The Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Wendy Jo Sperber has died.

Actress WENDIE JO SPERBER, who starred alongside TOM HANKS in the hit ‘80s sitcom “Bosom Buddies,” passed away Tuesday evening after a long battle with breast cancer, according to her publicist. She was 46. Sperber was a prolific sitcom and movie star; she also appeared in the ‘80s sitcom “Private Benjamin” and had more recently starred on the NBC hit “Will & Grace,” as well as in movies like ‘Back to the Future.’ The comedienne also founded the weSPARK Cancer Support Center in 2001. Hanks released the following statement on Sperber: “The memory of Wendie Jo is that of a walking inspiration. She met the challenges of her illness with love, cheer, joy, altruism through weSPARK, and an unstoppable supply of Goodness. We are going to miss her as surely as we are all better for knowing her.”

You’d all recognize this gal.  I blog on this because when I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-90s I almost got set up on a blind date with her.  I knew a girl who was friends with her, and she said that Wendy Jo had just got out of a relationship and was looking to go out with some new people, and that I was just her type.  But, for one reason or another it never happened.  How weird.

I haven’t had a chance to hear or read Bush’s speech yet, been super busy today at work.  I’ll have commentary later on today when I get a moment.

Update: Finally got around to reading it.  Very good, I’m impressed.  I especially like the idea of releasing an unclassified strategy paper on the White House website.  Smart move.  It’s hard for your critics to claim you don’t have a plan when anyone can go on the internet and download the damn thing themselves. 

The biggest criticism I’ve had of Bush so far is that he’s really failed to articulate a strategy or plan, nor to explain why victory in Iraq is so critically important.  When Bush was making the case to go to war he outlined about 20 reasons at one time or another, but focused on just two or three, with WMD and getting rid of Saddam being the main selling points.  On this basis the American people supported him overwhelmingly.  Now we find ourselves in a situation where Saddam is gone, and there were no WMD there anyway, which completely blows his entire justification for the war.  Look at it this way: if we had found warehouses full of WMD, Bush would be hailed as the greatest wartime president since FDR, but we didn’t, and he’s paying the political price for it. 

So, since the main justifications for the war in Iraq were proved to be false, Bush now needs to show a clear strategy as to why finishing the job is critical.  This speech today is a good sign that, finally, he’s getting it.  I hope he understands that this can’t be a one-time thing, that this message has to be stated over and over and over to get the pint across, especially in the face of a hostile media and a determined opposition.  But the argument is there to be made, he just has to figure out how to do it.

A few people have reported problems leaving comments to some of the posts.  I can’t replicate them.  Can you guys give me specific details as to what is happening?

Update: Everything is fixed.  It’s because someone (cough - Salinger - cough) screwed up the URL in their link.  Remember, folks, if you’ve got a long URL, use tinyurl.com to shorten it first.

Welcome to Georgia.

A 37-year-old woman who married a 15-year-old boy was indicted Tuesday on charges of child molestation, statutory rape and enticing a child for indecent purposes.

Lisa Lynette Clark, who says she is pregnant with the teenager’s child, was arrested earlier this month after their November 8 wedding.

She has been ordered not to come within 100 feet of the boy.

Georgia law allows children of any age to marry—without parental consent—if the bride-to-be is pregnant. The law dates back to the early 1960s and was written to prevent out-of-wedlock births.

Click on the link and check out the picture.  She’s a total MILF.  Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with women today?

While Arnie is “agonizing” over Tookie, Jeb gets the job done.

Gov. Jeb Bush signed death warrants Tuesday for a man who fatally shot a Pensacola police officer and a carpenter who killed an elderly woman who refused to pay him.

Clarence Edward Hill, 47, is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on Jan. 24. Arthur D. Rutherford, 56, is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on Jan. 31.

Hill shot and killed Officer Stephen Taylor during a bank robbery in 1982. Taylor had tried to stop Hill’s 19-year-old accomplice from fleeing the bank with a bag of money.

Stella Salamon hired Rutherford in 1985 to install sliding glass doors in her Santa Rosa County home. She paid him for this work, but asked him to return to correct a problem with the doors.

Rutherford killed Salamon when she refused to write him a second check, and stole her purse. Her body was found submerged in a bathtub.

20 years and 23 years.  The wheels of justice turn slowly, my friends, but we get to the right destination in the end.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Ugh.  It’s Christmas, which means that for the next month we’re going to be subject to that horrible Folger’s commercial that they’ve been running since the 1980s.  You know the one, where the kid in the letter jacket gets out of the cab, and the little Aryan girl comes down the steps.  “Peter!” Then the two of them go into the kitchen, make Folgers coffee, which then wakes the family up to find that Peter made it home for the holidays.

Seriously, this commercial makes me want to take my own life.  I hate it.

Say what you like about Australia, but they know how to take care of the elderly.

Prostitutes as old as 70 continue to work in rural Australia, pushed out of the cities due to strong competition from younger and more attractive sex workers, the author of a study said on Tuesday.

Here in America, when our whores become too old to be useful, they move to New York and get elected to the Senate.

How do you lure a city full of looters to come home?  With free goodies.

Hurricane-stricken New Orleans is largely destroyed and abandoned, but city officials said on Tuesday it will soon have universal wireless Internet service.

A free, municipally-run Wi-Fi system has begun operation in the French Quarter and central business district and should cover the entire city within a year, Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement.

“We are among the first cities to feature a city-wide wireless network and that’s especially important to the recovery of our community,” he said.

Much of the equipment for the system has been donated by private companies, including Intel Corp, Tropos Networks and Pronto Networks, the city said.

Considering the widespread looting, I think it’s fair to assume that every laptop in the city was looted.  So what they’re doing here is trying to bribe back the laptop looters with a promise that they’ll be able to sit in the French Quarter drinking Hurricanes and download porn on the city’s dime.  If they could only work out a deal with Nike and Microsoft to offer free shoes and Xbox consoles they’d be able to repopulate the city in about ten minutes.

A reader to Sully’s blog sends in this email.

I certainly agree with Zalmay that stakes are high in Iraq – precisely because we’ve put all of our chips, so to speak, on this wild gamble in the Middle East. But Bush has nobody to blame for dwindling public support but himself. This is a President that refuses to acknowledge that there is such a thing as “the American people” and that he is accountable to them. And he shows no signs of this changing. Every significant speech is made to cherry-picked crowds at military academies. Scott McClellan’s briefings have become unintentional comedy sketches. And his surrogates just buzz and strafe Sunday morning talk shows every so often to parrot the same useless talking points. Imagine how much public opinion could be shaped and how much criticism could be defused if he simply addresses the American people to tell us what ‘the course’ that we must supposedly ‘stay’ is. What IS the mission? How many Iraqi battalions being independent and battle-ready will it take before we can at least begin to draw down? When can we expect this to occur? What is he doing to draw the Sunnis more into the political process and away from the insurgents? What is he doing with neighboring nations like Iran to stop their meddling and to seek their help in securing the borders? There are countless other questions – the answers of which could be used to explain in detail our progress, our plan, and a clear direction for America in the Middle East.

But when he is silent and hiding away from his critics, it’s only reasonable for people to begin to assume that he has no progress to report, no plan, and no direction. It would be sad if the hard work of people like Gen. Casey and Zalmay is all for naught because their boss was too much of a fool to explain the rather significant benefits of what they’re now doing in Iraq.

Exactly the same point I’ve been making for the past few days.  Bush’s talking points, the same talking points he’s been regurgitating for months now, aren’t getting the job done.  He needs a new tactic, or we’re going to lose.  The American people aren’t afraid of war or sacrifice, but they need direction and reassurance that their sacrifice is going to be for something tangible.  Bush needs to articulate this and he’s failing.

How typically French.

The French government tried to blame the British intelligence service MI6 for the sinking of the Greenpeace flagship, the Rainbow Warrior, in a campaign of “misinformation and smears” that infuriated the Thatcher government, newly released documents have revealed.

French secret agents, on the orders of the government, planted bombs on the Rainbow Warrior in a New Zealand harbour, killing one of the crew. The scandal rocked the French government, which lied for more than two months, denying responsibility for the act of state terrorism. The documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act to the Guardian, show how French attempts to incriminate M16 soured relations between the two countries.

Note how the Guardian refers to this as an act of state terrorism, which is wasn’t.  The Greenpeace ship was in New Zealand to interfere with French nuclear tests taking place in the South Pacific.  The French were protecting their own national interest.  Perhaps they didn’t go about it the right way, but this doesn’t fit under the umbrella of terrorism in any sense of the word.

The then French president, François Mitterrand, was in danger of being toppled, as politicians and officials struggled to avoid the blame and save their jobs.

Sir John Fretwell, the British ambassador in Paris, privately warned London that Mitterrand could be forced to resign in a Watergate-style scandal. He wrote: “The highest personalities in the land are fighting for political survival and even the fabric of the state is beginning to shake under the impact of repeated revelations, denunciations, attempts to acknowledge bits of truth while concealing others ... and the desperate attempts to find answers which will somehow satisfy public opinion while keeping the president above the melee.”

In other words, the French were denying for months their one successful military operation of the 20th century.

Yesterday in the WaPo, an op-ed column beautifully states a point that I have made here countless times, that the greatest beneficiaries of Wal-Mart’s success have been the poorest elements of society.

Wal-Mart’s critics allege that the retailer is bad for poor Americans. This claim is backward: As Jason Furman of New York University puts it, Wal-Mart is “a progressive success story.” Furman advised John “Benedict Arnold” Kerry in the 2004 campaign and has never received any payment from Wal-Mart; he is no corporate apologist. But he points out that Wal-Mart’s discounting on food alone boosts the welfare of American shoppers by at least $50 billion a year. The savings are possibly five times that much if you count all of Wal-Mart’s products.

These gains are especially important to poor and moderate-income families. The average Wal-Mart customer earns $35,000 a year, compared with $50,000 at Target and $74,000 at Costco. Moreover, Wal-Mart’s “every day low prices” make the biggest difference to the poor, since they spend a higher proportion of income on food and other basics. As a force for poverty relief, Wal-Mart’s $200 billion-plus assistance to consumers may rival many federal programs. Those programs are better targeted at the needy, but they are dramatically smaller. Food stamps were worth $33 billion in 2005, and the earned-income tax credit was worth $40 billion.

Set against these savings for consumers, Wal-Mart’s alleged suppression of wages appears trivial. Arindrajit Dube of the University of California at Berkeley, a leading Wal-Mart critic, has calculated that the firm has caused a $4.7 billion annual loss of wages for workers in the retail sector. This number is disputed: Wal-Mart’s pay and benefits can be made to look good or bad depending on which other firms you compare them to. When Wal-Mart opened a store in Glendale, Ariz., last year, it received 8,000 applications for 525 jobs, suggesting that not everyone believes the pay and benefits are unattractive.

But let’s say we accept Dube’s calculation that retail workers take home $4.7 billion less per year because Wal-Mart has busted unions and generally been ruthless. That loss to workers would still be dwarfed by the $50 billion-plus that Wal-Mart consumers save on food, never mind the much larger sums that they save altogether. Indeed, Furman points out that the wage suppression is so small that even its “victims” may be better off. Retail workers may take home less pay, but their purchasing power probably still grows thanks to Wal-Mart’s low prices.

Read the whole thing.  Suffice it to say that it’s vindication for a position I’ve held for a long time.  If Wal-Mart were to go away tomorrow, the poorest in society would have to start paying higher prices for food and clothing, the essentials of life.  Even if there isn’t a Wal-Mart in their immediate area, the very fact that Wal-Mart exists forces other retailers to keep their prices lower.  Wal-Mart is the best thing that ever happened to the poor in America.  It’s too bad that the left is so blinded by its hatred of corporations that it can’t see this obvious fact.

Kraft Mac and Cheese.  It’s the bleachiest!

A mother has been charged with trying to poison her adult daughter and her daughter’s family after allegedly pouring bleach into their macaroni and cheese on Saturday night.

Nancy O’Donnell, 56, was charged with four counts each of aggravated assault and recklessly endangering another person, police said.

O’Donnell’s daughter, Victoria Lynn O’Donnell, 24, was preparing dinner around 6:30 p.m. for her live-in boyfriend, Jamal Scott, 30, and their 6-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter. The four share a home with Nancy O’Donnell.

Victoria O’Donnell went upstairs while the food was cooking, and police said that when she came back downstairs, she could smell bleach in the food. She tried the macaroni and cheese and immediately spit it out after tasting the bleach, police said.

No one else tasted the food.

Victoria O’Donnell then confronted her mother about the allegedly tainted dinner. According to court records, Nancy O’Donnell said she wanted to sicken her daughter because “you don’t deserve those children.”

Consider this.  The mother and daughter both have traditional Irish names.  The kid’s name is “Jamal”.  I think the daughter has a case of jungle fever.  Perhaps the mother was trying to use the bleach to “lighten things up,” so to speak?

Monday, November 28, 2005

What do hot chicks do when they get out of college?  Drugs.

US drug manufacturers facing increasingly tough competition to market their wares to doctors have found a new, all-American weapon: cheerleaders.

So many young college graduates have traded their pom-poms for a saleswoman’s briefcase that a company has been set up in Memphis, Tennessee, to help corporations talent-scout cheerleaders around the country.

Gregory Webb, the founder and president of Spirited Sales Leaders, says he is aware of several hundred former cheerleaders who have been hired by pharmaceutical companies as saleswomen. He said the pharmaceutical industry had hired more cheerleaders than other industries because it pays higher salaries.

He rejected suggestions that drug corporations were simply seeking to exploit cheerleaders’ wholesome good looks in the hope of luring mostly male doctors into prescribing their products.

“Today’s cheerleader is not a 1950s cheerleader. These are true campus leaders,” Mr Webb said. “They’ve stood in front of tens of thousands of people in the arena, but they’ve also stood up in front of college presidents.”

On its website, Spirited Sales declares: “You may be surprised to learn that cheerleaders across the country possess all of the qualities you need to transform your staff into a successful sales team. As collegiate student athletes, these highly motivated individuals have achieved great success on the playing field and in the classroom and as a result, are better prepared for success on a winning sales team like yours.”

Now, I might be wrong here, but it seems like the pharmaceutical industry is (gasp!) trying to make a profit, and in order to do so they’re (gasp!) employing the oldest marketing trick in the world: if you want to sell a product, put a hot chick on it, in it, wearing it, holding it, eating it, or standing next to it.

When I was in boot camp they took our pictures, much like when you’re a senior in high school.  About the second to last week of boot camp they sent a representative down to talk to us to tell us what our options were as far as ordering photographs.  Did they send a middle-aged guy?  No, they sent a sexy, 22 year old blonde in a mini skirt, who was wearing way too much perfume.  Remember, we hadn’t seen a woman in over two months by this point, and just having the opportunity to talk to this girl was worth buying the full deluxe picture package.

Only liberals could be shocked, shocked that a pharmaceutical company would actually hire attractive young females to peddle its wares.

And the latest traitorous left-wing scumbag to feverishly work to undermine US political goals is…

Saddam Hussein’s attorneys will ask an Iraqi tribunal Monday for permission to add former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark to the courtroom defense team.

Khames Hameed al-Ubaidi said Clark was in Baghdad and will meet with the defense team on Sunday night or Monday morning, when the trial is scheduled to resume.

If Clark is not allowed to participate in the courtroom, he will act as a legal adviser, al-Ubaidi said.

A U.S. official close to the Iraqi High Tribunal said there have been no motions made by Hussein’s attorney to have an international lawyer work on the defense team. But the official said that if the proper motion for that was filed it would probably be accepted.

Clark was attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson and has been a civil rights attorney and activist in recent years. Clark, who opposed the Iraq war, met with Hussein in February 2003, just before the U.S.-led invasion began.

“Our plan is to go to court in Baghdad on Monday morning representing the defense counsel as defense support. A fair trial in this case is absolutely imperative for historical truth to justice obviously,” Clark told the Reuters news agency before leaving Amman, Jordan.

The historical truth to justice?  As if there is any doubt as to his guilt.  Well, maybe only in the minds of the American left.  After all, Saddam once shook hands with Donald Rumsfeld!

Men the world over have been using the internet to choke their chicken for years.  Now, thanks to some scientists, you can hug your chicken, too.

Singapore scientists looking for ways to transmit the sense of touch over the Internet have devised a vibration jacket for chickens and are thinking about electronic children’s pyjamas for cyberspace hugs.

A wireless jacket for chickens or other pets can be controlled with a computer and gives the animal the feeling of being touched by its owner, researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told Monday’s edition of The Straits Times.

The next step would be to use the same concept to transmit hugs over the Internet, it said.

“These days, parents go on a lot of business trips, but with children, hugging and touching are very important,” the paper quoted NTU Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok as saying.

NTU is thinking of a pyjama suit for children, which would use the Internet to adjust changes in pressure and temperature to simulate the feeling of being hugged. Parents wearing a similar suit could be “hugged” back by their children, the paper said.

Think of the sex toy implications, here.  You’re on a business trip.  You take out a little sock, slip it over your dong, and before you know it your wife is giving you hot mouth love.  The best part about it is that she’s not there while she’s doing it, so you don’t have to talk to her, and you can watch TV at the same time.