Bullet Wounds KKK Initiation Participant

Yet again, G-d makes His presence known.

A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

Heh.

Do you think it has something to do with the name "Paris"?

"The Paris, Texas, school district apologized Tuesday for a performance by one of its marching bands which played an Adolf Hitler anthem and waved a Nazi flag during a football halftime show."

On Rosh Hashana, yet.

Reason #1048 not to live in Vietnam...

OK, you know you don't want to eat in Vietnam when the dog meat might not even be dog meat...

Be careful frying that turkey!

Who fries their turkeys anyway?

The Ice Cream Scoop Bandit...

Not to underestimate the terror one feels when threatened with a putty knife, but what about this paragraph:

The new charges against Angela Jackson, 18, of Susquehanna Township, come as she was awaiting trial for allegedly twice robbing a convenience store armed with an ice cream scoop.

"Gimme all the money in the register or I'll make you a large banana split!"

And she got away with it twice?

Illegal Bologna

Prepare for the new national War On Illegal Luncheon Meat...

Lileks. Again.

Damn, James is good today.

He starts out nice 'n' family man, talking about his daughter:

Okay, one more toddler moment: we read a book this morning, and I gave it a theatrical reading worthy of Patrick Stewart. Gnat was impressed. “I love you, Daddee,” she said, and of course I said I loved her too.

"No. Call me dottor."

"You’re my best daughter only and ever."

Big hug. She looked at the TV, at the pictures of the wreckage in Turkey.

"I don wan news. I want Blues Clues."

But then he downshifts into rhetoric that makes you wanna yell "Damn Straight!"

You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police.

. . . .

It’s going to take another attack to convince the fence-sitters: I hear this all the time. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the next attack on American soil will jolt whose who’ve moved on, who’ve forgotten the aching, clammy dread we all felt after 9/11. But others will believe that we brought it on ourselves. You already read it around the web - the bombings in Turkey were a response to Britain’s assistance for toppling Saddam; what did we expect? In other words: if we fight back, we get what we deserve. If we do not fight back, and we are attacked again, you can blame it on the crimes for which we have not yet sufficiently atoned. The only proper posture for the West is supine. Curl up and let them kick until they’re spent. Give them Israel and New York and perhaps they'll go away.

This is either going to end on their terms, or ours. Which would you prefer?

Oh, there you go again with the us vs. them, the good vs. evil, the with-us-or-with-the-terrorists. But these aren’t my definitions; these are the definitions of the enemy. (Eyes roll; “enemy.” How dramatic.) They certainly believe it’s a matter of us vs. them; they’ve been acting that way for years before we caught on. They certainly believe it’s a matter of good vs. evil, although they believe they are Good. No - correction. They believe they are righteous. They obviously believe that sides have been drawn, allegiances chosen; why else kill Turks, for heaven’s sake? Yes, the attacks in Turkey were aimed at Jews and Crusaders, but they obviously knew there would be massive numbers of wounded Turks, and they didn’t care. (The ones who are truly callous about the fate of other Muslims are the Muslim extremists. But, well, Muslims don’t kill Muslims, so the Mossad must have bombed the synagogues. QED.) I repeat: their terms or our terms.

I wish I could write like him.

The New Medicare Bill

This bill is abominable. Why should you all be responsible for paying for my pharmaceuticals in 5 years when I reach 65? What the hell have I done to merit that (other than reach that age)? If you say that people "need" it - they also need cars and cell phones. Should you be made to pay for those also? The bill reeks... not because it does too little... but because it does anything at all! It is a bill that will cost the economy millions of dollars and, as a result of the law of unintended consequences, will also result in the production of far fewer new pharmaceuticals to help mankind.

Response to Peter

Peter (and whomever else reads this):
The problem is that the President is begining to put more and more pressure on Israel, at the insistence of the British and our State Dept. Witness his strong language re the fence. It also appears that the US will reduce the amount of aid to Israel because of the fence. I happen to think that Israel should stop taking American aid, for many reasons. But it is certainly negative that the President is linking a cutback in aid, to the fence - a method which Israel considers necessary for its own defense.

Terrorists with Tofu breath

Michelle Malkin takes on some people I consider truly dangerous: Animal rights and environmental rights extremists.

As she notes:

While aspiring terrorists with tofu breath build nail bombs and play with matches, the best and brightest scientists around the world are forging miraculous breakthroughs that will benefit all mankind -- and especially the poor in underdeveloped nations that the leftists and Luddites claim to care about so much.

The main thing that unites animal rights activists and environmental activists is not love of animals or trees: It's hate for humans.

After all, you named her after the French capital...

In The New York Post, Linda Stasi takes Paris Hilton's parents to task in connection with the video that has now caused email servers to creak under the strain of all the forwarding:

She is, (and it is), without a doubt, a parent's worst nightmare. Well, unless of course you are Paris' parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton - then maybe you're living the dream.

I mean, let's be honest, the naked, probably drunk, 19-year-old sexed-up girl (it was shot three years ago) in this video is everything you raised her to be - and is playing exactly the role you raised her to play.

What are you so suddenly shocked and angry about? Did you find out she was having unprotected sex in a Marriott and not a Hilton hotel?

Come on!

Where the hell have you been since your two daughters were running wild at 14? How did you allow them out to go clubbing and looking all sexed-up at an age when they should have been home with you having dinner and doing homework?

Hard to argue with her, really.

A Day at Baltimore Airport

This story was verified as accurate by snopes.com (http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/onleave.asp). It's worth reading.
/Stuart

The writer and his wife live in LA and both work for Uncle Sam.

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope that you will spare me a few minutes of your time to tell you about something that I saw on Monday, October 27.

I had been attending a conference in Annapolis and was coming home on Sunday. As you may recall, Los Angeles International Airport was closed on Sunday, October 26, because of the fires that affected air traffic control. Accordingly, my flight, and many others, were canceled and I wound up spending a night in Baltimore.

My story begins the next day. When I went to check in at the United counter Monday morning I saw a lot of soldiers home from Iraq. Most
were very young and all had on their desert camouflage uniforms. This was as change from earlier, when they had to buy civilian clothes in Kuwait to fly home. It was a visible reminder that we are in a war. It probably was pretty close to what train terminals were like in World War II.

Many people were stopping the troops to talk to them, asking them questions in the Starbucks line or just saying "Welcome Home." In addition to all the flights that had been canceled on Sunday, the weather was terrible in Baltimore and the flights were backed up. So, there were a lot of unhappy people in the terminal trying to get home, but nobody that I saw gave the soldiers a bad time.

By the afternoon, one plane to Denver had been delayed several hours. United personnel kept asking for volunteers to give up their seats and take another flight. They weren't getting many takers. Finally, a United spokeswoman got on the PA and said this, "Folks. As you can see, there are a lot of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we're trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight. We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you're doing, we are here for you and we love you."

At that, the entire terminal of cranky, tired, travel-weary people, a cross-section of America, broke into sustained and heartfelt applause. The soldiers looked surprised and very modest. Most of them just looked at their boots. Many of us were wiping away tears.

And, yes, people lined up to take the later flight and all the soldiers went to Denver on that flight.

That little moment made me proud to be an American, and also told me why we will win this war.

If you want to send my little story on to your friends and family, feel free. This is not some urban legend. I was there, I was part of it, I saw it happen.

Will Ross
Administrative Judge
United States Department of Defense

Pacifist Europeans have short memories

Mark Steyn writes an interesting piece about the odd pacifism of Europe.

I liked this paragraph:

You can't help noticing that it's the low-tech weapons that are really horrible. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and the Congo, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of EUtopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly non-state-of-the-art ways until the Americans intervened.

According to the latest estimates, the mass graves in Iraq contain the remains of at least 300,000 people, but we're still arguing about whether the war was "justified". The pacifism - or, more accurately, passivism - of Europe does not seem especially moral.

and

The EU has done a grand job of trumpeting its weakness as strength, but the fact remains that there's something hollow at the heart of European identity. You can't be a great power without great power: Slobodan Milosevic called the EU's bluff on that a decade ago.

When you say as much to Euro-grandees, they say, ah, but you wouldn't understand, here on the Continent we have seen the horrors of war close up, the slaughter of the Somme casts long shadows. I'll say. In the New Statesman last week, Philip Kerr managed to yoke All Quiet On The Western Front with Joan Baez and John Lennon, and unintentionally underlined just how obsolescent the Sixties folk-protest canon is. Where Have All The Flowers Gone? would have made a great song for the First World War, but not for Afghanistan or Iraq or anything we're likely to fight in the future.

In our time, mass slaughter occurs only in places where the West refuses to act - in the Sudan or North Korea - or acts only under the contemptible and corrupting rules of UN "peacekeeping", as at Srebrenica. In Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, technological advantage changes the moral calculus: it makes war the least worst option, the moral choice. At the 11th hour of the 11th day, we should remember those who died in the Great War, but recognise that it could never be "the war to end all wars" and never should.

Israeli Rap takes on politics

An interesting news story about Israeli Rap music's political content.

Wearing baggy sweat pants, a baseball cap pushed off-center and a glittering, rhinestone-studded Star of David necklace, Kobi Shimoni (known by the stage name Subliminal) swaggered on stage as if he were the Israeli incarnation of Eminem (news - web sites). With a booming rhythm track and an Israeli flag draped from the DJ stand, the show turned out to be as much a patriotic pep rally as a rapper's delight.


"Who has an Israeli army dog tag, put your hands in the air!" Subliminal called out in a mix of Hebrew and English. Hundreds of hands shot up. "Who is proud to be a Zionist in the state of Israel, put your hands in the air! Hell yeah!"

Say Thank You

I have had a small correspondence with a Lt. Colonel in the army, who is stationed in Afghanistan. I sent the following e-mail to him. It would be nice if we all did something similar today:


Colonel:
I dont know many people who are on active duty in the military so, on this Veteran's Day, I decided to send this to you as a representative of all those whom I don't know.
I want to extend to you a heart-felt thank you for your service. Although these sentiments are (unfortunately) not often expressed, you are in our prayers.
Stuart Kaufman
Management Recruiters of Great Neck
stuartk at mrgreatneck.com

Zell Miller

I was watching Tony Snow's Sunday program a couple of weeks ago, and the panel was discussing Zell Miler's new book, and his "motivations" for writing it.
It was Cece Connolly who expressed a view that I realized was a perfect illustration of the cynical and vile way that the Washington establishment views the world. Ms. Connolly posited that perhaps Senator Miller wrote the book because he is seeking appointment to a high level position in a second Bush administration.
Her musings made it clear that the Washington establishment considers it impossible that an elected official can actually have an agenda outside of his/her own personal self aggrandizement. She, in fact, projected her own worldview onto Senator Miller. She (and they, with few exceptions) is incapable of recognizing decency when it is staring them straight in the face.
This, in a nutshell, is the reason why the Congress and the big media are leading us down the road to perdition

Ah, the left...

The always-interesting Evan Coyne provides some video of his favorite protester at the Rutgers pro-Palestinian rally.

As he notes:

Mary Lou is an attractive, articulate spokeswoman for liberal causes. She is also an example of why so many on the left refer to President Bush's intellect in derogatory terms: their standards are simply too high. It is unfair and unreasonable to expect that every candidate for elective office demonstrate the level of mental acumen shown in this speech. Watch, and you will see why Mary Lou is my new favorite protester.

Note: The above constitutes considerable sarcasm on Evan's part.

Once Again, the Singer Proves That She Should "Shut Up and Sing"

On her web site ( http://barbrastreisand.com/statements.html ), America's reigning self-proclaimed political pundit/diva holds forth on the First Amendment and the CBS decision to exile the Reagan defamation to Showtime.
She Says:
"Due to their experience with the restrictive English government, the framers of our constitution specifically included a ban on prior restraint in the First Amendment, which is an attempt to stop information from getting out there before the public has a chance to see it at all - exactly what is going on in this case."

She is such a schmuck! She still hasn't grasped that the First Amendment applies to government censorship, and that what happened in the Reagan smearfilm/CBS situation, was nothing more than the marketplace operating at its best.
What an ignorant cow!

SUICIDE OR MURDER OR MURDER SUICIDE?

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS president
Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of
a bizarre death. Here is the story:

On March 23, 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and
concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. The decedent had
jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide.

He left a note to that effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past
the ninth floor, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through
a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent
was aware that a safety net had been installed just below at the eighth
floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not
have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned. Ordinarily,
Dr. Mills continued, "a person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately
succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended" is still
defined as committing suicide. Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death
nine stories below at street level, but his suicide attempt probably would
not have been successful because of the safety net. This caused the medical
examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.

The room on the ninth floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was
occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously, and
he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset that when he
pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went
through the window striking Mr. Opus.

When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one
is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with the murder
charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant. They both said they
thought the shotgun was unloaded. The old man said it was his long standing
habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to
murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident,
that is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's
son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It
transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the
son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly,
loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.

The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of
Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son
was in fact Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over both the
loss of his financial support and the failure of his attempt to engineer his
mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March
23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth-story
window. The son had actually murdered himself, so the medical examiner
closed the case as a suicide.


Stuart Kaufman
Management Recruiters of Great Neck
stuartk@mrgreatneck.com

Worst Album Covers Ever

Well, they're right, these are the Worst Album Covers Ever.

I especially like the pedophile's favorite album third from the bottom, Julie's Sixteenth Birthday.

My Son

Last night my wife (Susan) and I attended a ceremony at which my son (David Kaufman, for those ignorant few who don't alrady know) was presented an award by Judge Judith Kaye (the top honcho judge in NY State) on behalf of the Legal Aid Society.
I just wanted to take advantage of this forum to tell whomever may be interested that no father was ever prouder of his son than I am of mine. He goes from strength to strength. He is an honorable, decent person who uses his intelligence and wit to improve this world. If I have done nothing more in my life than produce David A. Kaufman, then my life has been an unqualified success!

Girls pummel man who exposed himself

Hee. I really don't have time. But this was too good.

OpinionJournal - Extra

I'm incredibly busy today, but I just wanted to put this out there. OpinionJournal - Extra.

Great column, lists lots of bloggers (though it shockingly neglects to include KaufmaNet) and is fairly interesting.

I'll reblog about this later, maybe much later.