaplain and his dog.
She spread the idea that a visit from a dog was good medicine and that's how therapy dogs got started.
I enjoy looking at pics of the therapy dogs going into hospitals, nursing homes, etc. They just walk around and work their magic.
They like handing out kisses.
And kisses are popular (and free).
They make you smile.
They let you connect.
This last one reminds me of our taking our dog Shiloh to the hospice during Mr. Cracker's granddad's last days.
He didn't know his family anymore, but he'd smile and say Shiloh's name over and over while he petted her.
And he was happy.
Kerry is considering delaying his nomination until one month after the Convention.
John Kerry is considering delaying his acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination at the party's July convention so that he can keep spending the millions of dollars that he raised during the primaries, The Associated Press has learned.
If Kerry were to delay acceptance of his nomination for a month, he would even the playing field with President Bush, who is planning to accept the nomination at the Republican National Convention five weeks later. The party convention would still be held at the end of July, but Kerry would officially accept the nomination at a later date under such a plan.
......
Delaying the nomination would be a dramatic move and is believed to be the first time a candidate would ask his party to reschedule his nomination so he could stop the clock from ticking on his general-election government financing.
So they'll have the Convention, but no one will be nominated. All so he gets to keep spending private funds the way he wants.
Also, exactly why is the AP journalist saying that doing this will "even the playing field"? The party in power always holds their Convention last. That's how you have an "even playing field."
(Via Lucianne.)
Deserter Camilo Mejia said he'd rather go to prison than serve in Iraq. He's on his way to getting his wish.
I hope on release that he's deported back to Nicaragua.
"He enjoyed all the benefits of the military, just not the duty,'' Capt. A.J. Balbo, the lead prosecutor, said in his closing argument. "The defense says he accomplished all his missions. Except the most important one - showing up.''
Spying for the Ayatollah's boys? Shaking down Baathists? Interfering in the investigation of the Food for Oil scandal? Suspected in the disappearance of Judge Crater? Chalabi's bad!
CBS News reported that the U.S. has evidence Chalabi has been passing highly classified U.S. intelligence to Iran, citing senior U.S. officials.
CBS said the "rock solid" evidence was said to show that Chalabi himself gave Iranian intelligence officers information so closely guarded that if revealed it could "get Americans killed."
Update:
Chalabi quits Governing Council.
Sassy has a link to a photo-essay on one of the world's nastiest neighbors. No, it's not Canada.
I do like waking up to tasty news. Seems we've raided Chalabi's digs and the HQ of his Iraqi National Congress. Tuesday, we cut off his allowance. He is so not getting a Christmas present this year.
U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police surrounded the residence of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi (search) on Thursday, and an aide said the troops raided the house ostensibly to search for fugitives.
The aide, Haidar Musawi (search), accused the Americans of trying to pressure Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite who has become openly critical of U.S. plans for how much power to transfer to the Iraqis on June 30.
He said the Americans also raided offices of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress.
"The aim is to put political pressure," Musawi told The Associated Press. "Why is this happening at a time when the government is being formed?"
There was no comment from the U.S. military press office. Police sealed off the residence in the city's fashionable Mansour district and would not allow reporters to approach. At least two Humvees could be seen, with a dozen U.S. troops milling about.
Several armed Westerners were also seen, wearing flak vests and using SUVs without license tags — vehicles associated here with U.S. security.
Some people could be seen loading boxes into vehicles, and neighbors said some members of Chalabi's entourage were taken away.
Update:
An AP story has an anonymous source saying Chalabi was interfering in the investigation of the UN Food-for-Oil scandal.
(Via FR.)
Update II:
The VOA choice of a Chalabi pic is a hoot. Looky whose pic is in the place of honor behind him.
Gilly has a neat link to the new cyber church sponsored by the Methodist church in England. You attend as an avatar. They had a rough opening, with the normal jerks showing up to cause trouble, but now they have more wardens with the "smite" button to chuck out the riff-raff. Load up your Shockwave and check it out.
What's with so many people being on the late show with the British bayonet-charge story? That was days ago, y'all. Not exactly piping-hot news. Now suddenly there're excited links to the Sun article.
If you want fresh news, go to Google news and put in some search terms, read Free Republic where the readers submit news stories, or find some good small news-hunting blogs. For a medium as fast as the internet is, news in the blogosphere sure travels at the speed of molasses.
These 9/11 hearings are a disgrace. I wish someone would just pull the plug. The commisioners finger-pointing and grandstanding in front of a peanut gallery makes me ill. This is not how you conduct an investigation.
At last we can put a face to the name "Salam Pax". No, wait, that's the Level 3 baldness guy from Hair Club for Men. Here's Salam. He's in Australia for some wingding.
(Via Tim Blair.)
The Miami Herald has a closer look at Camilo Mejia, the Florida National Guardsman who deserted and is seeking CO status. Mejio's parents were big in the Sandinista government. His father even penned the Sandinista anthem, which includes the immortal lines "We struggle against the Yankee, enemies of humanity.''
Camilo Mejia's family and supporters see him as a once-confused teenager who joined the Army so he could go to college, then showed courage in leaving it when he became morally appalled at the ''war for oil'' and the treatment of prisoners.
But the military and many fellow soldiers see someone else in Mejia, now 28, who left Iraq on a 15-day leave and never returned: a coward who abandoned his fellow troops in a time of war; an opportunist who joined the armed forces for the paid tuition, but then didn't have the gumption to follow through when called into combat.
A deserter.
Here's Duane when he was a studio guitarist working on an album for Wilson Pickett.
He suggested to Wilson that they cut a version of "Hey, Jude". Wilson said "I ain't singin' about no Jew!"
Oh, that wacky Wilson. Duane clarified things and the subsequent recording was a smash hit.
Wail on, Skydog!
Everybody is getting sick of the mainstream media's defeatism.
The Miami Herald has a touching story on the return of Vietnam MIA Captain Clinton Musil. His children have gone up to Washington every year to check on the status of his case. At last, his bones were found and identified. Captain Musil will be buried later this month in Arlington National Cemetery.
'It's a sad, but joyous occasion,'' Larry Musil said. ``We're celebrating the fact that he's finally coming home. We're celebrating that we can finally bury him on American soil -- the soil he died fighting for."
(Login/pswd=floridacracker61@yahoo.com/cracker)
I guess we're not having Chalabi over to supper anymore. The NYT reports today that all payments to his Iraqi National Congress have been suspended.
The United States government has decided to halt monthly $335,000 payments to the Iraqi National Congress, the group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, an official with the group said on Monday.
Mr. Chalabi, a longtime exile leader and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, played a crucial role in persuading the administration that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. But he has since become a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration, who say the United States relied on him too heavily for prewar intelligence that has since proved faulty.
Poor Venezuela. Chavez is building a militia to unleash on his own people. He may well end up enjoying Sunday brunches with Pineapple Face if he's not careful. Of course, he'll cause a lot of chaos and destruction first. I hope the Venezuelans do something about him while they still can.
President Hugo Chávez's decision to create a citizens militia and strengthen Venezuela's armed forces to protect his government was condemned by opposition leaders Monday as another ominous turn toward a Cuban-style government.
''If you close your eyes . . . it's like listening to Fidel in the 1960s,'' said former energy minister and Chávez critic Humberto Calderón Berti.
Speaking to a massive rally in downtown Caracas on Sunday, Chávez alleged that the threat of an invasion to topple him, backed by the Venezuelan and Colombian ''oligarchies,'' required that ``every citizen consider himself a soldier.''
He also declared a new ''anti-imperialist'' phase of his so-called Bolivarian Revolution, a mishmash of leftist and populists ideologies named after Simón Bolívar, a hero of Venezuela's war of independence from Spain.
He announced a three-pronged program, including an increase in personnel and an additional $10.5 million in funding for the army and national guard. The number of military reservists will be doubled to 100,000, and the new militias will lead to the ``reinvigoration of civilian-military integration.''
This amounts to ''the legalization of his own group, of paramilitaries,'' said opposition legislator Ernesto Alvarenga, noting that Chávez supporters have already formed several illegally armed groups, including the Tupamaros, Carapaicas and the Bolivarian Liberation Force.
The opposition has long accused the president of fomenting armed groups and cultivating an alliance with leftist guerrillas in Colombia. Now they fear these groups are about to be turned on them.
Chávez alarms his foes with plans for a militia
Opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez fear that a plan to increase militarization of the populace is a Castro-like tactic to entrench himself.
BY PHIL GUNSON
Special to The Herald
CARACAS - President Hugo Chávez's decision to create a citizens militia and strengthen Venezuela's armed forces to protect his government was condemned by opposition leaders Monday as another ominous turn toward a Cuban-style government.
''If you close your eyes . . . it's like listening to Fidel in the 1960s,'' said former energy minister and Chávez critic Humberto Calderón Berti.
Speaking to a massive rally in downtown Caracas on Sunday, Chávez alleged that the threat of an invasion to topple him, backed by the Venezuelan and Colombian ''oligarchies,'' required that ``every citizen consider himself a soldier.''
He also declared a new ''anti-imperialist'' phase of his so-called Bolivarian Revolution, a mishmash of leftist and populists ideologies named after Simón Bolívar, a hero of Venezuela's war of independence from Spain.
He announced a three-pronged program, including an increase in personnel and an additional $10.5 million in funding for the army and national guard. The number of military reservists will be doubled to 100,000, and the new militias will lead to the ``reinvigoration of civilian-military integration.''
This amounts to ''the legalization of his own group, of paramilitaries,'' said opposition legislator Ernesto Alvarenga, noting that Chávez supporters have already formed several illegally armed groups, including the Tupamaros, Carapaicas and the Bolivarian Liberation Force.
The opposition has long accused the president of fomenting armed groups and cultivating an alliance with leftist guerrillas in Colombia. Now they fear these groups are about to be turned on them.
Chávez said the government had already begun selecting retired military officers -- including Cabinet ministers, state governors and legislators -- to ``take part in organizing the people for the defense of the nation.''
Also under discussion by the National Defense Council -- a ministerial advisory body convened last week -- is the creation of as many as three ''theaters of operations'' in the center of the country.
The ''theater'' model, which has been operational on the Colombian border since the pre-Chávez era, involves joint operations by all four branches of the armed forces.
THE SPARK
Chávez's speech was triggered by the arrests in Caracas more than a week ago of a large group of alleged Colombian mercenaries, some of them accused of being members of paramilitary groups that fight Colombia's two leftist guerrilla insurgencies.
Chávez has accused elements of the Colombian army, the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command and extremists in the domestic opposition of being responsible for the supposed plot. He insists that the plan was to assassinate him and attack military bases and the presidential palace.
The opposition has for the most part dismissed these claims as fantasy and has suggested that the government is putting on a ''show'' to distract them from their campaign for a recall referendum on Chávez's rule.
''Chávez wants to divert us from our electoral route,'' said Calderón Berti, who belongs to the foreign relations commission of the opposition umbrella group, the Democratic Coordinator.
Pompeyo Márquez, a principal spokesman for the Democratic Coordinator, agreed. Márquez argues that the president senses he is highly vulnerable because he has lost much of his popular support.
The opposition has four days later this month to confirm signatures on the recall petition considered doubtful by the National Electoral Council. Only about 500,000 signatures need to be confirmed to reach the 2.4 million required to force a referendum.
''On June 1 there will be a new [political] reality,'' Márquez said. ``And we are heading for the recall referendum.''
Part of the explanation for the ''discovery'' of a foreign invasion plot, the opposition says, is that Chávez needs to unite the nation against an alleged external threat and -- a more sinister interpretation -- turn political opposition into a form of treason.
''It's exactly what [Manuel] Noriega did in Panama'' in 1988-89, Calderón Berti said.
DOING AS CASTRO DID
The tactic also matches that used by Cuban President Fidel Castro shortly after he seized power in 1959.
Retired Gen. Alberto Muller, a hard-line Chávez supporter who said he considers himself to the left of the government, disagreed.
''I don't perceive any persecution of the domestic adversary,'' Muller said. 'Quite the contrary -- I'd have been much less tolerant in [Chávez'] place.''
On the other hand, political commentator Alberto Garrido, who has written several books on Chávez, says that far from exaggerating, the opposition underestimates the threat that Chávez poses to Venezuelan democracy.
By launching the ''anti-imperialist'' campaign, Garrido argues, the president is telling the opposition that ``you can't be against your country.''
There's an outstanding article in the Washington Post today about American workers in Iraq. The story follows some recruits at a job fair, examining their motives. The workers are mainly Southern, patriotic, and (surprise, surprise) would like a chance to earn some big money.
Now here's some fighting. Go, Brits!
OUTNUMBERED British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago.
The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.
Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara.
Update:
A bit more here. Al-Jazeera has a headline calling it "mutilation", but no story. Seems some people truly don't like to be on the receiving end of a bayonet.
Looks like the Italians had a bug-out. Can we swap them for some Ghurkas?
General Latif gave some basic, common sense advice to an audience of sheiks, imams, tribal leaders, and city council members in Fallujah. I hope his audience will heed his words.
"We can make them (Americans) use their rifles against us or we can make them build our country, it's your choice," Latif told a gathering of more than 40 sheiks, city council members and imams in an eastern Fallujah suburb.
....
Latif also told the insurgents to "stop doing stupid things."
"Those bullets that are fired will not get the Americans out, let them finish their job here so that they can return to their country," Latif said.
"Our country is precious, stop allowing the bad guys to come from outside Iraq to destroy our country."
This one needs a soundtrack.
(Pic courtesy Pisces Peach.)
Well, holy cow, Kuwaiti women might get the right to vote.
The ladies say "Hear, hear!".
The Indy Star newspaper is admitting they made the wrong call on the Nick Berg story.
But regarding the story about the beheading of Nick Berg, I suspect few people would disagree. We made the wrong call. The beheading was a vengeful, hateful, inhuman act that illustrated the continuing tension in Iraq. The story about it should have been on Page One.
Some other papers will never learn.
More than twice as many people came out to celebrate the troops on Armed Forces Day in Cape Coral than showed up for the Million Mom March in Washington.
For at least one attendee, the festival meant something personal.
Mariner High School senior, Gregory Bowden, 18, danced with his sisters and mother. The Private First Class National Guard officer will be going to Fort Bliss, Texas, soon for training. After that, he can be assigned anywhere in the world. While he hopes to stay in the U.S., he said he’s not afraid of having to go overseas.
Wearing a big grin, he surveyed the crowd.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” he said. “It’s worth fighting for stuff like this.”
Here's an interesting article from the Washington Post on missionaries in Iraq. This is the real changing of hearts of minds.
The Religious Policeman tells the strangely familiar story of the House of Saud:
So where did they come from? Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time, on a hill known as Watership Down, there lived a family of rabbits. They had a family name, let's call them the Hashemites. They ate grass and skipped around, did nobody any harm, really.
However, nearby lived another family of rabbits. They were seriously wierd. All their female rabbits had to stay inside the burrow. Whenever there was an eclipse, they would hold special rituals. They took everything absolutely literally. They were led by the meanest, baddest rabbit ever. Let's call him AbdulAziz.
He decided to move in on the rabbits on Watership Down, and take the place over. This he did, relatively easily. The poor old Hashemites moved off, so some very poor and scrubby land up north. AbdulAziz was now King of some very prosperous real estate.
He decided it was time to start a family. As I said, these rabbits were seriously wierd. They had a rule that you could have 4 wives at a time. Tough shit on the 75% of male rabbits who ended up celibate, they could always go off and be terrorists. So King AbdulAziz started to procreate, as rabbits do. When he got bored with one wife, he divorced her, and married another one. In fact he married several, having children all along the way. And of course these children interbred, thru several generations...
Here's something special. Who needs Al-Jazeera when you have PrisonPlanetTV?
(Via FR.)
Take off those pants, grab a bottle of booze, and wander on over for some quality funky time in Ted's hot tub courtesy of Boston Irish (scroll down) and Protein Wisdom.
Maybe later Ace of Spades can give us a report on the upcoming Michael Moore/Teddy Kennedy Charity Cherry Pie Eating Contest in support of Planned Parenthood.
Sam of Hammorabi is saying some freaky, weird things on the subject of Nick Berg's execution.
Some folks are inclined to conspiracy theories, so be aware.
Isn't it uncomfortable when your view of someone is altered because of some discovered strangeness?
Man, Star Trek sure has sprung some strange religious cults. First it's Heaven's Gate and now down in Tampa it's the People's Democratic Uhuru Movement.
Their catchphrases are "No justice, no peace," and "Hailing frequencies open."
“They can’t do all the work. We have to do some work, too.”
-Cassie Poller, age 7.
Ft. Myers Students reach out to troops
Local book lovers — including a Fort Myers 7-year-old — are helping U.S. troops combat the loneliness of restricted downtime in Iraq.
“I thought of the idea that they could read books and magazines while they are over there,” said Cassie Poller, a first-grader at Evangelical Christian Elementary School.
With Principal Jon Wilson as the organizer, Cassie and her friends in grades K-4 through fifth collected more than 1,000 books and magazines in less than two weeks. About 500 already have been sent to individuals or to major bases of operation in Iraq.
Evangelical Christian Elementary School students Cassie Poller, 7, front, Katie Morrison, 8, Thomas Seidler, 8, Brandon Travis, 7, and Wills Caldwell, 11, rear, helped collect books and magazines to send to U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq. Poller came up with the idea, and her schoolmates helped her organize the collection and shipment.
Ft. Myers Students reach out to troops
Local book lovers — including a Fort Myers 7-year-old — are helping U.S. troops combat the loneliness of restricted downtime in Iraq.
“I thought of the idea that they could read books and magazines while they are over there,” said Cassie Poller, a first-grader at Evangelical Christian Elementary School.
With Principal Jon Wilson as the organizer, Cassie and her friends in grades K-4 through fifth collected more than 1,000 books and magazines in less than two weeks. About 500 already have been sent to individuals or to major bases of operation in Iraq.
The Foundation for Lee County Library Systems will soon launch a Books for Troops campaign to send packages of 15 paperbacks to individual U.S. troops serving anywhere overseas.
“We need APO addresses. Every APO address we get, we will send something out to them,” said Joyce Lyons, a director of the Foundation for Lee County Library Systems and president of the Lee County Library Advisory Board.
“We are going to put a letter in with each box telling them this is just a token of our support for our brave men and women overseas,” said Lyons, a 17-year resident of Cape Coral who spends the summer in Maine.
Within the next two weeks, the foundation will announce where to submit the APO addresses and drop off donated paperbacks.
Volunteers for the libraries were the first donors. They offered choice paperbacks from their annual book sales.
“We got three big boxes just from the Cape Coral book sale. I’m sure the public is going to get behind this,” Lyons said.
If students at Evangelical are an indication, she’ll be right about that.
“I thought it was a good idea,” said 8-year-old Thomas Seidler, a third-grader. The aspiring astronaut contributed a book on spaceships.
Skateboarder Wills Caldwell, 11, a fifth-grader, gave issues of Sports Illustrated.
“We do local mission trips around here,” Wilson said, but this is the first time the elementary students reached overseas to do good works.
“We don’t want anyone else to get hurt,” said Brandon Travis, 7, a second-grader who recalled the terrorism on Sept. 11, 2001.
Wilson said the students will continue to collect and mail books and magazines through the end of the school year.
“They can’t do all the work,” Cassie said of U.S. troops. “We have to do some work, too.”
So the FEC has told Al Sharpton to return the $100 grand they gave him. Of course, he's vowing to fight it. We expect no less of Al.
In case y'all don't remember, Sharpton accepted the money on the very day he dropped out of the race. He was already under investigation at that time by the FEC for campaign money violations.
Why they gave him the money, I can't fathom. Why he accepted the money knowing he was dropping out, well, that's just Al.
The Washington Times is reporting on the lack of reporting of the Nick Berg story in the mainstream press:
"Nick Berg has already disappeared from many front pages, but prison abuse stories remain," Mr. Boortz said. "Maybe it's just this simple: The prison abuse scandal can damage George Bush, the Nick Berg story can only help him."
The Washington Post, for example, ran two prison-abuse stories on the front page yesterday, plus three related stories elsewhere in the A-section. A single story on Mr. Berg was relegated to page A21.
The New York Times featured three prison-abuse stories on the front page, with a single story on Mr. Berg, which emphasized that "federal officials" failed to protect him. Three more prison-abuse stories ran elsewhere in the A-section.
The Times' apparent agenda did not escape the Boston Herald, which ran an editorial yesterday accusing the paper of "using its power to mislead."
"The New York Times, which has hawked story after story on the prison abuse scandal, saw fit [Tuesday] to run a single column on the upper-right front page about Berg's murder, while prominently featuring accusations of abuse by a former Afghan prisoner," the Herald said.
On the other coast, DJs at a radio station out in Oregon went with the story big time. They played the audio of the execution all day while mocking the screams of Nicholas Berg. They've been fired and the radio station issued an apology.
I think the editorial boards who have chosen to ignore the story and the DJs who mocked it are two sides of the same agenda-driven, moral midget coin. They'd like to make a molehill out of a mountain. That an American was decapitated on video by Al-Qaida is just a trifle to them.
American's beheading old news for media elite
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published May 14, 2004
Some news organizations have relegated the beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg to a second-tier story behind repetitive accounts of Iraqi prisoner abuse.
Observers smell a rat -- and an agenda to undermine the Bush administration by showcasing abuse photos and perpetuating the outrage that has accompanied it in the past two weeks.
"What's shocking is that the beheading of an American is a one-day story. It was gone by Wednesday night. The press is trying to create more sympathy for the prisoners than Mr. Berg," said Tim Graham of the Media Research Center yesterday.
"Journalists are also looking for stories which fit a template -- the Vietnam quagmire template. And this prisoner-abuse story fits," he said.
Neal Boortz, radio talk-show host, agreed.
"Nick Berg has already disappeared from many front pages, but prison abuse stories remain," Mr. Boortz said. "Maybe it's just this simple: The prison abuse scandal can damage George Bush, the Nick Berg story can only help him."
The Washington Post, for example, ran two prison-abuse stories on the front page yesterday, plus three related stories elsewhere in the A-section. A single story on Mr. Berg was relegated to page A21.
The New York Times featured three prison-abuse stories on the front page, with a single story on Mr. Berg, which emphasized that "federal officials" failed to protect him. Three more prison-abuse stories ran elsewhere in the A-section.
The Times' apparent agenda did not escape the Boston Herald, which ran an editorial yesterday accusing the paper of "using its power to mislead."
"The New York Times, which has hawked story after story on the prison abuse scandal, saw fit [Tuesday] to run a single column on the upper-right front page about Berg's murder, while prominently featuring accusations of abuse by a former Afghan prisoner," the Herald said.
Some news organizations took a different tack.
The Dallas Morning News' editorial page ran an edited photo of Mr. Berg's assailant holding his severed head aloft, with the headline, "This is the enemy: Vile image shows the world why we should fight."
An accompanying editorial explained that the photo "is meant to bring perspective to events in Iraq, to refocus the nation's eyes on the larger picture of the war against radical Islam, and its stakes."
On his ABC Radio show yesterday, Sean Hannity aired a 30-second audio clip from the beheading, telling his audience, "I know you don't want to hear this. But you should make yourself hear it, because it is horrible and it is evil in your midst."
One newspaper was duped by the seeming abundance of prisoner-abuse images. Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran an apology to its readers for running a photo Wednesday said to depict U.S. soldiers raping Iraqi women. The faked image had originated on an Internet pornography site.
"This photo should not have appeared in the Globe ... those images were never authenticated as photos of prisoner abuse. There was a lapse in judgment and procedures, and we apologize for it," Editor Martin Baron said.
Broadcasters remained fixated on prisoner abuse, in all its permutations.
ABC News' Peter Jennings shaded his report Wednesday on Mr. Berg, downplaying the assailants' links to al Qaeda and observing, "The suspected terrorist leader who's claimed responsibility for Mr. Berg's murder is one of the most wanted men in Iraq -- at least by the United States."
In addition, the networks overlooked a CBS-affiliate interview with Army Pfc. Lynndie England -- accused of prisoner abuse -- who said their tactics had actually yielded useful information.
Meanwhile, the District-based Radio-Television News Directors Association issued guidelines yesterday for "airing graphic materials," providing nine points for broadcasters to ensure that their subjects are treated "with respect and dignity, showing particular compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. The code does not distinguish between a subject that is alive or dead."
• Contact Jennifer Harper at jharper@washingtontimes.com or 202/636-3085.
Mahmood of Mahmood's Den has got his files transfered to the new server and is ready for visitors. Take him a casserole. It's only polite.
The story just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
I'm going to wait for things to shake down a bit before writing about it. I don't want to add my own half-baked theories to the pile. I will say that I have no intention of watching the video. I have a very good imagination and I already know who we're fighting.
Ricky of North Georgia Dogma is tracking some very strange folk. Maybe they think Nick Berg's decapitation was filmed on a Hollywood soundstage.
There's a terrific editorial in the Boston Herald today.
The moral authority of the United States has never been stronger or more worthy of respect.
This is a nation of Nick Bergs, Thomas Hamills, and Norman Darlings - the last an Army Pfc. buried in a Massachusetts military cemetery on Monday.
It is a nation where a Boston cab driver, himself a Russian immigrant, proudly displays his daughter's photo in an Army uniform on the dashboard, smiling at the irony that once upon a time he was a Russian soldier and now his daughter is an American one.
It's a nation where that daughter puts herself in harm's way to protect the freedom of the press which allows Boston Globe editors to run bogus photographs of American soldiers raping Iraqi women.
Prouder than ever to be American
By Boston Herald editorial staff
Thursday, May 13, 2004
The moral authority of the United States has never been stronger or more worthy of respect.
This is a nation of Nick Bergs, Thomas Hamills, and Norman Darlings - the last an Army Pfc. buried in a Massachusetts military cemetery on Monday.
It is a nation where a Boston cab driver, himself a Russian immigrant, proudly displays his daughter's photo in an Army uniform on the dashboard, smiling at the irony that once upon a time he was a Russian soldier and now his daughter is an American one.
It's a nation where that daughter puts herself in harm's way to protect the freedom of the press which allows Boston Globe editors to run bogus photographs of American soldiers raping Iraqi women.
This is a nation who counts Jim Sereigo-Wareing among its citizens, a Methuen man who has spent $6,000 out of his own pocket to hang American flags from highway overpasses. And it's a country of neighborhoods where homeowners for and against the Iraq war display candles as silent prayers for soldiers' safe return home.
It's a country where most see teaching right from wrong as a fundamental parental duty, and worshiping God as an act of love, not hate.
Nick Berg is not a hero. Nor is he a martyr. He is a murder victim, like the 3000 people who were killed on Sept. 11 were murder victims. Like Daniel Pearl and the young people dancing in a discoteque in Bali, or the commuters traveling by train to Madrid.
Berg went to Iraq because he wanted to help an oppressed people rise up. He lived a fundamentally moral American ideal.
His bereaved parents blame US officials, in part, for the slaying. Who can begrudge them their anger when their son is coming home in pieces. But they are, nonetheless, wrong.
Those responsible stood in hoods behind the bound 26-year-old and held his head aloft in bloody triumph. Those deserving blame are the masters of their cause, hiding in caves and rogue states around the world.
Their cause is power. Power over people and power over ideas. Hate, fear and oppression are just the tools wielded to gain it. The Almighty just the excuse.
President Bush rightly calls Islamic terrorists ``evildoers.'' And they tarnish a just and loving religion by committing evil in God's name.
It was an abuse of power that led to the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But the actions of a few don't reflect the dedication of the many.
This nation is using its power for good. To rebuild infrastructure, restore order, open schools and hospitals, create a government of, by and for the people.
And just as some American MPs used their power to abuse, some American leaders (of both the opinion and political variety), are now using their power to mislead.
Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner ought to be condemned for displaying those fraudulent rape photos.
Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson ought to be ashamed to link treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war to racism against blacks in this country.
The New York Times, which has hawked story after story on the prison abuse scandal, saw fit yesterday to run a single column on the upper right front page about Berg's murder, while prominently featuring accusations of abuse by a former Afghan prisoner.
We can only hope that most in the Arab world reacted with disgust, with horror and with sadness when they saw Berg murdered so brutally, just as Americans are to the photos of degraded Iraqi prisoners.
We can only hope the agendas of Turner, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and others are seen for what they are.
Yesterday, a German official implored the United States ``to regain its moral authority for the good of the Western world.''
The truth is we have never lost it.
Rummie's in Iraq and boy is he pissed. Wait, he's always pissed.
OK, Rummie's in Iraq and he's going to knock some heads together.
It's always good fun to see the folks at a major newspaper with egg on their face. They take themselves so seriously.
Country Store has the scoop on the Boston Globe's reaction to the realization that they'd published a bunch of bogus GI rape pics.
Zeyad on Nick Berg:
Strange coincidence that the Nick Berg video was released almost
simultaneously with the video of Palestinian 'freedom fighters'
displaying the severed head of an Israeli soldier on a table.
Al-Jazeera had the head blurred out, and the Nick Berg video was
casually mentioned near the end of their news bulletin, and that was
that. No extensive discussions with Arab 'intelligentsia' followed, no replaying of the video over and over again for days (as the Abu Ghraib images), no talk shows with enraged, fist shaking, name-calling Arab figures discussing the effect of these videos on the 'image' of the Islamic or Arab world. Just shame and guilty silence. Apparently, pictures of an American female soldier taunting a naked man with underwear on his head is much much more gruesome to Arabs. I guess not everyone is perfect.
So, to distance myself from the shameful hypocritical Arab and Muslim masses. I wish to denounce this barbaric act and the pathetic ideology that fueled it, to disown any person from my part of the world who would justify it, and to offer my sincere condolences and sympathy to the family and countrymen of Nicholas Berg.
And for Muslims, who are definitely going to say 'this isn't the real Islam':
"When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives." Surat Mohammed:4
Grow up, and leave the 7th century.
It's bad news when your elementary school teacher is a crackhead.
A deputy said that he saw Palmer pull into a known drug area near the Marlboro Apartments in Pompano Beach. The deputy said after he parked briefly, Palmer pulled out and drove through a stop sign.
Police routinely profile whites but it's no big deal. They figure a white guy going into the ghetto is up to no good. They're usually right too.
The Australian has an interesting article on the role of the Internet as a virtual training camp for Al-Qaida.
"The internet has become a virtual Afghanistan," says Clive Williams, director of terrorism studies at the Australian National University.
"They are using the internet as a command and control centre and for discussion of targets like Madrid. The documents show they had been talking about that on the internet since last December," he says.
They certainly made heavy use of the Internet access in the libraries here in Broward County.
Too bad these tech-savvy terrorists can't scare up a camera to take a pic of Bin Laden.
Duane's not too busy to say "Howdy."
Wail on, Skydog!
RIP Nick Berg.
What a horrible thing to happen to someone. I'm so sorry for his family and I hope the men who did this will be brought to justice.
Update:
The Bush administration said Tuesday the people who beheaded American hostage Nick Berg in Iraq are enemies of freedom who will be hunted down and brought to justice.
Yes, justice. I've read some crazy threads today, just as damn nutty as anything from the DU. We're not animals. These killers must be hunted down and brought to justice.
There's a good article in the Washington Times on how Teresa has funneled money into Kerry's campaign. She's now filed for an extension, to delay revealing her tax returns for as long as possible. She could file for another delay after that, if she wants. She has until October. Sooner or later, though, they're going to have to face the music.
Ever since his 1996 Senate re-election campaign, Sen. John Kerry has made liberal use of millions of dollars from his second wife's inheritance. Now that he has become the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee — a timely infusion of more than $6 million facilitated by his wife's $500 million wealth — Mr. Kerry and his spouse, Teresa Heinz Kerry, now claim that divulging her tax returns would constitute a violation of a "right to privacy." Meanwhile, Mrs. Heinz Kerry, whom her husband describes as his "graceful and unbelievable partner in this effort," poses for Newsweek cover-story photos and accuses the vice president of being "unpatriotic." Even for a candidate who insists on having it both ways on so many issues, this is truly an audacious gambit.
Yes! Yes! Draft Edwards! He's purdy. Some may say he looks like the kind of guy who's got to squat to pee, but they're just jealous. I want handsome fellas on my TV!
Can someone explain to me how John Kerry keeps getting gigolo gigs? I just don't get it.
Did John Kerry go to Vietnam because voicing objection would have been futile or because he believed in it and wanted to win?
Videotapes of his own interviews keep coming back to haunt him.
I'm dying to see the Apocalypse Now footage he took while in-country. Now that would be really special.
Now the Palestinians are using suicide-hermaphrodites.
Next they'll be recruiting RuPaul.
One day we're going to hear about homicide-bombers with explosive breast implants.
(Via Command Post.)
Jesse Jackson, fresh off the disappointing self-rescue of Thomas Hamill, spoke at the Million Mom March yesterday. The rally, organizers say, drew about 2,500. It's not recorded what Jackson said, because, well, nobody really cares anymore what he says.
