Is Paris Earning? The loathsome Hilton heiress was initially reported to have been offered a million dollars by NBC's Today Show for an exclusive interview to follow shortly after her release from jail, but a public outcry quashed those plans. Then I heard that some other entertainment or 'news' organization was going to pay her a million dollars, but I haven't seen anything further about that. Did CNN pay her for her appearance on Larry King Live last nite? I hope not.
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Question: Why wouldn't a payment to Hilton for such an interview violate the laws against a person's profiting from a crime for which s/he has been sent to jail?

Second Question: Didn't the judge who sent her back to jail say she had to serve out her entire sentence? If so, why did she serve only 23 days instead of 45?

Third Question: What is wrong with this country?
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Short People. News reports that were very big last week proclaimed, with apparent alarm, that the United States is shrinking in personal height, and the Dutch are now the world's tallest people.

America's Growing Problem
New Study Says Americans No Longer the Tallest in the World

It's a small world, after all — especially in America.

New research shows that Americans are coming up short, but not in terms of money or lifestyle. Our growing problem is with our height.

The study, conducted by the University of Munich and Princeton University, found that the United States had the shortest population in the industrialized world, and the reason may have to do with the way people live. * * *

"It's well known that the Americans held the title for 200 years," said University of Munich professor John Komlos. "Ever since the colonial times, the Americans were the tallest." * * *

Komlos said height revealed a lot about a country's well-being, including how long its citizens lived and how healthy they were. Researchers said that one reason for Denmark's high ranking [not as tall as the Netherlands but two inches taller than the U.S.] could be that the Danish health-care system provides better care to children when they are young, the time of life when most growing takes place.

Another reason for our lag might be the American diet, which is filled with fast food. Overeating can cause kids to produce too many growth hormones too early, which halts growth at a younger age.

I shall pass over the apparent contradiction between early childhood being "the time of life when most growing takes place" naturally and "too many growth hormones too early, which halts growth at a younger age." No, early production of growth hormones would not explain early cessation of growth. But let's pass over that.
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The whole absurd discussion ticked me off (even tho I am largely Dutch, and perhaps part-Danish in ancestry as well), because it is just so blind to what has actually been happening in this country: short immigrants have been pouring into the United States for decades.
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A fully-grown man from the Andes may be only 5'2" tall; a woman, 4'10". Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other Third Worlders who have constituted the bulk of our immigration for decades are all shorter than native-born Americans. The older, European stock of the Nation isn't growing less tall. The Nation's average stature is shrinking because of immigration. No mystery. No health issue. Just mass immigration of short people from short countries. Period.
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Not once, however, did I see anyone in media mention that. No, they wanted to believe that we are shrinking due to diet, health problems, or some other mysterious cause. Nope. Just immigration.
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The fact that the children born here from short immigrants are usually substantially taller than their parents doesn't seem to register with these reporters. And is it really credible that the United States is shorter than Japan?

the United States had the shortest population in the industrialized world

Drivel. The average height of American men is 5' 10" (my height). Let's see what the average height of Japanese men is. Well! Imagine that! According to Wikipedia, the average height of men in Japan* is 5' 5.2", 4.8 inches shorter than Americans. So not only is the premise that we are shrinking because of bad eating habits or a bad healthcare system false, but the assertion that we have "the shortest population in the industrialized world" is a ridiculous, outrageous LIE.
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Why didn't the major news organizations that reported this story not catch that lie? Didn't they know that Japanese are short? I did. So as soon as I heard the assertion that we were the shortest people in the industrialized world, I knew that had to be wrong. But the paid professionals in our huge media companies didn't catch that?
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Could it be that they wanted to believe that we were in decline, if not in world economic, military, or cultural power, then at least in height, so let pass the patently, blatantly false assertion that we are the shortest people in the industrialized world, because Japan's being shorter didn't fit the moral they wanted people to draw? Or are Japanese not considered part of the industrialized world, because they're not white? For shame, media, for shame.
____________________

* More than one figure is given in the Wikipedia article for heights for some countries. The 5' 5.2" figure is the first shown for Japan, and the shortest. The shortest and tallest figures given for this one country, Japan, differ by 5.7", so how much credibility do average measurements have? If the figures for Japan could vary by almost 6", and the difference between the Netherlands and U.S. is only 3", how reliable is the assertion of a meaningful difference? Might it all be a sampling error? or even a metric-to-feet/inches conversion error? Huge conclusions should not flow from tiny differences that could be simple mistakes.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,571 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:05 AM

 
Drought and Fire, Floods and Drowning — Same Day. Again this week, the news is filled with reports of huge differences in water conditions in various parts of the Nation. Parts of Texas and Oklahoma got 18 inches of rain last nite alone, and the streets of a state capital, Oklahoma City, are flooded after 15 days of rain. More rain is on the way. Elsewhere, a 13-year-old boy was swept to his death in a swollen river. But while all that was happening, a forest fire was running wild in the Lake Tahoe area of California, pouring out smoke in such quantities that the health of people in a second state capital, Carson City, Nevada, was endangered. In like fashion, a few weeks ago central Florida was ablaze with long-running wildfires, while parts of the Mid-Atlantic States were flooded. Georgia farmers are being ruined by drought, and parts of the Southwest are experiencing what I recently heard termed a five-year drought. An MSNBC report Monday says that drought is presently affecting parts of 30 states, with "significant wildfire danger" in 19 states. A video that amplifies that report says:

"Basically, you're talking 50% of the United States is in some kind of a drought mode." ... In Georgia and northern Florida, the biggest fire in more than 100 years is still smoldering.

Heavy rains in Texas are not, the reporter says, an unalloyed blessing. Those rains produce growth of masses of grasses and other biomass, with the effect that:

When the hot, dry weather returns, there will be much more fuel to burn.

Every year we see the same absurdity: floods, often deadly, in one part of the country; drought, often with accompanying deadly fires, in another. Government does nothing to move water from where there is too much to where there is too little. Why is that?
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Isn't it obvious that we should have canals and high-capacity pipelines running every which way across the Nation to even the flow so that every part of the country has enuf water, but little more? Indeed, we should have irrigation works in place in every part of the Nation subject to drought. My area is called the Garden State. We could be a Garden Nation, with the large-scale equivalent of drip-hoses in the places that regularly become tinder-dry, as would prevent the most devastating wildfires. We need to remember that homes, trees, and the occasional firefiter, are not the only things destroyed by such fires. Uncounted animals are also killed. And, for the "global warming" crowd, wildfires send millions of tons of "greenhouse gases" into the air.
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Tho fire has always played a part in renewing forests, there is in this, as in everything else, a Golden Mean, between no fires and catastrophic fires.
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Droughts can be so severe, over such a wide area, that they constitute a danger to the entire Nation's prosperity (at the least). A webpage on a Federal Government website says that this country suffered a nearly nationwide, three-year drought in the 1950s, when our population was half what it is today. No one has done anything to insulate us from the consequences of sustained, widespread drought in the future.
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In 1997 I sent letters to three major newspapers in different parts of the Nation to advocate the creation of "an interstate highway system for water". None of them printed it. I later put that text (only about 630 words) onto the Expansionist Party website, but almost no one has troubled to read it. Far less than 1% of visitors to the XP home page have gone on to read that page.
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Creating such a massive and complicated system would almost surely lead to learning on a grand scale, and perhaps even to new technologies. For instance, we might learn how to use passive systems, such as capillarity, to raise water without human-supplied energy in places remote from power lines.
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Had we started on such a system ten years ago, beginning with watercourses from the wettest parts of the Nation, such as the inland areas regularly inundated by waters lifted from the Gulf of Mexico, out to the High Plains, Southeast, and Southwest, there might today be places other than streets for deluges like that underway in east-central Texas and Oklahoma, to go. And Georgia farmers might not be facing ruin.
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If we start an interstate highway system for water today, ten years from now we might find that not only are the rainiest parts of the Nation not submerged, but agriculture and forests in much of the rest of the Nation are in hugely better condition than they are today. For the "global warming" crowd, again: resurgent forests absorb enormous quantities of "greenhouse gases" and lock them up in biomass for decades or even centuries. For people concerned about deforestation in the Third World, the more wood that American forests can produce, the less predation the First World will make upon Third World forests.
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What else would be affected is impossible to predict. Consider the costs and effects of the actual (roadway) Interstate Highway System. Modern American life without that system is impossible to visualize.

The system is prominent in American daily life. The distribution of virtually all goods and services involves Interstate Highways at some point. Residents of American cities commonly use urban Interstates to travel to their places of work. The vast majority of long-distance travel, whether for vacation or business, uses the national road network; of these trips, about one-third (by the total number of miles driven in the country in 2003) utilize the Interstate system. * * *

Although construction on the Interstate Highway system continues, the removal of the last traffic signal on Interstate 90 in Wallace, Idaho, on September 15, 1991 is often cited as the completion of the Interstate System. The initial cost estimate for the system was $25 billion over twelve years; it ended up costing $114 billion and taking 35 years to complete.

Before the Interstate Highway System was built, few people thought we needed it. If we had been told it would cost $114 billion (tho not in 1956 dollars) and take 35 years to complete, we might not even have started it. But aren't we glad we built it, no matter what it cost and how long it took?
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We don't have to be passive 'grasshoppers', leaving ourselves exposed to risks from droughts and floods. We can be industrious 'ants', building a safety net against capricious — and destructive — Nature.
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P.S. Ann Coulter "needs killin'". She has moved far beyond the limits of acceptable political discourse. I have advocated that Bush and his ilk be tried and executed by tribunals over war crimes and crimes against humanity. Coulter, however, has said John Edwards should be murdered by terrorists. But she is much more sensibly to be regarded as a proper target of Moslem terrorists, since she has been a forthrite advocate of discrimination against Arabs at home and mass murder of Arabs abroad. Her continued existence is yet another proof that there is no God.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,568 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:45 PM

 
'Forever' Favored. When I went to the post office recently to mail something that weighed more than one ounce (I don't know what happened to my postal scale), I bought some stamps because I didn't have any 41-cent stamps and didn't want to have to append 2-cent stamps to the 39's still in my wallet. Tho I didn't ask for them, I got a packet of Liberty Bell stamps marked with the notation "FOREVER". Sure enuf, they are the new "forever stamps", which will be good no matter how long they are held, for being honored even past future price increases.
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Altho that sounds great on first hearing, think about it. Who is going to be able to expend a lot of money, and who will have the space to store large quantities of postage stamps? The poor, to whom pennies matter and who don't have computers at home via which to pay bills online? No. The middle class? They can afford to buy such stamps in quantity, but trivial price increases don't matter to them, so most people in the middle class won't bother to stock up on stamps. The cheap-ass rich, however, will love the "forever stamps". Their personal correspondence will forever be cheaper than that of the poor and middle class, and the businesses they own will use them for things like holiday cards for years after first issue. If holiday special issues are also made "forever", they will buy them in quantity too.
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For this ever to be fair, then, to the poor and middle class, the "forever stamps" should be restricted to only one or two designs, forever (there are to be at least two, one the Liberty Bell, the other the flag), so that people who receive mail with them after a price change will be able to appreciate the 'savvy' — or cheapness — of the sender. And holiday stamps must NEVER be issued as "forever" stamps, because mailing Christmas cards is the one time the rich would be more inclined to use stamps rather than postage meters, and they will trust that recipients of two cards a full year apart won't remember what the design of the stamp on last year's card was. So they could get away with being cheap, without being seen as cheap.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,566 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:25 PM

 
That's Telling Them! Condoleezza Rice, Bush's feckless female Secretary of State, had harsh words for the Sudanese Government over its making promises it doesn't keep as to ending the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. She showed barely controlled rage and threatened the bastards:

If you do not change your ways immediately, we will do absolutely nothing!

But not in those exact words.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,562 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:13 PM

 
Blaming the Victim, Zionist-Style. The Radical Zionists who refused to recognize the triumph of democratically elected members of Hamas to the parliament of Palestine managed to inflict a cutoff of all U.S. and European Union aid to the Palestinian Authority immediately after those elections. The result has been that that fatally weakened government fell to assault by Hamas, which was able to force it out of Gaza, as gave control of the entire Gaza Strip to, we are to believe, "extremists".
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Oh? They are extremists, are they? And what, exactly, are the U.S. Government and European Union, which cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority, and Israel, which impounded scores of millions of dollars in Palestinian revenue payments and refused to hand them over to the Palestinian government to which they were due? Who is to blame when a government starved of money with which to improve the lot of miserable, economically and politically oppressed people, and defend itself against armed thugs, is overthrown? The people who voted for change and didn't get it? The people who had no resources with which to fite the 'thugs'? Or the 'people' who did everything in their power to keep the Palestinian people miserable and thus force them to violent revolution?
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Let's be clear: George Bush, the European Union, and, of course, as always, the monsters who control "Israel", are wholly to blame for the takeover of Gaza by Hamas militants. Now, too late, the U.S. and EU are lifting their boycott of the Palestinian Authority, which has already lost Gaza, to prevent it from losing the West Bank too. What a bunch of morons. Will the Israeli government now also unhand the Palestinian tax revenues it has withheld? Will it pay interest? Don't bet on it.
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Israel actively connived in military actions against Hamas, and lost, just as it lost its war with Hezbollah last July and August! Two lost wars in one year! How are the mighty fallen (2 Samuel 1:27), indeed.
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Meanwhile, the enemies of Islam and truth (two separable matters, to be sure, but here united) are running off at the mouth with nonsense. Ralph Peters, the New York Post's resident bloodthirsty psychopath, whose solution to all things in the Middle East is to slaughter ever larger numbers of Moslems, ranted recently about the bankruptcy of Islamic civilization, as 'proved' by the collapse of Iraq and Palestine. Huh? The United States invaded Iraq and destroyed its government, but Islamic civilization 'collapsed' under its own weight? And foreign Jews, backed by outsiders with hundreds of billions of dollars, invaded Palestine, stole more than half of it outrite, then reduced the remainder to penury, but the "collapse" of Palestinian civilization is all the fault of the Palestinians? In what universe?
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Why not talk about the collapse of Anglo-Saxon civilization and ignore William the Conqueror? The comparison is apt, and hopeful, because out of the Norman Conquest came a new civilization, greater than the old. Its greatest feature, the magnificent "English" language, combined the richness of Rome with the directness of Germany and created a synthesis that is proving irresistible all around the world. Can we hope that from the trials of today, a new Middle Eastern civilization will emerge that will be more brilliant, adaptive, and constructive than any that that region has seen in a thousand years?
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Stranger things have happened. Like a ragtag bunch of loons from Central Europe persuading the greatest Empire in the history of the world to turn over part of the Arab homeland to Jews, as thus to produce unending war in a vital area of the planet; then persuading a country that originally opposed the creation of that homeland (precisely because it would produce endless war) becoming its greatest champion, and spending two trillion dollars to keep it going, even to the point of accepting thousands of deaths on its behalf. No one is keeping careful, public track of how many Americans overall have died for Israel, but one tally appears at the end of every entry to this blog. Add to that, other tallies: American soldiers killed in Afghanistan; American contract workers killed in Iraq; Americans killed in the Beirut barracks attack of 1983, the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S.S. Cole attack, and on, and on, all around the world. Plus, of course, a little thing known affectionately as "9/11".
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But no price is too high to pay for Israel, even the end of the world. In fact, a large portion of the Americans most stridently in favor of U.S. violent support of Israel (so-called "Christian Zionists") devoutly pray for the Armageddon they are sure our devotion to Israel will bring. Then whose civilization will have collapsed?
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Unfortunately for the "Last Days" loons, Israel is likely to produce — before it is destroyed by US, the United States, as Rome was finally forced to destroy Judea — only millions of deaths, not billions, as the 'Christian' Zionists want. Jesus will not return to rule for a thousand years no matter how many Moslems the Jews and their lackeys in the U.S. Government kill. We will just disgrace ourselves with a guilt that will crush our spirit and bring us terrible shame when we finally regain our senses from the madness into which we have plunged. But we got over the colonial-era Salem witch trials and smallpox-infected blankets for Indians, Andersonville, Wounded Knee, suppression of Philippine independence in 1898, inaction in the face of British and French maintenance of the blockade of defeated Germany after World War I, which starved hundreds of thousands, the Dresden bombing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai, the Highway of Death "turkey shoot", and many other disgraces to the honor of a people that likes to think itself honorable, no matter how many crimes it consents to have committed in its name. And we're not bothered in the slitest, so far, by the endless violence that U.S. destruction of Iraq's government has produced.
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Conscience is for sissies. We'll be fine.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,559 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:03 AM

 
Foreign Takeovers. Someone please explain to me why ABC's game show National Bingo Night is hosted by two foreigners, a Brit (Australian?) and an Indian. And why So You Think You Can Dance has a British host and British judge. And why Martin Bashir, a Brit of Pakistani ancestry, is one of three anchors on ABC News's late-nite show, Nightline. And why Howie Mandel, a Canadian, hosts NBC's Deal or No Deal. And why there are dozens of Canadians in major U.S. news media, from John Blackstone and Keith Morrison to Thalia Assuras and John Roberts. And why American Inventor has a British judge. And why America's Got Talent has TWO British judges (out of three). And why CNN's U.S. State Department Correspondent and co-host of Your World Today is an Indian from Kenya. And why one of the two reviewers on Reel Talk, a movie-reviewing program on WNBC (the New York flagship station of the NBC Television Network), is British. And why one of the judges on American Idol is British? And ... you get the picture. "American" television is filled to overflowing with foreigners taking very good jobs away from Americans. We can't even find jobs in our own country. Everything is being given away to foreigners. Everything.
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If we seek work at home, we face a severely shrinking job market because millions of jobs have been exported to Third World countries, and foreigners by the hundreds of thousands are brought in legally to take not just the jobs "Americans won't take" (twelve million illegals, and counting, are filling those) but the very, very best jobs in this country as well. Millions of illegal immigrants have been permitted in (de facto) to compete at jobs in hundreds of categories, lowering wage rates in industries like construction, as contractors who knowingly employ illegals who will work cheap underbid legitimate American businesses who hire only people legally entitled to be here — like people born here. We're told it is "impossible" to deport 12 million alien invaders. Let's just surrender to barbarian invasions. It didn't hurt Rome, did it? Oh, wait. Yes, it did.
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Everywhere you look, foreigner after foreigner after foreigner is taking jobs away from Americans. Craig Ferguson, a Scot (citizen of the UK), hosts the Late Late Show on CBS, and altho he keeps talking about becoming a U.S. citizen, he hasn't done so yet, after many years' residence.
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You listen to TV and hear British accents in dozens of commercials, from Victoria's Secret, to Wrigley's Orbit gum, to GEICO insurance (think about that: the (U.S. Federal) Government Employees Insurance Company's spokesman is an animated gecko (a tropical lizard) with, of all things, a British accent, as tho the gecko is native to the United Kingdom), to some new Johnson & Johnson lotion. A cartoon bee for Nasonex has a Spanish accent (voiced by Antonio Banderas, a foreigner). Some hair-care product has a woman with a stark Spanish accent as its spokesperson. I am so sick of British accents on American television I could spit, and Spanish accents aren't much better. How about American accents on American television? Is that too much to ask?
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Hundreds of CEO's of major "American" corporations are foreigners.
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American roles in major American films are taken by foreign actors and actresses, from Nicole Kidman playing a suburbanite in Bewitched to Heath Ledger playing a cowboy (an American icon!) in Brokeback Mountain. Americans, you see, aren't qualified to play Americans.
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Americans just can't get a break. Everywhere we look, we are being progressively beaten down in our own country by foreigners. And the media, now shot-thru with foreigners, won't object for us to demand change from a Congress that turns a blind eye to our concerns. Why would Members of Congress worry? Their jobs are secure. For now. But naturalized citizens can become Congressmen and Senators already, so native-born American Congressmen shouldn't feel too secure.
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Foreign-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, an Austrian, would like the Constitution changed so he can run for President. If we make that change, why not abolish the requirement that members of Congress be citizens at all?
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One of the two major parties, the Republicans, in the Nation's most populous state, California, has hired foreigners in key positions:

The California Republican Party has decided no American is qualified to take one of its most crucial positions — state deputy political director — and has hired a Canadian for the job through a coveted H-1B visa, a program favored by Silicon Valley tech firms that is under fire for displacing skilled American workers.

Christopher Matthews, 35, a Canadian citizen, has worked for the state GOP as a campaign consultant since 2004. But he recently was hired as full-time deputy political director, with responsibility for handling campaign operations and information technology for the country's largest state Republican Party operation, California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring confirmed in a telephone interview this week. * * *

Matthews was hired by Michael Kamburowski, an Australian citizen who was hired this year as the state GOP's chief operations officer. But neither new official has experience in managing a political campaign in the nation's most populous state — and as foreign citizens, neither is eligible to vote. * * *

Jon Fleischman, Southern California GOP vice chair, said he was not aware of the hiring of Matthews — but added that hirings are routinely made without consulting party officers. He said he doesn't consider it a problem to hire foreigners if they are the most qualified job applicants.

The Republicans, who pose as conservatives concerned about defending our borders, are hiring foreigners for top jobs within their own party, the party of the President! There are 300 million Americans, but not one of them (us) is qualified to serve as their deputy political director in California. Not one. We must be an extremely inferior bunch if to operate a major party in our own political system we have to hire people who were brought up in a different political system. Or is it just the Republicans who think us contemptibly inferior?
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Rioters against globalization have all too often pointed the finger at Americans, as tho we are out to take over the world. In reality, Americans are enormously adversely impacted by globalization, and the emerging ethos of the ruling rich that nationality doesn't matter. You go with whoever will work cheapest and be most slavishly obedient.
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To break down resistance to giving every job to whoever will work cheapest, the concepts of nationalism and nationality must be destroyed. So the tiny elite who control major corporations are doing everything they can to destroy our concept of self. They've gone very far in that direction, since no one seems to mind that TV shows on major networks with names like "National" this and "American" that are hosted and judged by foreigners! Yes, Americans need to be judged — and rejected — by foreigners, in our own country! We have no pride. Let foreigners ruin our lives by crushing our dreams of stardom. We'll just flee into fantasy and everything will be alrite.
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This country has always had an inferiority complex, from the days of the colonial predecessors of the United States, which felt their own products were crude as against British and French goods. Our art was primitive; our music, unsophisticated. "We're just a bunch of country bumpkins." Even after we started producing first-rate goods (and very early as regards things like furniture and technological devices), there was always the nagging thought that we just don't measure up to the Old World. Now we're the world's only superpower, but the people at the top of society still think we're a bunch of nouveau-riche nobodies who can be manipulated and used, milked for our consumer dollars and the outrageous interest we will pay without protest, and bypassed for cheaper workers in every industry. As long as we can fly the flag, sing "God Bless America", watch NASCAR, and whup furriners in distant wars, Americans won't lift a finger to defend the homefront from takeover by millions and millions of foreigners at both the highest and the lowest levels of society.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,547 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:38 PM

 
Widening the Majority. I sent, today, the following message to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, respectively:

Would an extra two Democratic votes in the Senate and five or six in the House be good to have? If so, why haven't you moved to make Puerto Rico (with the U.S. Virgin Islands) into a State?
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In the alternative, would saving $11 billion a year on the deficit be a good thing to do? If so, why haven't you told Puerto Rico that it must get into the Union or get out, and thereby cut itself off from U.S. Federal aid?
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There are 4 million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands who cannot vote for President or for representation in Congress. That is a scandal, an absolute outrage to the Constitution and indelible stain on our national honor and anticolonial heritage. We're the people who started the drive to end colonialism. Yet we have colonies! Inexcusable.
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It's time to move the question. Tell Puerto Rico that it must step UP to full equality, with first-class citizenship, by becoming a State, or to step OUT of the U.S. realm: to get the hell off the American dole, and "assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle" it. (Our Declaration of Independence)
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Don't ask Puerto Ricans for permission to introduce statehood legislation. Don't let them talk you into holding yet another pointless, nonbinding referendum. Admitting new States is wholly within the power of Congress, not anyone else. You don't have to ask anybody's permission. Puerto Rico can't make itself a State. Only Congress can create a new State, whether the President signs on or not — and there is no reason to think that President Bush, whose father publicly favored statehood decades ago, would veto Puerto Rico statehood over continued colonialism. Even if the President were to veto such a bill, surely Congress could override such a veto of the right of Americans to vote for President and representation in Congress!
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"New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union ... The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States" (U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 3).
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It is a crime against our history to hold territories as perpetual colonies. Puerto Rico has been a colony for 109 years, the Virgin Islands 90 years. That is much too long. It's time to move the question. Merge the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico — which is your right to do (U.S. Const., Art. IV); you don't have to ask anybody's permission — and create them into a new State of the Union, subject only to ratification by the electorate in a followup, binding plebiscite. And make rejection of statehood in that plebiscite an automatic, binding declaration of independence that severs the legal connection between the United States and those colonies, terminating all U.S. responsibility for the people of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and ending all U.S. aid given to them only by virtue of the present legal relationship between those islands and the Nation.
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Given such an ultimatum, the people of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, voting together as a single entity, will almost certainly step up to statehood. But if they don't, we will save $11 billion a year now thrown away on colonialism that robs the people of initiative and blackens our reputation in the eyes of the world, as imperialists who speak of freedom while holding 4 million people in colonial subjection.
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Force the issue. The time for waiting for the people of the islands to make up their minds is over. Statehood or independence: fish or cut bait.

I don't understand why Democrats haven't moved on this yet. They can end the stain upon our national honor of colonialism in the Caribbean, and increase their majority, making it more feasible to override a Presidential veto on at least those issues in which a few Republicans can also be won over.
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Speaking of a Presidential veto, I commend President Bush for vetoing the attempt to provide Federal funds — tax moneys taken by force from me and other people who value innocent human life — to kill babies and chop them up for parts in needless, immoral embryonic stem-cell research. There are things we are not entitled to do, even in the pursuit of knowledge. Murdering children is one of them. Scientists don't like to be told "No!", which is how we get things like the hydrogen bomb and over 21,000 nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles all over this needlessly endangered planet.
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The fact that one person has a medical problem does not justify killing somebody else to treat him. Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease is his problem, not that of a baby who has absolutely no connection to him. He should man-up and accept his fate with grace, until such time as some morally permissible technique, such as ADULT-stem-cell research, can fix it. He and others like him must not become medical vampires, killing others to stay alive. At end, everybody dies, and some of us get terrible diseases that make life hard. That's tuf. Get used to it. Be a man. Men protect babies. They do not kill them.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,545 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:18 PM

 
The Ultimate Power Grab. Michael Bloomberg, a Zionist and Jew who happens also to be a multibillionaire and Mayor of New York City, apparently wants to become President of the United States, completing the Jewish takeover of all the levers of power in the greatest power in the history of the world, and thus assuring that the United States will defend Israel at all costs, up to and including total annihilation of this country in a full-scale thermonuclear war for Zionism. If, by some inexplicable quirk of the electorate — or the magic of money — Bloomberg is elected, we can be reasonably certain the United States will (finally, in the view of Zionists) go to war against Iran, on top of our present wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and world Islam will have no alternative but to regard the United States as a permanent, poisonous, superviolent enemy of Islam. At that point, Moslems will have only one choice left: to surrender to the triumph of the Jews over Islam or go to full-scale war against the United States everywhere Moslems can reach. I can't imagine Islam surrendering to Radical Zionism and thus smiling upon the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Moslems by Radical Zionists based in Palestine and America. So, if Bloomberg is elected, we will see total war between militant Islam and the United States.
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What a wonderful thing Zionism is turning out to be: World War III, in which Christians and Moslems kill each other by the million for Jews. There may soon come a time when the 9/11 attacks are viewed as "the good old days".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,531 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:30 PM

 
No Riffraff, Thank You. The New York Post yesterday editorially reproached Congressman Charles Rangel for not securing Federal funding to subsidize Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg's "congestion pricing" scheme.

What's this? Congress might not be ready to guarantee some $500 million in funding for Mayor Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan?

At least one congressman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, seems to thinks so — and he's warned New York pols just that.

I was indignant, so sent the following email to Rep. Rangel. I had to sidestep a zip-code restriction on the feedback-form email system in place in Congress to do that, and mentioned my indignation at that too:

(I resent the attempt by your email system to prevent people outside your district from sending email. You are a member of a NATIONAL body, not a New York City or State body.)

Please do everything you can to stop the attempt by Mayor Bloomberg to turn over to the rich alone, the streets constructed and maintained by the people at very considerable cost and effort. The streets do not belong to the rich. They belong to everyone, and we should no more have to pay a fee to drive on the streets we paid for (including via Federal tax supports) than have to pay a fee to get a police officer to act or firefiters to put out a fire. The people have already paid for the right to use the streets: we own them, we built them (the rich didn't do any of the actual work of building or maintaining the streets), we repair them with our taxes (including sales taxes and parking garage taxes paid by outsiders). To charge the same fee for poor and middle class drivers as for the rich is grotesquely unfair, the old "The law forbids both rich and poor from sleeping under bridges" thing. "Congestion pricing" is stealing by the rich. It must be stopped, and everyone responsible for this attempt to clear the 'riffraff' from Manhattan and leave the Central Business District for the rich only should be condemned very publicly and very loud. Cordially, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Expansionist Party of the United States (originally formed in NYC), 295 Smith Street, Newark, NJ 07106, XPUS@aol.com

I attempted to send a similar message to Oregon Congressman DeFazio, to urge him to stick to his guns, but ran afoul of this "unacceptable zip code" thing. HOW DARE Congress tell citizens of the United States that they have no right to email any Member of Congress but the one elected from their district? How dare they? And Congress wonders why it has a lower favorable rating than even Dumbya! At least the White House permits anyone to email the President.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,525 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:58 PM

 
Mercy for Whom — The Guilty, or the Innocent? The United States has, for all practical purposes, legalized murder of men by women. All a woman has to do is claim that a man abused her, and she automatically gains the legal right to blast his brains out, hack him to death, or otherwise dispose of him. And it doesn't matter what the woman does after that. She can call the cops and brag about liberating herself from torment, or take the kids and run across several state lines. At end, any woman has the right to kill any man as long as she claims that he abused her.
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That is the message of the Tennessee murder of a PREACHER by his wife. She CLAIMED he abused her. She MURDERED him and RAN, with the children. She was caught. She was tried, and convicted. And then she was given PROBATION for murder.
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The jury that found her guilty of anything less than murder should be rounded up and beheaded, then chopped up for parts for people waiting for organ transplants. The judge who said that the time that murderess had already served in prison, a mere few months, was enuf punishment for the poor dear, should be wrapped in a noose and dropped thru a trap-door gallows from so high that his head rips off; and then his body should be chopped up for parts for decent people. The legislators of the State of Tennessee who wrote laws that permitted such an outrage against justice, and the Governor who signed them, should be rounded up and slaughtered, and their bodies chopped up for parts for decent people desperately waiting for organ donations.
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We now have a positive incentive to kill off the evil who fill this planet to overflowing with wickedness. We can now chop them up for parts for decent people. Seize them; tissue-type them; chop, rip, or slice off their evil, empty heads; and distribute various pieces of their bodies to save the lives and improve the quality of life of decent people who would never do the terrible things we have become inured to: the murders, the heartless predation, the monstrous inhumanity of the subhuman scum who fill the prisons and courtrooms of this infantile and craven Nation, which refuses to fite back with all the force needed to end the crimes against us, because it's "not nice" to kill criminals. Yes it is, and especially if we chop them up for parts.
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There are, at any given time, some 97,000 people in the United States alone waiting for organ transplants without which they will die. My friend Joe's father died while he was waiting for a heart transplant.

Experts suggest that each of us could save or help as many as 50 people by being an organ and tissue donor.

We have hundreds of thousands of 'people' in prisons all across the country for monstrous crimes they did, without question, commit.

There are more than 1.5 million inmates in the nation's state and federal prisons [for all offenses, trivial and horrendous], a number that is projected to grow to more than 1.7 million by the end of 2011, a 13 percent increase. The nation's population, by comparison, is projected to grow by 4.5 percent in that time.

States are projected to spend up to $27.5 billion on the new inmates, including $12.5 billion in construction costs, according to the study.

Cadavers don't need housing, only dismemberment for transplant into decent people of what is usable and cremation of what is not usable in transplantation. The ashes can be dumped in national or state forests, as fertilizer.

About 3,400 of these 1.5 million inmates are on death row. There are many, many more 'people' who doubtless committed crimes that, in a just society, would result in their execution but who, for whatever reason, were not condemned to die for their crimes. Sometimes, a jury of cowards just would not accept responsibility for condemning someone to death, even tho they knew that it was their legal and moral obligation to do that. Sometimes a prosecutor whose case was less than ironclad dared not even try to get a jury to convict on a capital charge, but sought a conviction only on a lesser charge, hoping a jury of useless cowards would nonetheless rise to the minimal courage to consign a clearly-guilty defendant to many years in prison — altho s/he actually deserved to die.
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For the moment (only), let's stick only with those already on death row. Let us also, for this purpose, eliminate, say, 10% of those already on death row out of concern that there might conceivably be some reasonable doubt of their utter guilt (even tho a jury did not find any reason to doubt their guilt). That would still leave 3,060 prisoners on death row who, without question, did commit the monstrous crimes for which society condemned them to death.
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3,060 prisoners times 50 people the organs from each criminal's body might keep alive or make life better = 153,000 people waiting for organ or tissue transplants who could be helped by killing the people already on death row and chopping them up for parts for decent people. That is a bedrock minimum for the number of people whom our criminals could help rather than harm.
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How do we derive a figure of 50 people who could be helped from the death of a single 'person' (criminal)? Think about it: 1 heart, 2 kidneys, 3 lobes of a liver = 6 decent people saved from tragic, premature death by the postmature death of a beast that looks human but isn't. Heart, kidney, and liver-lobe transplants are now fairly commonplace. Other organs, and tissues (an organ is a group of tissues that function together), can also be transplanted to good effect in many cases. For instance, each involuntary subhuman donor could contribute two human lungs, one each for two different people. (Of course, no smoker should receive a lung transplant. It has now been 44 years since the Surgeon General warned people that tobacco kills. No one who ignored that warning deserves a lung transplant. Let smokers die from their folly, and thus warn others away from such self-destructive behavior by putting them on notice that society won't lift a finger to save smokers from their own stupidity after they've been warned that smoking could kill them. Lung and other transplants should be given only to people whose grave health problems were beyond their control.
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Two corneas in each involuntary donor could give two people partial vision or one person full vision.
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What other organs might we transplant? Colons for people who lost their own colon to ulcerative colitis. Spleen? Gall bladder?
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And what of tissues less than organs? I had two knee/leg surgeries in which I received cadaverous tendon tissue. (My own tendons from kneecap to shin had burst.) There are many types of tendon and muscle tissue, skin, bone, marrow, and other body parts that could be transplanted into many recipients without causing rejection problems.
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Altho transplants of many kinds of tissues could help 50 people per cadaver, the number of people whose life could be saved is much smaller. Vital organs would then be the determinant: heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and not much else. Perhaps 8 lives per criminal chopped up for parts.
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We should be so eager to use cadavers in transplants of many kinds that criminals should be scared sh*tless that we are looking for an excuse to kill them and chop them up for parts. They should be afraid that we want them dead even if they didn't commit the particular crime of which they are accused, and suspect that we will gladly kill anyone even remotely credible as the guilty party, just so we can chop them up for parts. Criminals should be scared of US, not the other way around.
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What we must not do, however, is trivialize murder by giving probation to a woman who shot her husband dead, then ran across several state lines to elude arrest. We should kill the bitch, chop her up for parts, and be PROUD to be ABLE to execute her for her crime and turn her evil body into good parts. We dishonor humanity by being merciful to murderers. We honor innocent life by transforming evil 'people' into good parts.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,519 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Superheroics. The popular culture of the United States has become a culture of death — violent death — and of people rising above the troubles that threaten to destroy them, thru literally superhuman efforts — "superpowers" that no one really has. That insane culture of impossibility is matched by the insane propaganda of Al-Qaeda, in which people can triumph over adversity thru the superpower of triumph over death: they can blow themselves up to kill their enemies, and they won't themselves die but will instead be magically transported to a better place, Paradise, there to be rewarded with sumptuous living. Of course, they won't really be alive. They won't really have a body to enjoy the pleasures of the body. But the Al-Qaeda Technicolor version of Heaven is just great living on a higher plane.
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The American version of Al-Qaeda's fairy tale is that we can triumph over all our problems and irritations to enjoy a better life here, on this planet, by defying death, not embracing it. Our real lives may become hellish, but we can escape reality into a world of fantasy where nothing can hurt us and we are all-powerful against our enemies. When we emerge from the theater back into the lite, the problems are all still there, except we have a little less money to deal with them. So we go back into the theater or slip a videotape or DVD into a magic-machine and return to a world of fantasy that may be hyperviolent, but it is violence in which the good triumph, instead of the real world, where, it all too often appears, the bad always win.
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In the real United States, the rich are willfully impoverishing the rest, inflicting interest rates that people can't pay and late fees and overlimit fees and default interest rates that are even higher than the rates people couldn't pay in the first place. Millions of homes are being taken away by foreclosure. Tens of millions of jobs have been exported to the Third World. Millions upon millions of foreigners pour across our borders, to be hired by the rich to take jobs away from Americans and lower wages even for Americans who manage to find work. Benefits are being slashed. Over 40 million Americans have no health insurance, and the bulk of other American workers are being forced to pay ever higher portions of their medical expenses, which rise multiply the rate of inflation. Essentially every day's news brings reports of American youths being blown to pieces in a war sold to them by lies. Once the people realized that it wasn't mistakes that led us to that war but lies, they voted to oust the party of liars and end their war from lies, only to find that the other party refuses to end the war!
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The new majority won't end usury, lower interest rates, end evil fees, stop foreclosures, enact universal healthcare, or do anything else the people elected them to do, except raise the minimum wage. Good thing, too, because if American corporations keep exporting jobs and importing Third World workers, we'll all be making minimum wage — except the rich, of course. They will live in their mansions, and the rest of us will be their slaves. And there's nothing we can do about it.
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So let's go to the movies or turn on TV and live in a fantasyland where people can do things that people can't do, and that way we can have justice. If the Founding Fathers had had movies and TV, there would never have been an American Revolution.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,514 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:55 PM

 
Revolting. The mood of the American public "has turned decidedly grim, and downrite angry on some subjects", intoned Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News tonite. Added Tim Russert, "This is bleak. People think Washington is broken."
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Now, why would we think that? Maybe because the people elected the Democrats to end the war in Iraq but they voted to continue funding it? Maybe because the people are drowning in debt, usury, and foreclosure, but Congress sees no problem with our banking industry? Maybe because gas prices rise because oil companies willfully shut down refineries for the express purpose of raising prices at the pump, and Congress does nothing? Maybe because the people are outraged over illegal immigration but neither the Congress nor the President wants to deport the 12 million aliens who invaded our territory and now demand the 'right' to stay here? Maybe because everywhere we look we are assailed by thieves and con artists, in email scams and penis-enlargement scams advertised on television in full view of the FCC and FTC but nobody in government does anything to protect us? Maybe because Congress and the President do NOTHING we want them to do? And maybe because elections now mean nothing, because neither party will do the people's bidding? The major parties have us by the throat, and they will do whatever they want to do — which is usually what rich campaign contributors want them to do — and we have no choice but to choose Tweedledum or Tweedledee, both of whom are on the payroll of the rich.
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Alas, it's not just Washington that is broken. A disgraceful incident reported today occurred in an L.A. emergency room. A woman was dying on the floor of a wretchedly incompetent and badly administered hospital. No one was treating her. Her relatives called 911 to have her removed to a hospital that cared, but two 911 operators refused to do a thing, not even call the police to have a police officer order the staff at that hospital to act. The woman died. Both 911 operators need to be removed from their crucial job and sent to prison for a very long time as accessories before the fact, and the hospital staffers guilty of refusing to do anything for her, who just watched as she DIED, should be KILLED, beheaded, their bodies chopped up for decent people. There might even be people in that very hospital who need organ transplants from donors who match those staffers' tissue types. This incident goes far beyond the bounds of negligence or incompetence. It goes very deep into the territory of criminal behavior, properly punishable by death.
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Eskimo Savages. Why are Eskimos allowed to hunt whales? Ned Potter of ABC News — who reported that a bowhead whale recently killed by Eskimos had lodged under its skin a harpoon tip of a type not used for 100 years — neglected to mention why we are allowing Eskimos to kill whales. Are white Alaskans allowed to kill whales? If not, Eskimos should not be, either. Eskimos are not special. They are not better than white people, blacks, or Orientals, all of whom are forbidden to kill whales. Eskimos do not have rights other Americans do not have. If killing bowhead whales is illegal for non-Eskimos, it must be illegal for Eskimos. The Constitution mandates equal treatment under law. If society outlaws whaling, that law must apply to everyone equally. Arrest the Eskimo whalers and send them to prison. They killed a magnificent animal that apparently had lived over 100 years, but had to die for a bunch of savages? I don't think so. The Eskimos didn't produce that whale. They didn't breed it, feed it, protect it, or take care of it in any way. They had no right to kill it. There is no place on this planet for savages outside the law.
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Immigration Madness. In an editorial today, the New York Post says of an illegal Malian immigrant whose wife and four children perished in a Bronx fire:

Washington looked the other way at Soumare's status as an illegal alien — and even granted him special permission to bury his family in Mali and then return to America.

What?? He's an illegal alien who was allowed to LEAVE the country and then RETURN, even tho he had no right to be here in the first place? And Dumbya wonders why people are furious with him over immigration.
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No, Mr. Bush, if someone is not supposed to be here in the first place and goes back to his country of origin, he should NOT be allowed to come back into the U.S. as tho he had the right to be here before the trip. What, exactly, does that guy have to connect him with the Bronx, now that his family is dead and in Mali? Oh, that's right: a lawsuit! He wants to sue various entities, including governmental entities in New York City, for $100 million! So not only is he here illegally, but he wants to use the LEGAL system to extort $100 million from the taxpayers of a country that took mercy on him? Deport the bastard! And fire whoever granted him "special permission" to return to the United States after he went back to Mali.
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I find it interestingly odd that the Post did not call for that scumbag's deportation. Of what conceivable use are Radical Rightwingers if they are soft on illegal aliens?
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Speaking of odd behavior by the New York Post, another editorial today says that in not insisting on renominating antihomosexual bigot Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Bush is encouraging terrorism!

Democrats ... enjoyed the administration's stand-down on Pace. They understand all too well that the president has demonstrated weakness before the world.

And don't think for a moment that al Qaeda, and the mad mullahs of Tehran, didn't notice.

The security implications of abandoning Pace should be obvious: It's just another sign that while America can talk the talk on terror, it's somewhat less willing to walk the walk.

Oh? So the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs will not fite the 'war on terror'? You'd think he would, no matter who he might be. Rightwingers is crazy
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The Post editorial is, aptly, called "The Pace Disgrace". Unfortunately, the disgrace is not that Pace was effectively dismissed but that he got off litely. The Post says:

Pace deserved better.

He deserved better, alrite. He deserved a beating by a mob of angry gay men.
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The Post was in rare form today. Yet another opinion piece ("Help All Students") infuriated me, so I sent the following brief emailed letter to the editor:

The heading of that poisonous piece should have been "Help the Rich Destroy the Public Schools". People who send their children to private schools, be they religiously affiliated or not, make a conscious choice to remove their children from the democratizing institution that more than any other has made this one country out of many groups. They pay a price for that, in tuition, uniforms, etc. That is their choice. They also drain the public schools of hard-working students who might influence their peers, and as well drain away attention to public-education issues from middle- and upper-class families who need not care what happens to kids in public schools as long as their own kids can escape. I would much rather we abolish all private schools than that we subsidize the subversion of public education by encouraging parents to remove their children from public schools, and cheat ourselves of their taxes, so the poor and middle-class who do not subvert public education have to pay higher taxes to make up the shortfall! Close all Catholic schools, prep schools, yeshivas, and other institutions that remove children from the public schools. The 'overburdened' parents now 'forced' to shoulder the costs of private and religiously affiliated schools would then be freed from their 'burden'! And that's the only way they are entitled to be freed from that burden.

Compulsory Government Fees Aren't Taxes? The Post speaks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to taxation. It bitches and moans endlessly about the tax burden in New York State and especially New York City, but smiles upon a proposed congestion 'fee' to be charged on vehicles brought into Manhattan's Central Business District. That is a tax by any other name, a tax that specially targets the poor. But the Post is all for it, because it would benefit the rich. I have a better idea: let's charge the rich a fee for the air they breathe and thus 'contaminate' with carbon-dioxide thru exhalation. They can afford it. And if they don't pay that fee, let us end that contamination. Beheading and subsequent organ harvesting would be nice.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,513 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:22 PM

 
Different Perspectives. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is out on his ass, and two television worlds, news and entertainment, had two different reactions.
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The news commentators said not one word about Pace's antihomosexual public pronouncement of three months ago, but ascribed his firing (or failure to be renominated, however you want to put it) as being due solely to the failure of the Iraq policy he oversaw.
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Jay Leno, however, pointed out that Pace had made a very public stand against homosexuality as immoral. Mind you, a professional KILLER dared to describe homosexuality as immoral. "Make war, not love" is Pace's stance, whether he ever put it that way or not. Wikipedia's article on Pace quotes him thus:

In a March 12, 2007 discussion with editors of the Chicago Tribune, Gen. Pace said, "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals [how about among 6 or 7?] are immoral and that [the U.S. military] should not condone immoral acts ... I do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is okay to be immoral in any way ... As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy."

What an interesting perspective: mass murder good, sex bad.
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Why the sharp difference of perceptions between news commentators, not one of whom I saw mention Pace's antigay remarks, and entertainment commentators?
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The same week (day?), a star of ABC's medical drama Grey's Anatomy, Isaiah Washington, received the same news: his contract will not be renewed. Isaiah — I was going to abbreviate his name to just "Washington", but I do not wish to confuse the insignificant actor with the great man of U.S. history, so go with his first name; at least it's spelled right, unlike former basketball player Isiah Thomas's — Isaiah (W.) didn't take it well. Good. He tried to make amends, but everyone knew he was insincere and was just trying to save his job. Now he's out on his ass, just like the other antigay public figure. Good.
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It's all too rare that I see any good news, and regular readers of this blog will see my reactions to a lot of bad things that happen all around us. This is a nice change of pace — oops: Pace.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,512 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Good Riddance to The Sopranos. HBO's paean to the Mafia ends later tonite. Good. The Sopranos is hideously evil trash, every episode of which should be destroyed — including the one in which two of my friends appear as extras. Anyone who willfully tries to preserve so much as one episode should be "whacked" and chopped up for parts for decent people. That anyone should praise that monstrous series shows the utter evil into which too much of this country has descended. Since when is murder-as-entertainment praiseworthy? On what planet?
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I am appalled and indignant that a reporter (reportress, actually) on News 12 New Jersey dared to say today that New Jersey was proud of that evil garbage and The Sopranos was very good for New Jersey. Oh, yeah, preserving the stereotype of New Jersey as crime country is good for us! Filming in NJ brought in $60 million, so that's good, right? Oh? What if Murder, Inc. were a New Jersey-registered corporation paying state taxes and good wages to hitmen? Would that be good for New Jersey too? What is wrong with people?
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Everyone responsible for The Sopranos should be flogged and banished from media for life. Indeed, they should be banished from society for life, each of them sent into solitary exile in the Arctic. The United States is far and away the most violent and crimeridden nation of the industralized world, and a large part of that is because violent crime has been normalized by a popular culture dominated by subhuman, antihuman scum. If we can't just slit their throats, chop up their bodies for parts for decent people, and burn what we can't use (then use the ashes as fertilizer in a protected forest), we can at least condemn all such vile outputs as the loathsome and morally indefensible Sopranos.
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HBO could partially redeem itself by having the series end with the arrest of every member of the mob 'family', and their conviction and sentencing to death — or, better, by staging a joint FBI-New Jersey State Police raid that kills every last mobster in a firefite in which the worst injury a law-enforcement officer suffers is a non-life-threatening wound to a shoulder or leg. That's unlikely, tho, isn't it? Too bad. I might almost tune in if I could watch that. Nah, I'd have to subscribe to HBO, and I'm not about to do that.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,508 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:07 PM

 
Sauce for the Goose. The Bush Administration is feigning huge indignation that some Iranians, with or without government sanction, are sending weapons to Taliban fiters in Afghanistan. Hm. It's OK for the United States, whose nearest shore is over 7,000 miles away, to intervene in Afghanistan, but it's not OK for Iran, right nextdoor, to intervene in Afghanistan. Why is that? If Iran wanted to help DEFEAT the Taliban, would it be OK for Iran to send weapons and ammo into that same country?
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We need to stop pretending that there is only one way to view things, and stop presenting ourselves as indisputably in the right just because it's us doing something, but others doing exactly the same kind of thing, from the other side, are guilty of terrible crimes. As far as the Taliban and many people in Iran regard things, they are the ones 'with God on their side'.
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The U.S. has failed to make the case not only that the Taliban supported Al-Qaida but also that it violated fundamental human rights, as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and that is why the civilized world is intervening to prevent the Taliban from regaining power. How can we make that case when we ignore grievous offenses to the Universal Declaration as a matter of course? Malaysia's highest civil court recently found that a woman who wanted to convert to Christianity had no right to do that without permission from an Islamic court, where:

she could face prosecution for apostasy, which is a crime punishable by fines, jail sentences, caning, or time in "rehabilitation" centers in Malaysia.

Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. has had some 23,000 soldiers for years and on which we have spent $100 billion, and counting, the government the U.S. installed permits the execution of Moslem converts to Christianity! Altho one person seized for that cause was permitted to escape to Italy, the laws against conversion are still in place, and the United States is spending billions of dollars a year and the Western world is endangering the lives of tens of thousands of Western soldiers to keep in power a government that permits the execution of Afghans who convert to the religion of the West. That is insane.
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Afghanistan signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 of that Declaration says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

The Universal Declaration may not be legally binding on nonsignatories, but the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is. It contains similar language, also at Article 18:

Article 18

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

The United States cannot permit Afghanistan, Malaysia, or any other country to violate the right of people freely to choose their own religion, and change that choice at any time. No one should have to apply to a court for permission to change or abandon his religion. If the U.S.-installed government of Afghanistan will not abide by this basic obligation under international law, then the U.S., which has the power to do so, should forcibly remove the current government and institute one that will live up to Afghanistan's legal obligations as to this fundamental human right.
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Until the U.S. demands that Afghanistan obey international law on freedom of conscience, it is in no position to complain that Iran, which acts on its religious and political principles, should keep its nose out of its neighbor's affairs. Afghanistan is Iran's neighbor, and what happens there is important to Iran. We don't have to bolster a hideous Afghan government just to keep it from harboring terrorists. We can perfectly well perform surgical strikes and shock-and-awe campaigns against training camps without spending tens of billions of dollars and putting tens of thousands of Westerners in danger to defend a government that is as contemptuous of freedom of conscience as the Taliban ever was.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,500 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
CNN and the Pope on Callousness toward the Starving. I was outraged to see on CNN Headline News today a story about a "custard fight". I sent the following message via feedback form:

What is wrong with you people? Why would you show, and thus condone, a food fite in a world of starvation? Does it mean absolutely nothing to you that custard is food, and a bedrock minimum of 16,000 people a day die of starvation? Would the slimeballs who participated in the left-handed custard fite you approvingly made lite of have done so in front of starving children in Darfur? If not, they should not have done it at all. And CNN should not condone such outrages. No food fite, no eating contest should EVER be covered and thus condoned by any news organization until starvation has ENDED everywhere on this planet.

I decided that the heavy hitters among the world's moral leaders must condemn food fites and eating contests, so found an email address for the heaviest-hitter of all, the Pope (benedictxvi@vatican.va), and sent this message:

[Subject Line:] Gluttony and Deliberate Waste of Food in Rich Countries

With the onset of warm weather in northern countries, many places hold "eating contests" of various kinds, which glorify the sin of gluttony in callous disregard of widespread starvation on this planet. Other places stage "food fights", in which people deliberately destroy food by throwing it at each other. The Church must denounce all such obscenities and demand they end, and urge that the money and effort now misused on such things be redirected to alleviating starvation instead.
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The Papacy should denounce all such obscenities, but should direct special attention to the most widely publicized such event, the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest to be held in New York City on July 4th. (http://www.nathansfamous.com/nathans/contest/) By condemning that particular event well in advance, the Papacy might actually end it, and that would make a very big impression on sponsors of other such obscenities.
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Please use all your powers of persuasion and publicity to end eating contests and food fights everywhere on this starving planet. If we cannot end starvation, we can at least not mock the starving.

I have no way of knowing if that will be seen by anyone with influence on the behavior of the Pope. All I can do is try.
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Correcting the Record. I heard someone on TV talking about "homegrown terrorists", in reference to the plots against Fort Dix and JFK. I just checked. Not one of the people charged was born in the United States. They were all — every last one of them — born abroad. There are over 6 million American Moslems, most born here. Not one U.S.-born Moslem has, as yet, been involved in a terror plot. Not one. We should expect that sooner or later one or more native-born U.S. citizens (Moslem or otherwise) will be so alienated as to become involved in a plot against his or her neighbors. But it hasn't happened yet, so let's have no guilt-mongering, wailing, and g-nashing of teeth about "homegrown terrorists".
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,495 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:10 PM

 
Grim Assignment for Graphic Artists. We are just over one month from the evil glorification of gluttony known as Nathan's hotdog-eating contest. Let's try to head this off and end that grotesque event once and for all.
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A quick survey of information available on the Internet shows that a minimum of 850 million people — 2.8 times as many as the entire population of the United States — are so severely malnourished that their basic health is undercut and they cannot sustain a productive working life. Estimates vary as to how many people die from starvation/chronic malnutrition, but 16,000 a day, mostly children, seems the low end of most approximations. 16,000 a day x 365 days = 5,840,000 people (again, mostly children) who die from starvation each year. Other estimates put the annual toll closer to 9 million, even 15 million. The bulk of those deaths occur in backward nations (the supposedly "developing world" — which never develops, in part because people are too weak from hunger to pull themselves out of poverty), where statistics-gathering is not a high priority for overwhelmed governments.
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In the United States, evil slobs promote conspicuous displays of gluttony and waste of food, when millions of people around this planet are dying from want of food. That is inexcusable. The monstrousness of that evil must be brought home to people. Graphic artists can do something toward that end.
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Thus do I propose a full-scale assault on all eating contests, starting with Nathan's, the most notorious.

In 2006, 30,000 fans crowded the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues in Coney Island to witness the match-up between Takeru Kobayashi of Japan and Joey Chestnut of California. An additional 1.5 million households tuned in to the contest’s live broadcast on ESPN. Chestnut ate an astounding 52 Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Buns in the 12-minute contest, nearly dethroning Kobayashi who ate 53.75 hot dogs and buns and secured his sixth straight title. * * *

I propose that graphic artists create posters, for hardcopy and Internet, in which 53 hotdog buns hold one starving child each, under this statistic, taken from the Nathan's website:

In 2006, the winner of the Nathan's Famous July Fourth International Hot Dog Eating Contest ate 53.75 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes.

The children's images should be authentic, at least as regards a different face in every bun, even if the body, stretched out within the bun, might have to be stylized. Take a few pix of the standing-starving and use those, in slite variations, to show the bodies laid out in the buns, one starving child per bun.
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Once such a poster is created, it can be distributed via the Internet, whereby people who want to use it would be able to do so easily, as to post it to a physical or virtual bulletin board, or to make it an enclosure to an indignant letter or an illustration within an outraged email, as to Nathan's (see address below), or the President, or members of Congress, or a local religious leader, or the Pope — or whoever.
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A way should be devised on the website (which could be hosted by some anti-hunger organization, or as a free website on, for instance, Yahoo GeoCities with the cooperation of that host in extending as much free bandwidth as might be necessary) whereby people who want a poster-size version to display at a demonstration could print it in sections or take it to a Kinko's to print at poster size. Then they'd be ready to make their presence known at every event leading up to the July 4th obscenity.

The 2007 Nathan’s Famous worldwide hot dog-eating circuit begins on March 24th in Sunrise, Florida [and continues thru] June with over a dozen qualifying contests ... The winner of each qualifying round will receive the right to compete in the Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest which, according to archives, has occurred each July 4th in Coney Island, NY since 1916. * * *

[Qualifying events will be held:]
June 9
Charlotte, NC

June 16
Mall Of America,
Bloomington, MN

June 16
MacArthur Center Mall
Norfolk, VA

June 22
Molly Pitcher Travel Plaza
Cranbury, NJ

June 23
Zoo Atlanta
Atlanta, GA

June 23
Cinemark Theaters - Century 20
Daly City, CA

June 27
Civil Service
South Street Seaport, NY

June 28
QVC, West Chester, PA

Every eating contest, but specifically every Nathan's qualifying event and the final spectacular, should be mobbed by demonstrators objecting to gluttony in a world of starvation. The reporters and cameras of media covering such events should find themselves surrounded by a sea of protestors holding aloft signs bearing the horrifying statistics about world hunger (from, for instance, the World Food Programme, Bread for the World, or The Hunger Site, one statistic per poster.
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If any is available, a billboard near each competition's site should be taken, to show the starving-children-as-hotdogs poster very large, or something similar, like starving children on the right and Nathan's slobs on the left, split-screen style.
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Nathan's corporate headquarters (Nathan's Famous Executive Offices, 1400 Old Country Road, Westbury, NY 11590; Phone: 516-338-8500, Fax: 516-338-7220; email, with a poster or without, should go to cs@nathansfamous.com) should be picketed by protestors for at least two full weeks before its contest in obscenity.
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New York is the news capital of the United States, so protests at a New York corporation's headquarters 28 miles from Rockefeller Center, and at a contest site 18 miles from Midtown, within New York's city limits, would have a really good chance to generate a lot of coverage.
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Protests outside all Nathan's stores, everywhere, and those of its subsidiaries Kenny Rogers Roasters and Miami Subs, might also garner adverse publicity for the slobs.
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Altho targeting Nathan's would be the single best thing we could do to draw attention to the obscenity of eating contests in a world of starvation, we should not give other eating contests, nor "food fites" in media — destroying perfectly good food as entertainment! — a free ride. We should encourage condemnation of such events by local newspapers, local and national politicians, and religious leaders of every type anywhere near such an event. Given that Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, it should be easy to get a lot of churches to sign on to a campaign to exterminate eating contests everywhere.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,495 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:07 AM

 
Spelling Madness; Sexual Madness; "Click It or Ticket"; Preserving Marriage.

(1) Spelling Madness. The annual Scripps "National" Spelling Bee — Why are Canadians allowed into our "national" spelling bee? Let them in when they enter the Union, not before. — wrapped up last nite with a live telecast on ABC Television. The winner got prizes worth a total of $42,500. For spelling. Why is the spelling of English so difficult that kids can win huge prizes for doing it rite?
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The purpose of an alphabet is to convey speech across time and distance. That is all. It is speech that carries the meaning. To get to the underlying meaning, we convert visual symbols back into speech. But you can't do that in English without making innumerable adjustments, adjustments that take a very long time to learn and to make each time we encounter unfamiliar words. Even the best-educated reader of English can be stumped by unfamiliar words spelled in unexpected ways. On seeing them, many people can guess their sound, not so much from their spelling as from context: chamomile, chamois, ptarmigan (káa.ma.meel, sháa.me, tór.mi.gan). But some are opaque and unguessable, so have to be learned in their utterly arbitrary form: knight, phthisis, phthisic, mnemonic, pneumonia, thyme (niet, tthíe.sis, tíz.ik, nee.món.ik, noo.móen.ya, tiem). And some are perceived one way by some people and other ways by others, so we end up with multiple pronunciations of words learned largely from reading: kiln, naphtha, diphthong, nausea, atoll (kiln or kil, náaf.ttha or náap.ttha, díf.tthong or díp.tthong, náu.zee.ya or náu.zha, áa.taul or áa.tol or áa.toel or áe.taul or áe.tol or a.tául or a.tól or a.tóel — that's right, eight pronunciations for a five-letter word. Makes a lot of sense, right? Oh, no, wait. It doesn't make any sense at all.
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There are different ways to spell the same sound, so you have to learn distinctions in writing that don't exist in speech: ate-eight, to-too-two, here-hear, there-their-they're, I-eye-aye, nay-neigh-née-né! On hearing an unfamiliar word, you have to guess how to spell it. And you can't even look it up to find out what it means unless you can spell it!
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There are different ways to pronounce the same letter or letter combination: get-gesture-campaign, church-chemistry-champagne, ice-crevice, ate-incarnate, do (musical tone)-do, cove-move, mishmash-misheard, hear-heard-heart (get - jés.cher - kaam.páen, cherch - kém.is.tre - shaam.páen, ies - krév.is, aet - in.kór.nat, do - du, koev - muev, mísh.maash - mis.hérd, heer - herd - hort).
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Does it have an F or PH? EE or EA or EI or IE or EY or Y? If you hear náap.ttha, how are you to know there's an H after the P? If you hear nies, how are you to know (no?) it's spelled "gneiss"?
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Small wonder that, despite universal education, we have a high rate of functional illiteracy in English-speaking countries as against countries whose languages, like Spanish, have phonetic spelling systems.
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Every year English takes in more words from more languages, respelling almost none of them. And so we get more words with multiple pronunciations: jalapeño (hòl.a.páen.yo, hòl.a.péen.yo), mantra (máan.tra, món.tra, mún.tra). New scientific names are invented, using nonphonetic spellings from Greek (-photo, syn-), or Latinized distortions of familiar words or names (rafflesia, from a Mr. Raffles but pronounced ra.flée.zha, raa.flée.zha, or either of those beginnings with -zhee.a or -zee.a at the end). New words are coined, using old forms in unpredictable ways: humongous, which its coiner may have intended to be pronounced hyue.múng.gas, or even just hyue.múng.as, with no hard-G, by comparison to "among" (a.múng) but which is read by some people as hyue.móng.gas. Names for new devices or products are given arbitrary and unusual spellings to make them stand out: Wii (pronounced simply we), Skyy (skie) vodka. Specialists may use different pronunciations than the general public does: Celtic (kél.tik rather than sél.tik), fungi (fúng.gi rather than fún.ji). Personal names pronounced in unexpected ways become commonplace: Pilates is pronounced not like the familiar name (Pontius) Pilate. No, that would be too easy. It's pi.lót.eez. Ancient names from foreign languages are taken in, in an unreasonable form: Chaldea, even Chaldaea (both pronounced kaal.dée.ya), even tho the CH represents not the English CH-sound but a simple K-sound, and even tho that is not the way it was spelled in its original country, because the original country didn't use the Roman alphabet!
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So, instead of getting better over time, the spelling of English gets ever worse, and we have to direct ever larger portions of the time — and budget — given over to education, to learning simply to cope with a preposterous orthography.
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Small wonder, too, that the educational Establishment does not want spelling simplified or phoneticized, which is easy to do. If it took kids only six months to learn to read and spell every single word in the entire English language, we wouldn't need nearly so many teachers of reading. So, anytime you hear people defend the current, insane spelling of English — which cannot properly be called a "system" — know that they are defending the indefensible, perhaps from a vested economic interest.
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Oddly, one industry that would profit hugely from radical phoneticization of English, publishing, does nothing to promote spelling reform. It could sell hundreds of millions of books in new editions of old works — and not just in English-speaking countries but also in countries where large populations want to learn English — but its executives have apparently bought into the specious arguments against spelling reform.
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How much worse must things get before we finally say "Eenuf iz eenuf!" and demand drastic change? Or will we consent to have spelling become worse and worse — and worse — in perpetuity?
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That people in English-speaking countries might passively and resignedly accept endless worsening of written English does not mean that new learners in other countries will accept such madness. Perhaps China's government will adopt phonetic English (as it has romanized the writing of Chinese, in the pinyin system) and the authoritarian Communist government of the world's most populous country — comprising more than one in six people on the planet — will lead the rest of the world to phonetic English, simply riding roughshod over the defenders of spelling madness in the old English-speaking countries. After all, China's writing system is so bad that the Communists finally made a radical break from the past and started to move Chinese society in the direction of an alphabet. They did so because they appreciated the eminent good sense of showing speech clearly with a small number of characters, the letters of the Roman alphabet. It must have astonished them, when they looked at English, to see how we have thwarted the very purpose of an alphabet by turning groups of letters into ideograms almost as cumbersome and unreasonable as Chinese characters. "knight" is not really an alphabetical spelling but a word-picture that employs letters rather than brushstrokes.
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if the Communist government of China broke the back of resistance to reforming the spelling of English? That wouldn't justify the multitudinous crimes of that government, but it would mean that the suffering of the people of China under Communism might actually bring some benefit to them and the world more generally, as China leads the way to spelling English rationally. Stranger things have happened. Not many, perhaps, but some. This next item speaks to one such stranger thing.
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(2) Sexual Madness. I was irritated to find on AOL's welcome screen for people from North Jersey yesterday a link to "JerseyPride.org" — not to be confused with JerseyPride.COM, a website that promotes respect for New Jersey. JerseyPride.ORG turns out not to have anything to do with pride in New Jersey but is instead an insane organization for "the LGBTI community". "I"? What on Earth is the "I" for? Don't tell me "Intersex". Yup: "Intersexed". Their website is headed "Jersey Pride, Inc. producer of New Jersey's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Intersexed Pride parades." Unbelievable.
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There is no such thing as an "LGBTI community" any more than there is a single genius-retardate, evangelical-atheist, or any other single community drawn from mutually incompatible groups.
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As I note in the profile on the top right of this blog, I am the man who in 1970 offered the term "Gay Pride" as it is now used. June has in recent years been designated "Gay Pride Month" — or, in some antigay circles, "Gay and Lesbian Pride Month", since gay men are never entitled to anything to themselves. So this first day of June is an appropriate time to address the madness that has taken over and practically destroyed the gay-rights movement.
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I am appalled at what has happened. The Gay Movement, which is about a lot more than political progress, was always weakened by inclusion of outsiders and enemies, and has now been completely taken over by anti-gay, and especially anti-male, lunatics. It was bad enuf that from early on, the Movement in this country was shot-thru with lesbians, with whom gay men have absolutely nothing, intrinsic, in common; only outside disapproval, an extrinsic and largely extraneous matter in the lives of gay men once they have fought their way out of the closet.
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Hell, gay men and lesbian women disapprove of each other fully as much as straight society disapproves of either!
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There were even occasional heterosexual intruders, such as the odious Madolin Cervantes of the early New York Mattachine Society. Men just coming to terms with their attraction to men would go to a meeting of what they thought was an organization for gay men, and who should be at the podium but a heterosexual woman! Many of them were hugely embarrassed and offended, and never returned.
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Over the decades, various loons expanded, diluted, and self-confuted the Movement by incorporating "bisexuals" — that is, confused people who so hate themselves and everyone else that they can never commit to anyone, of either gender; transvestites (called also "transgendered people") — utterly insane, self-despising losers who want the world to accept their astoundingly mad delusion that a person could be born "the wrong gender", that a man could be "a woman trapped in the body of a man", and vice-versa; and then, in some formulations, "Queers" (to form a presumably single, unified but actually nonexistent "LGBTQ" community). Never mind that "Queer" is the exact equivalent of "Nigger". In the case of "Jersey Pride" (Pride? It is to laff!), they decided to include the "Intersexed", people who are neither here nor there. Never mind that there are very few genetic intersexes (Wikipedia says the best approximation is 0.018% of the general population, or about 1,584 people, of all ages, in New Jersey), and some of those that do exist are sterile and retarded, because distinct gender is fundamental to human functioning.
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So gay men went from being linguistically only half of their own movement, and second at that (it's almost always "lesbian and gay"; men are second, forced to sit in the back of the bus in their own movement), to 1/5 of their own movement. They are to be lumped in with, and their interests subordinated to those of, people with whom they share nothing.
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What happens when an organization incorporates not just extraneous causes but mutually antagonistic groups and purposes into itself? It destroys itself, that's what. In the quest for larger numbers of participants in events, the Gay Movement has destroyed itself. It is now an Everybody Movement, which is of course also a Nobody Movement.
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Why stop at Intersexes — that immense 0.018% (eighteen thousandths of one percent) of the population? Why not incorporate every conceivable "sexual minority": pedophiles (LGBTQIP), asexuals (LGBTQIPA), antisexuals (LGBTQIPAA), castrati and eunuchs (LGBTQIPAACE)? If you really want to grab for numbers, you obviously have to incorporate heterosexuals (LGBTQIPAACEH)! Indeed, since there are more heterosexuals than all the others combined, you'd have to put them first in the list (HLGBTQIPAACE). How about sex addicts (HLGBTQIPAACESA)? Sado-masochists (HLGBTQIPAACESASM)? Bestialists (HLGBTQIPAACESASMB)? Fist-f*kers (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFF)? Foot-fetishists (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFF)? Rapists ((HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFR)? And on, and on thru all conceivable variations and distortions of the sexual impulse.
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Heck, why stop at sexual groups? If you really want to widen your potential membership base, why not bring in more groups now on the outside of society? Alcoholics (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFA)? Drug-users (for simplicity, we won't break out such people by type of drug used, be it heroin, cocaine, meth, marijuana, OxyContin, etc.) (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFADU)? Shoplifters and kleptomaniacs (HLGBTQIPAACESASMBFFFFADUSK)? And on and on thru all the various groups of the demi-monde. Wouldn't that make for a parade!
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What an interesting concept: in striving for a larger membership and thus more political clout, expand beyond all reason and destroy internal cohesion. What a great idea! Let's extend this to its 'logical' conclusion. How about increasing numbers for each group by merging the NAACP and Ku Klux Klan: NAAKKKCP. Merge Mensa and the Association for Retarded Citizens (MARC). How about a single political party for the Republican, Democratic, Green, Socialist Labor, Socialist Worker, and Communist Parties, plus independents (with independents placed first, of course): the IRDGSLSWCP?
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How about merging Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Mormonism, Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Unitarianism, atheism, and agnosticism into a single religion/nonreligion/antireligion, the Universal Communion of Believers and Nonbelievers (UCBNB)? It could hold services in Pig Latin.
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Small sports concerned about their lack of enthusiasts could join with other sports organizations to increase their visibility. Instead of an NHL for hockey, USSF for soccer, MISL for indoor soccer, AFL for arena football, USL for lacrosse, etc., they could all merge with each other and with the (outdoor) NFL, Major League Baseball, and NBA to create one big, happy sports family: the NHSAFLOFBBA.
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Snap out of it! Organizations that dilute themselves to increase numbers at the expense of internal cohesion are doomed to failure, and deserve to fail. Thus it is that 55 years of gay activism in the U.S. have produced legal same-sex marriage in one state of fifty. One.
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The solution to small impact of separate organizations is not merger but coalition. Separate organizations retain their separate memberships but form ad-hoc alliances for specific purposes, and only for specific purposes. In every other area they retain full independence and are not bound to any other group's stances or purposes they do not share. That way they retain their internal cohesion but still get to affect public perceptions and politics.
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But be very careful what coalitions you join, and who else is part of those coalitions. Gay organizations should be particularly concerned about being tainted by groups like NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and Eulenspiegel (sado-masochists). Alliance with such groups not only reinforces perceptions by the wider society that gay men are child molesters and self-hating, violent degenerates but also tells gay men that they should consider child-molestation and self-despising sexual violence as normal.
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Gay organizations need desperately to recognize the confused state that almost all gay boys start in, and steer them to wholesome and self-reinforcing, not self-subverting, attitudes and behaviors. Gay boys cannot learn to be gay men by seeing themselves as lesbians, "bisexuals", "transsexuals", "queers" (not normal, but queer, bizarre) or "intersexes". They need to identify solidly and solely as gay males, first boys, then men, and not ever anything else.
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(3) Fools and Seatbelts. My state's Governor, Jon Corzine, nearly died last month because he didn't trouble to buckle his seatbelt. He has since made a national PSA (public-service announcement) to promote seatbelt use, which kicked off a nationwide "Click It or Ticket" campaign to crack down on people who don't use seat belts.
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Corzine had been riding in the "suicide seat" (front passenger seat). On Wednesday, Matt Lauer of NBC's Today Show, who had interviewed Corzine about his accident, was caught on camera not wearing a seatbelt himself while riding with (supposed) Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was driving and also not wearing a seatbelt. Lauer was not in the suicide seat, but a back seat, so his error in judgment was potentially somewhat less consequential, since the main hazard seatbelts are designed to prevent is a person's being thrown thru the windshield and clear of the vehicle in a front-end crash. A passenger in a rear seat can still suffer very serious injuries from being thrown against the roof or forward into the seatback ahead, so it's a good idea to wear a seatbelt even if riding in the back seat. Once, when I settled into the back seat, when my sister was to drive, she refused to start the car until I buckled up: 'I don't want you flying into me if I have to stop suddenly.'
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In Britain, a seatbelt safety PSA has shown a backseat child flying into the driver (the 'mother' in this fictional scenario) and killing her. Such injuries, especially fatal such injuries, are rare but definitely possible. A UK site says:

Car passengers [in the rear seat] need to be educated about the dangers not just to themselves but to front-seat passengers and drivers as well. Research in 1998 showed that 160 lives could be saved a year [in the UK], of which up to 15 are front-seat passengers or drivers hit by the unbelted passenger.

If a similar percentage applied in the U.S., which has 5 times as many people as the UK, that translates to 800 deaths a year, of which 75 are front-seat passengers or drivers killed by back-seat passengers flying into them. To put this in context, there were about 43,443 traffic deaths in the U.S. in 2005. 800 is 1.8%; 75 is 0.17% of all traffic deaths here.
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Mitt Romney is a fool if "he needs to keep reminding himself to buckle up." He shouldn't bother. His death would be no loss. It might even be a public boon.
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(4) Preserving Marriage. The statistic is commonly batted about that half of all (heterosexual) marriages end in divorce. How many women who now launch divorce proceedings would do so if the laws were changed to end child support from a divorced spouse and require the custodial parent to bear all the costs of childcare? This is a simple way to preserve a lot of marriages. If women want their 'freedom' from a bad marriage, and want custody of the children from that marriage, let them pay all the costs of the children they steal from the father. The noncustodial parent should pay all costs of caring for his/her children only when they are actually in his or her care (weekends, holidays, vacations, all summer — whatever).
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The most common argument made against gay marriage* is that marriage is for children. What is divorce for?
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Society created an arrangement for taking care of children economically and emotionally . It's called "marriage". Why should we undo the very institution we created for children, and pretend that child support payments are a wholly satisfactory substitute? Is a father really so easily dispensable that a mere check is adequate replacement? If not, then society needs to restore marriage to what it was intended to be: security not just for the adult partners but, MORE IMPORTANTLY, for the children.
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Most (straight) people enter into marriage nowadays with insufficient seriousness, on the blithe assumption that if it doesn't work out, they can escape a few years down the road and move on. Society's revisions to marriage laws have promoted immaturity and instability, and injured not just adults but also children by the tens of millions.
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Divorce between marital partners should end the relationship entirely, as tho it never existed. There should be no alimony, no child support. If the relationship no longer exists, the financial benefits and obligations should also no longer exist. Period. Divorce should return people to the position of strangers. If you owe a stranger no financial support, you owe no ex-spouse financial support. Conversely, however, if a person wants child support or any other financial benefit from another person, let the two be married and stay married. It is insane to create an institution to provide such things and then destroy that institution but retain the financial obligations built into that institution. There should be no alimony, no palimony, no child support outside of marriage — nothing. Financial support is a benefit of marriage, not the obligation of strangers.
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In the uncommon case where neither parent feels able to bear the full cost of custody, the court should be empowered to enroll the custodial parent in a public-assistance program — or to deny the divorce entirely. If one adult wishes to move out on his or her own, only within marriage should s/he be required to pay child support in the children's home. If one's 'freedom' is so important that a person is willing to continue to pay all the costs s/he would have had to pay had s/he remained in the marital home PLUS all costs of a second residence for him- or herself as well, fine. Plainly, no court is entitled to require him/her to live in a place s/he finds oppressive. But the children will be provided for, by the institution designed to provide for children: marriage.
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If an abandoned spouse refuses to be divorced, courts should evaluate the justice or injustice of that spouse's making continuing financial demands upon a spouse who wants out of an unhappy marriage. This is definitely not a no-fault approach to marriage. People who enter into marriage assume legal obligations in perpetuity, and should not be permitted to abandon those responsibilities for trivial cause. When there are no children and each partner is capable of taking care of him- or herself, divorce should be nearly automatic. But when a partner feels entitled to financial support because that was the promise when s/he entered the marriage and people are entitled to rely upon promises made in a contract, that partner should have the right to contest a divorce and either defeat it entirely or delay its effectiveness, and the resulting cessation of financial support, for a time reasonably sufficient to make other, adequate arrangements. If one partner becomes disabled, and the able-bodied partner wants out of the marriage on that account, courts have the right to take very seriously the "for richer, for poorer" and "in sickness and in health" parts of the common wedding vows (contractual promises), and bear in mind the intent of society in establishing marriage as an institution to save society from having to support people who should instead be able to rely upon the support of a spouse.
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Divorce should not be automatic. If you don't want to risk becoming trapped in a marriage that may go awry, don't get married. If you do get married, take the promises very seriously. At end, each of us should prefer to take care of him- or herself if a marriage fails despite honest effort on both partners' part. People should let go if efforts to save a marriage fail, and move on, for their own emotional well-being as much as anything else.
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When gay men end a relationship, they end it. Each takes his own things and resumes full financial responsibility for himself. Straights could learn from us.
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(5) Disgusting Commercials. Why should I and millions of other gay men, plus boys and young children, have to hear about menstrual bleeding and vaginal yeast infections in commercials that invade general-audience programming? Commercials for tampons, menstrual pads, vaginal yeast medications, etc., do not belong on television. Period (you should pardon the expression).
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* By the way, New Hampshire's Governor signed legislation yesterday that makes that conservative/libertarian New England state one of seven states that have legalized same-sex "civil unions". New Hampshire's neighbor Massachusetts is the only state, so far, to legalize gay "marriage". Of the New England states, only Rhode Island has at present neither a same-sex "civil union" nor "marriage" statute. New England. Puritan country.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,475 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM