A little TOO cool, don't you think?

My mom was a "cool mom", but the worst thing she ever did was to teach my friends how to make fake boogers with rice from Chinese restaurants...

You've gotta be kidding me.

It seems that the Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania crashed the funeral of a Marine killed in action in Iraq, where she (wait for it) "hand[ed] out her business cards" and advised mourners that "'our government' is against the war."

Firstly, WHAT?!

secondly, WHAT?!

and thirdly, someone should mention to the Lt. Governor of Pennsylvania that she's not exactly the Constitutional officer in charge of foreign policy.

The Daily Show on Judge Roberts

A very good point made by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart about the response to Judge Roberts (the quoted part starts at about 00:59):

Jon Stewart: What's been the reaction in Washington [to the selection of Judge Roberts]?
Ed Helms: Jon, liberals are outraged by Bush's choice. They have been for weeks.
Jon Stewart: Ed, they just found out about Roberts last night.
Ed Helms: That's not the point. The left wishes the President had picked someone they wanted, not someone he wanted. I mean, who gave him the authority? It's an abuse of power.
Jon Stewart: I think it's in the Constitution.
Ed Helms: What Democrats are saying is that they wish they had won the last election.

Do you think?

There but for the grace of G-d...

A moment of silence, please for the TiVo of Right Thinking from the Left Coast's Lee.

Thank you.

Fatwa against a blogger

Whoa. According to this, a fatwa has been issued against a blogger by "a known terror group," and the FBI "believe that the threat is real."

This is the best they could come up with?

I honestly haven't read enough about Judge Roberts to decide about him, but NARAL is really stretching, in my opinion, if this is the best they could come up with for why "Mr." Roberts shouldn't be a Justice.

Everything listed under the "Hostility to Reproductive Rights" section are arguments made by Judge Roberts when he was a Deputy Solicitor General, with the obligation to argue cases as an attorney on behalf of his client, essentially the Administration.

The stupidest one they have listed is an example where, during oral arguments, "a Justice asked, 'Mr. Roberts, in this case are you asking that Roe v. Wade be overruled?' [Judge Roberts] responded, 'No, your honor, the issue doesn't even come up."

So, evidently, stating that he's not asking for Roe to be overturned is "Hostility to Reproductive Rights"?

If this is the best they can do, objectors to the confirmation of Judge Roberts are going to look opportunistic and stupid.

Hope on the left.

Andrew Sullivan notes that some leftists are making affirmative statements against terror on a website/blog entitled Unite Against Terror.

An example:

We are witnessing one of the greatest betrayals by the left since so-called left-wingers backed the Hitler-Stalin pact and opposed the war against Nazi fascism. Today, the pseudo-left reveals its shameless hypocrisy and its wholesale abandonment of humanitarian values. While it deplores the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, only last year it welcomed to the UK the Muslim cleric, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who endorses the suicide bombing of innocent civilians. These same right-wing leftists back the so-called 'resistance' in Iraq. This 'resistance' uses terrorism against civilians as its modus operandi - stooping to the massacre of dozens of Iraqi children in order kill a few US soldiers. Terrorism is not socialism; it is the tactic of fascism. But much of the left doesn't care. Never mind what the Iraqi people want, it wants the US and UK out of Iraq at any price, including the abandonment of Iraqi socialists, trade unionists, democrats and feminists. If the fake left gets its way, the ex-Baathists and Islamic fundamentalists could easily seize power, leading to Iranian-style clerical fascism and a bloodbath. I used to be proud to call myself a leftist. Now I feel shame. Much of the left no longer stands for the values of universal human rights and international socialism.

KaufMuffins!

Have you ever said to yourself, "Gee, I wish there was one appliance that would help me make my favorite breakfast sandwiches at home in minutes?"

Well, your wish has been granted!

Suicide Terrorism

I don't know why this just came to my attention now, but there's a fascinating article from the June 2003 The Atlantic about the Israeli response to suicide bombings and how we can learn from them in the U.S.

Ivins admits a mistake

Molly Ivins properly admits she was very wrong in a column:

In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.

The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed.

The high-end estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths in this war is 100,000, according to a Johns Hopkins University study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last October, but I was sticking to the low-end, most conservative estimates because I didn't want to be accused of exaggeration.

Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, Hussein killed several hundred thousand of his fellow citizens. The massacre of the Kurdish Barzani tribe in 1983 killed at least 8,000; the infamous gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja killed 5,000 in 1988; and seized documents from Iraqi security organizations show 182,000 were murdered during the Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, also in 1988.

In 1991, following the first Gulf War, both the Kurds and the Shiites rebelled. The allied forces did not intervene, and Saddam brutally suppressed both uprisings and drained the southern marshes that had been home to a local population for more than 5,000 years.

Saddam's regime left 271 mass graves, with more still being discovered. That figure alone was the source for my original mistaken estimate of 20,000. Saddam's widespread use of systematic torture, including rape, has been verified by the U.N. Committee on Human Rights and other human rights groups over the years.

There are wildly varying estimates of the number of civilians, especially babies and young children, who died as a result of the sanctions that followed the Gulf War. While it is true that the ill-advised sanctions were put in place by the United Nations, I do not see that that lessens Hussein's moral culpability, whatever blame attaches to the sanctions themselves -- particularly since Saddam promptly corrupted the Oil for Food Program put in place to mitigate the effects of the sanctions, and used the proceeds to build more palaces, etc.

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry.

Now, lest one think that the correction indicates an increased likelihood of my agreeing with Ivins, don't worry. The correction comes at the end of her new column, in which she misses the point of the Enron scandal entirely.

Honesty.

Yes, I know I'm blogboy today. But this was funny.

On the sister site to "Overheard at Work," called "Overheard in New York," I found this:

Bag lady: Ladies and gentlemen, my husband and I are homeless. We can't stay at our shelter during the day so we come on the train to get food. Today we are asking for money so we can do laundry. Anything you can give will help.

Hobo: Why don't you just admit that you're gonna buy crack? I'm in the same line of work, don't believe her.

--N train

Metaphor alert.

From "Overheard in the Office":

Project Manager: He said this, and we thought he meant that, and he thought we were doing this, and they thought we were doing that, and they didn't tell us they wanted that so we did this...and it all got lost in the...in the...in the big washing machine of communication.

Developer: Or possibly the tumble drier of tautology.

1-4 Warple Way
Acton, London

This just in... soda has sugar in it.

More crapola from the "Center for Science in the Public Interest" a/k/a "Granola-eating socialists who want to ensure you can never ever have fun."

They have now called for warning labels to be placed on soft drinks.

I think we should instead require a warning label on all press releases from the CSPI:

WARNING: The following press release has been written by people who believe they are much smarter than you, so please pay attention because we've used small words so as not to confuse all of you dumb normal people who are still so stupid as to be doing things we don't think you should be doing. This means you.

Correction-o-rama!

Gawker notes a particularly pathetic correction in the New York Times:

A front-page article on Saturday about the bombings in London on Thursday misstated the number of commuter trains bombed in Madrid on March 11, 2004. It was 4, not 10.
In the Times defense, these details are understandably difficult to confirm. Like when those 5 towers collapsed in Midtown on September 11.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the paper of record.

Who knew?

I just found out that Don Francisco, the longtime host of Sabado Gigante is Jewish. How cool is that?

We're not Afraid!

A response to the London bombing attack: We're not Afraid!

This is a very serious football fan.

This is really gross, in my opinion.

Olympics to New York: Drop Dead.

OK, so New York lost the Olympics bid.

I think I find myself a true New Yorker in my reaction to this. I thought having the Olympics in New York was a terrible idea; like we don't have enough trouble with traffic and security...

But I certainly didn't want anyone else to win!

One consolation, though. At least the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys lost too.

Who edits over at ABC?

I meant to write about this the other day, but life got in the way.

I didn't watch the Live 8 concert live on Saturday, but I did watch the ABC "recap." And apparently I should have watched the AOL feed.

What was ABC thinking? There were several travesties of editing. They showed a whole song by The Black Eyed Peas, a band which I seem to be unable to avoid, despite my best efforts.

They cut both the beginning and the end of The Who singing "Who Are You." They did, however, leave in Daltrey singing the "F" word (although they put "bleep" in the closed captioning).

Then, they actually truncated the REUNION OF PINK FLOYD!!! You gotta be kidding me.

And then they did the gutsiest thing. They actually cut Madonna.

Now, I understand that they could only show one song per band. Fine. They had time concerns. It was important that they only take two hours, because they had to show a rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos.

Oh, well. Whatever.