Quite possibly the worst thing ever

I don't know why I'm even linking to this because you probably don't want to read it, but here's a poem by Rosie O'Donnell about Star Jones and her recent weight loss. Somehow, she manages to sneak a stanza about Bush and Iraq into it. Wow.

(kinda sorta via Beautiful Atrocities)

Life imitates Lost

This sounds awfully familiar.

Two men suspected of helping smuggle cocaine to New York from Mexico inside statues of the Virgin Mary were arrested Thursday, U.S. authorities said.

Peter Matheis, 52, and Rafael Serrano, 36, both Mexican nationals, were indicted in New York and Houston respectively on money-laundering and narcotics charges along with six others arrested previously in the United States, the Drug Enforcement Administration said.

Five 3-foot-tall statues of the Virgin Mary, filled with 242 pounds of cocaine, were seized in a Brooklyn warehouse as part of the police operation.

The drug ring used the statues to smuggle cocaine worth millions of dollars, FBI agent John Gilbride said in a statement.

To be fair, the Virgin Mary statues on the teevee show were filled with heroin, so I guess Matheis and Serrano won't have to worry about getting sued by J.J. Abrams. But that was probably the least of their worries, anyway.

There's good news and bad news...

...about the student lawlessness here in Southern California that I mentioned the other day. It looks like police threats to crack down on kids leaving school are showing some results.

No student walkouts over proposed immigration reform were reported early Thursday after three days of increasingly tougher truancy crackdowns.

"It's quiet," said Ellen Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Good. Students need to stay in school. But south of here, in the San Diego area, the Oceanside Unified School District is closing schools because of threats of racially-motivated violence. That seems like a cave-in to mob rule, but if they think the threat is credible and they don't have the security resources to deal with it, I guess there's not much else they can do.

Meanwhile, back in my neck of the woods...

Los Angeles school administrators who watched students march onto freeways and scuffle with police telephoned parents and warned them that their children faced a possible $250 citation if they marched.

[...]

Students took notice of the crackdown.

"I have to go to school today because they called my home and said I had to go to school or I'm going to get a citation," said Rene Hernandez, 15, a student at Van Nuys High School who took part in earlier protests.

On the popular Web site MySpace.com, where many students have said they look for protest information, the word was to wait until Friday for the next mass demonstration.

Carla Yocute, 14, who also attends Van Nuys High, had seen flyers for the walkout but said she wouldn't join.

"I don't want to risk it," she said.

On Tuesday, the school closed its gates and kept students in their homerooms to prevent walkouts.

"I felt like an animal in a cage," Yocute said.

That's right, folks. When students aren't allowed to roam the streets and disrupt freeway traffic, they're like caged animals. And if there are walkouts tomorrow, I hope massive numbers of these kids get truancy citations. If they get on the freeways again, I hope some of them find out in a much harsher way what it feels like to be "caged," if you know what I mean.

The article says that only about 200 students walked out of schools in L.A. County yesterday compared to 11,000 the day before and 36,000 on Monday. The fact that someone is telling the kids to leave school on Friday is troubling, though, and I want to reiterate that there should be an investigation into who's instigating this nonsense.

I've had it with these snakes

Jeepers, this is just like a real-life version of Snakes on a Plane! Except there's only one snake involved. And it's in a PT Cruiser, not on a plane. I don't think Samuel L. Jackson was there, either. But other than that, pretty much the same deal. Yep. Eerily similar.

The sound of Democrats' heads exploding

This sounds like quite the quandry for Philadelphia's liberals.

This city's hoped-for bragging rights as home of America's tallest environmentally friendly building could go down the toilet.

In a city where organized labor is a force to be reckoned with, the plumbers union has been raising a stink about a developer's plans to install 116 waterless, no-flush urinals in what will be Philadelphia's biggest skyscraper.

Developer Liberty Property Trust says the urinals would save 1.6 million gallons of water a year at the 57-story Comcast Center, expected to open next year.

But the union put out the word it doesn't like the idea of waterless urinals fewer pipes mean less work. [sic]

So, on the one hand, you've got people who want to build a Gaia-friendly skyscraper. Sounds laudable. But on the other hand, you've got union members--a big Dem voting block--who want to feather their nest. What's a lefty to do?

Excuses, excuses

Okay, folks, get a load of this one:

LOS ANGELES Judges and attorneys have heard many excuses from people who want time off during jury service, but a man's request Wednesday in the midst of a West Covina murder case proved a novel one for two defense lawyers.

The middle-aged juror told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Pounders that he needs Tuesday off to go to jail.

[...]

The apologetic man -- known under the Superior Court's anonymous jury system as Juror No. 8, said that he has put off serving a five-day jail sentence for a drunken-driving conviction.

He said he needs to begin the term on Friday and is due to be released Tuesday night.

According to the story, the man left a party where he must have had more than a few drinks. He got in his car, hit a pedestrian on his way home, blacked out and woke up handcuffed to a bed--it doesn't say where the bed was.

Here's the kicker, though...

Asked why he replied "no" when asked along with other prospective panelists in the jury selection process whether he had ever been accused of a crime, the man replied, "I wasn't accused, I was convicted."

The guy's being honest, eventually, but I'm not sure that's the kind of brilliant legal mind I'd want on the jury if I was on trial. Splitting hairs and such.

Rep. Zsa Zsa

Everybody's favorite crazy congresswoman is back in the news.

According to sources on Capitol Hill, U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) punched a Capitol police officer on Wednesday afternoon after he mistakenly pursued her for failing to pass through a metal detector.

Members of Congress are not required to pass through metal detectors.

Sources say that the officer was at a position in the Longworth House Office Building, and neither recognized McKinney, nor saw her credentials as she went around the metal detector.

The officer called out, “Ma’am, Ma’am,” and walked after her in an attempt to stop her. When he caught McKinney, he grabbed her by the arm.

Witnesses say McKinney pulled her arm away, and with her cell phone in hand, punched the officer in the chest.

Drudge says that the Capitol Police are waiting for Congress to adjourn to arrest McKinney, but that no charges have been filed so far.

And take a guess what she says is responsible for the whole incident. If you guessed racism, well, you've won yourself a cigar!

A statement attributed to McKinney has been released on the Internet, where she allegedly claims to have been harassed by Capitol Hill Police.

The statement's writer says that she has been harassed by white police officers she says do not recognize her due to her recently changed hairstyle.

"Do I have to contact the police every time I change my hairstyle? How do we account for the fact that when I wore my braids every day for 11 years, I still faced this problem, primarily from certain white police officers," the statement says.

The article doesn't say whether or not the "white police officer" was Jewish, but it would hardly surprise me. In fact, I bet they're all Jews.

This needs to stop

I don't know what the media coverage in the rest of the country has been like, but here in Southern California, we've been seeing what amounts to lawlessness on the streets here for the past two days. Basically, thousands of high school students have been walking out of school for the past two days to "protest" laws being debated in congress that would crack down on illegal immigration. (I suspect a lot of them are just happy to ditch school, but that's a different matter.)

These kids have been running wild in the streets, sometimes blocking traffic on the freeways during rush hour traffic, and so far there hasn't been much of a police response. Thankfully, that may be about to change.

Thousands of students skipped classes and took to the streets again today to protest proposed toughening of immigration laws. But authorities clamped down, thwarting attempts to block freeway traffic, rounding up some youngsters and issuing truancy citations. Small numbers of arrests were reported.

[...]

Police issued 100 truancy citations to students in San Pedro.

Now, we're talking about twelve thousand kids who left schools in LA County, so there needs to be more of a police response, if you asked me. I just saw the Police Chief, the School Superintendent, and the Mayor (who was recently praising the protestors) on the news, all of them saying that this needs to stop and promising that there would be severe consequences if the walkouts continue. Chief Bratton also called the students' attempts at blocking freeways "insanity."

I'd also like to see an investigation into who exactly is organizing all of this. The kids I've seen on TV are saying that it's being arranged through MySpace.com, but somebody is instigating this lawlessness. If it's teachers, they ought to be fired.

Mickey Kaus has been covering the protests since the weekend. Keep scrolling.

I hope you're hungry

Las Vegas, a gigantic buffet, and Alka Seltzer have all come together to form the perfect storm of gluttony.

It's time to raise a glass of bubbly — the maker of the Alka-Seltzer antacid tablet has set a record for creating the world's largest buffet.

Cue the European "intellectual" sneering about how fat Americans are.

About 850 hungry customers helped Bayer HealthCare LLC, a subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical and chemical firm Bayer AG, celebrate the 75th anniversary of its heartburn relief product — known for the jingle "plop, plop, fizz, fizz" — by partaking in a massive spread at the Las Vegas Hilton.

In all, 510 dishes were set in front of the crowd Tuesday. Each one had to be certified distinct by a Guinness World Record adjudicator.

They ranged from Mongolian chicken and salmon Wellington to creme brulee and homemade apple pie.

Knowing me, I'd probably just keep going back for the shrimp and crab legs. And if they had an omelet station, I might get one of those, too. With ham, cheese, onions, and maybe some peppers. Yeah.

There's the rub

This actually sounds like a halfway decent idea:

Malaysia has opened a motorway drive-in massage parlour, with the aim of reducing road accidents by relaxing stressed-out drivers.

Drivers have to realise "the importance of stopping to have a rest", Works Minister Samy Vellu told Malaysia's Bernama news agency.

The new parlour is on the North-South Highway, which stretches the length of the Peninsular [sic] of Malaysia.

Sure, we've got rest stops along our highways, but they usually just include some stinky bathrooms, a couple of picnic tables, and wanted posters for runaways and the people who abduct them from...highway rest stops. And, yeah, getting a massage at a highway rest stop might sound a little sleazy, but think of the accidents that could be prevented by relieving stress with massages.

It was not immediately clear whether road users would have to pay for services at the massage centre.

Nor was it immediately clear whether "happy endings" would be made available.

What are you wearing?

Want to hear something about a bunch of pasty British people doing something in the nude? Well, too bad.

Up to a third of telephone users in the Britain make calls in the nude, with men more prone to do it without clothes than women, a survey revealed on Thursday.

Research commissioned by Britain's Post Office, which offers a fledgling home phone service, revealed that 40 percent of men admitted to nattering naked compared with 27 percent of women. The results were based on a survey of 1,500 telephone users.

Whereas, when I'm blogging, you can rest assured that I always at least have my underpants on. That's my solemn promise to you.

Unrelated

This article about the cost of employees slacking off during March Madness (the NCAA basketball tournament, for those of you who may be visiting from outside the US of A) isn't really all that interesting as far as I'm concerned, but the caption of the photo that accompanies it is just friggin' hilarious. Let's just say that they didn't pick out anything really...original.

Fight for the rights you don't have anyway

This AP article about protests over proposed legislation that would crack down on illegal immigration is pretty even-handed, though the writer doesn't bother to quote anybody who's in favor of any of the proposals mentioned. I say that it's even-handed because it actually uses terms like "illegal immigrants" instead of euphamisms like "undocumented workers," and presents information in a pretty straightforward way.

Some of the quotes given, though, are just laughable. Take, for instance, the following, which relates to violence between black and latino students, which erupted when the latter decided to walk out of a Los Angeles-area high school "to protest a bill passed the House in December that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally":

"It was horrible, horrible," [Chantal Mason, a sophomore at George Washington Preparatory High] said. "It's ridiculous that a bunch of black students would jump on Latinos like that, knowing they're trying to get their freedom."

Ms. Mason is right that racially-motivated violence is horrible, but I'm a bit confused about the last part of her statement. What "freedom" are these students "trying to get"? If they're United States citizens, they have a number of constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms already. If they're illegal immigrants who are in this country illegally, should they have some sort of freedom to be here, again, illegally?

Here's another gem, this time from Phoenix, where the police estimated that 10,000 people gathered to protest a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl which would give illegal immigrants a leisurely five years to leave the country:

"They're here for the American Dream," said Malissa Greer, 29, who joined a crowd estimated by police to be at least 10,000 strong. "God created all of us. He's not a God of the United States, he's a God of the world."

I don't even know where to start with Malissa. I guess one could point out that a lot of people are "here for the American Dream," though they have decided that they'll go through the painstaking process of applying for citizenship or the legal status of a resident alien instead of flouting our laws and making a mockery of our soverignty. And just what does God have to do with it? Did anybody claim that God only covers the USA, or did you just say that because it's the kind of mushy-headed liberal pap that naturally falls out of your head when you open your mouth?

There's plenty more at the link, including the mention of a condescending-sounding protest in Milwaukee called "A Day Without Latinos," implying, I guess, that all Latinos are illegal immigrants. And here I thought we right-wingers were the ones who engaged in all the nasty stereotyping.

Good luck with that, buddy.

I'm sure nobody has ever tried anything like this before:

A bored Canadian bureaucrat fed up with office drudgery is seeking C$1 million ($860,000) in donations so he can quit his job and "do something that makes a difference in my life and the lives of others".

The unnamed man, who claims to have worked for a large civil service organization for over 10 years, has set up a Web site -- saveabureaucrat.com -- on which he explains he is desperate to escape his job.

You know, if you've held down a steady job for the last ten years without any serious blemishes on your record, you might just be able to get some good references from your bosses. References you could put on a resume. Which you could submit here, for example.

"After a while it starts to sap the energy and soul out of you and you realize that you have become a true bureaucrat ... I feel like an old curmudgeon frustrated by having to deal with paper being passed around at a snail's pace," he writes.

Sorry to repeat myself here, but you might try, you know, getting a different job. It would probably be easier than cajoling a bunch of strangers into giving you a million bucks.

Despite promising not to spend donations on "Rolls-Royce cars, 10 bedroom houses, airplanes", the bored civil servant has quite a way to go.

As of Wednesday morning, five sympathetic souls had sent in a total of just C$59.26.

With that kind of scratch, you could buy some resume paper and get your best suit dry cleaned in time for a job interview, you lazy hoser bastard.

Quit yer bitching

The New York Civil Liberties Union is complaining that police lied about the circumstances surrounding the arrests of a bunch of stinky hippies, anarchists, and assorted malcontents during the 2004 GOP convention.

"We are concerned that false police statements may have tainted hundreds of cases of people arrested at the two largest mass arrests during the convention," wrote the group's attorney, Christopher Dunn.

City law officials have said the arrests were justified.

The accusations stem from a tense standoff in 2004 between police and the tens of thousands of demonstrators at the GOP convention, where President Bush accepted his party's nomination for a second term.

While demonstrations were mostly peaceful, sporadic clashes between police and protesters resulted in more than 1,800 arrests, mostly on misdemeanor charges like ey, obstructing governmental administration.

Hey, it's not like there were any threats to disrupt the city or anything--sometimes violently, right? And it's not like groups on the left were planning to disrupt the convention or anything, right? Right?

Up to 10,000 officers were deployed at the four-day event a show of force the civil liberties group called overkill and a threat to free speech. Two pending federal lawsuits claim most of the arrests were illegal.

Yeah, overkill.



Anyway, I thought these people saw getting arrested at a protest as some sort of honor or badge of courage or something. You know, it's a way to show your smelly hippie friends that you're just like Martin Luther King. But white. And with a trust fund.

Cheese-eating bigotry monkeys

Apparently, about a third of the Frogs surveyed in a recent study think that they're at least a little bit racist.

Some 33 percent of 1,011 people surveyed face-to-face by pollsters CSA said they were "somewhat" or "a little" racist, up 8 percentage points from last year, according to an annual report by the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights.

The poll asked the question "When it comes to you personally, would you say you are ..." followed by a list of options: somewhat racist, a bit racist, not racist, not very racist, not racist at all and don't want to say.

[...]

The report, presented to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, was conducted from November 17-22, 2005, immediately after several weeks of rioting in poor suburbs around the country.

Thousands of cars were torched by youths who said they faced discrimination, police harassment and lack of access to jobs. Youth unemployment rises to 50 percent in some poor urban areas.

So, I guess the results were colored by the riots, which were perpetrated by, if I recall the phrase correctly, "Youths Of Indeterminate Ethnic Extraction"--code words for mostly Arab and African thugs who rampaged through the suburbs of Paris last year.

I can see how people would be upset about a situation like that--I know I would have been--but to accuse themselves of racismover something like that? That seems like a stretch. But then again, these are the French we're talking about.

A couple of thoughts on the WBC final

I was glad to see that the Japanese team beat Cuba in the final game of the World Baseball Classic. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that the players on the Cuban team are a fine bunch of guys who love playing baseball and feel honored to represent their country in front of the world, but a victory for the Cuban team would be a victory for Fidel Castro, the western hemisphere's worst tyrant, and I'm sure his regime would play it up as propaganda against the US and its allies.

Instead, one of our staunchest allies, a free and democratic society, prevailed, so that's great. I would have liked team USA to have come out on top, but like a man once said, you can't always get what you want. Such is life.

I'm going to be looking for reaction in the state-dominated Cuban press (if I can find it online, that is) to the loss. It wouldn't surprise me if there are complaints about cheating or meddling from US officials, since we're always the bad guys when it comes to Cuba. This is probably a good place to keep your eye on for that sort of thing.

Sorry about the lack of posting

Rainy days and Mondays (today was both) always get me down. Besides, I've had a bunch of real-life work stuff to contend with over the past couple of days.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

What Liberal Media?

Via James Taranto, here's an online chat with the Washington Post's car columnist, Warren Brown. It starts off pretty straight, then veers waaaaaaay off to the left. Some examples lifted from his advice to readers...about cars, mind you:

Many of today's cars, even the economy models, can run 200,000 miles or so with proper service and care. Be not afraid. It's okay to venture forth into the brave new world of technology, as long as you aren't on a hunting trip with the Vice President. He needs a GPS on his gun.

[...]

Thus, to answer your policy direction question, America is moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. Those big rigs eventually will have gasoline-electric and diesel-electric engines for even better mileage and lower emissions.

America would be moving in the wrong direction to curb consumer choice. I mean, we already have enough of that don't we -- a government that believes it can engender freedom abroad by curbing and abusing it at home. [emphases mine]

That last bit was in response to a question about fuel economy, not, as you might think, civil liberties.

And yet, some people persist in claiming that our Mainstream Media doesn't have a liberal slant. Go figure.