Friday, December 28, 2007

Hillary Clinton and Benazir Bhutto

In Iowa yesterday, when asked about Benazir Bhutto's assassination, Hillary Clinton apparantly "turned away without answering."
I suspect that she needs some time for her speechwriters to prepare a statement that will best exploit Bhutto's murder and the chaos that followed. Eventually, Hillary will claim to have been a close personal friend of Bhutto and to have been inspired by Bhutto. Hillary will feed off of Bhutto's corpse like a worm.





But it takes time to create a story like that. Hillary's minions will have to make sure that the story is plausible. They cannot let her say anything that can be disproven easily. They will have to create a plausible timeline of how and when the two women supposedly met and maintained a friendship without anyone else finding out about it (except for the reliably dishonest Clinton sycophants who will verify whatever Hillary says). Hillary's handlers have the relatively easy task of creating a story that the New York Times will swallow (or at least defend when the story is questioned by the new media). At the very least, I imagine that Hillary's speechwriters are at this moment coordinating with the New York Times to make sure that everyone is on the same page before Hillary makes her Bhutto comments.

It might be wise to find a discarded copy of Hillary Clinton's biography, "Living History" and search it for any reference to Bhutto. In that book, Hillary said very little about anything, except for her boasts about meeting world leaders like Violetta Chamorro. If she didn't mention Bhutto, we can deflate her exploitation relatively quickly. I did not read Hillary's book, but a quick review of the index might reveal either (1) what Hillary's speechwriters will say about Bhutto or (2) a strategy for exposing Hillary's lies about Bhutto.

Benazir Bhutto - a corpse for Hillary to consume












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update
Sweetness & Light has more.

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Quote of the day - Ann Coulter [Mike Huckabee]

Huckabee opposes school choice, earning him the coveted endorsement of the National Education Association of New Hampshire, which is like the sheriff being endorsed by the local whorehouse.

Ann Coulter

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Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The Boomsday/banking double-whammy

Sorry to be gloomy on Christmas, but the following articles caught my attention:

The first of the vast US baby boom generation goes into retirement in January, setting off a demographic tidal wave with wide-ranging economic, political and social implications.
H/T Breitbart

Here comes Boomsday - just in time for the mortgage/banking crisis.








Does anyone still think they have "too much equity?"

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Quote of the day - Thomas Sowell [tooth fairy]

You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you like. But the Tooth Fairy's approach has gotten more politicians elected than any economist's analysis.

Thomas Sowell

tooth fairy

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Quote of the day - Joe Sobran

The free use of private property has lost its status as an important human right. In the Soviet Union it was abolished wholesale; in the Western democracies it has been nibbled away by taxes, regulation, and the alleged “rights” of people who make claims on others’ wealth and possessions.

Quote - Joe Sobran

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Sunday, December 23, 2007

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

There's a big demographic out there (and certainly not confined to evangelical Protestants, or even believing Christians) that's sick of the insipid generalities of the liberal establishment's offensively inoffensive pseudo-religion. By declining to defer to it and suffering no ill effects, Huck demonstrated how weedy and insubstantial it is.

Mark Steyn - 12-21-07

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Quote of the day - Dick Morris

Hillary’s experience has been limited to the insider back biting of Washington where she is an expert at using her secret police — a small army of private detectives — to unearth negatives about her or Bill’s opponents.

Dick Morris - 12-15-07

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Sunday, December 16, 2007

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct." As does Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.

Mark Steyn - 12-14-07

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Friday, December 14, 2007

Quote of the day - USA Today

Iraq remains a violent place, but the trends are encouraging.

U.S. and Iraqi casualties are down sharply. Fewer of the most lethal Iranian-made explosive devices are being used as roadside bombs. In community after community, Sunni groups who were once in league with al-Qaeda have switched sides and are working with the U.S. forces.

On the Shiite side of Iraq's sectarian chasm, something similar is happening. About 70,000 local, pro-government groups, a bit like neighborhood watch groups, have formed to expose extremist militias, according to Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations.


USA Today - December 13, 2007

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Thursday, December 13, 2007

Quote of the day - Ann Coulter

But liberals are still fighting the 2000 presidential election -- if only to take a break from fighting the 1973 Chilean coup by Augusto Pinochet. They never rest, they never give up, they never stop lying. Liberals lie and lie and lie and then, the moment conservatives respond, they shout: OLD NEWS!

Ann Coulter - December 12, 2007

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Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Quote of the day - Rush Limbaugh

"It's clear. The Democrats have taken sides. And it's not our side they've chosen."

Rush Limbaugh - 12-12-07

(commenting on Democrat opposition to interrogation of terrorists and Democrat attempts to dismantle America's intelligence apparati.)

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Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Jeanne Assam; New Life Church shooting; Colorado Springs;

Jeanne Assam





We have all heard the story of how Jeanne Assam saved the lives of possibly 100 people in Colorado Springs over the weekend. She saved these lives by shooting the gunman intent on massacre. Most importantly, Assam's heroics would have been impossible had the gun control advocates been successful in banning guns in church. The madman intent on murder was not deterred by any laws. Gun control laws would only have prevented Jeanne Assam from repelling the attack.

Some questions are in order:

Is it only a coincidence that the same people who want to remove all mention of "Christmas" from public life want to disarm Christians in the face of demented attackers?

How many of the 30+ Virginia Tech victims would still be alive if a Jeanne Assam had been permitted to carry a gun on that campus last April?

How many Columbine victims would still be alive if a Jeanne Assam had been present with a gun at that High School in April 1999?

How few leftists will learn the lessons of the New Life shooting and stop trying to disarm innocent Americans?

Jeanne Assam





Apparently not content with the death toll at the New Life Church (and elsewhere around the country), Pennsylvania politicians are proposing new gun control laws. My prediction is that we will never have enough gun control laws to satisfy anti-gun leftists. But we can get enough guns to stop the next shooting.









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update - Michelle Malkin has more.

You can bet that leftists everywhere are right now trying to dig up dirt on Jeanne Assam. They are hoping to find a criminal record or a history of "homophobia." Failing that, they may accuse her of being gay.

By the time they are through, she will feel like a potential rival to Hillary Clinton for some elected office. They will never forgive her for using a gun to save lives.



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Quote of the day - Melanie Morgan

Liberals think that if they make Ann Coulter radioactive, they can silence people like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and myself.

They want conservatives to give up Ann’s long blonde lock’s with her scalp attached. But if we allow Ann Coulter to be taken down for having done nothing wrong other than exposing their foolishness, then we will have allowed one of our conservative icons to fall for no other reason than a misguided notion that by dumping Ann somehow the liberal media will treat conservatives more kindly.

Melanie Morgan

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Monday, December 10, 2007

Quote of the day - General Sanchez

“It seems that as long as you get a front page story there is little or no regard for the ‘collateral damage’ you will cause. Personal reputations have no value and you report with total impunity and are rarely held accountable for unethical conduct.”

General Sanchez [commenting on MSM/DNC coverage of the war in Iraq.

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Sunday, December 09, 2007

Quote of the day - Mark Steyn

Democrats bemoan the lack of "affordable housing" while simultaneously demanding government rescue home "owners" with unsustainable mortgages. But saving the latter obstructs the former: the principal benefit of a property-bubble correction is, after all, much more "affordable housing."

Mark Steyn

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Saturday, December 08, 2007

Quote of the day - Thomas Sowell

The last time I saw a Republican express outrage was 1991, when Clarence Thomas told the Senators what he thought of the smear tactics used against him. Before that, it was Ronald Reagan saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Before that, it was probably Teddy Roosevelt.

Thomas Sowell

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Friday, December 07, 2007

Pearl Harbor - 66th anniversary

As you may recall, today is the 66th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. Click here for previous anniversary posts.

Below are photos of the U.S.S. California that I poached from navsource.org. The California suffered less damage than the more famous U.S.S. Arizona, but it eventually sank also. After burning for a portion of the day on December 7th, the California took on water. Rescue workers tried to keep it afloat and pumped out the water for three days. Finally, workers abandoned the effort on December 10.

U.S.S. California - 66 years ago today





The California was later raised from the bottom of the harbor and put back into service during the war.



Wearing special camouflage more than two years after Pearl Harbor

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Quote of the day - Ann Coulter [Joe McCarthy]

By exposing the Democrats' absolute blindness to Soviet totalitarianism, McCarthy shattered forever the nation's confidence in the Democrats' capacity to govern. For that, the Stalinist hate machine attacked him viciously and has never let up.

Ann Coulter

Joe McCarthy




Ann Coulter

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Thursday, December 06, 2007

Wayne DuMond; Mike Huckabee; Bill Clinton; Sheriff Coolidge Conlee; Walter E. "Stevie" Stevens; "Those were my testicles!"

In light of the recent controversy surrounding Governor Huckabee and the parolee that was subsequently convicted of murder, here is a story from 2001 that detailed how the same parolee was in jail for raping the daughter of a Clinton supporter. As is true with everything that came out of Clinton-era Arkansas, there is much more to the story.

I believe this first appeared in the Village Voice. I don't have a link because I was not blogging at the time (emphasis and photos added).

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A Pardon That Clinton Didn't Grant
The Castration of Wayne DuMond

by Ward Harkavy
Published March 7 - 13, 2001

As Wayne DuMond listened last week to billionaire fugitive Marc Rich's explanation that Bill Clinton pardoned him for "humanitarian" reasons, he couldn't help but darkly snicker.

DuMond had been accused of raping a Clinton cousin in 1984 and was hog-tied and castrated before he even went to trial.

He used to be enraged about it, especially when the cracker sheriff, who was a pal of the rape victim's father, scooped up DuMond's balls, put them in a jar, and showed them off.

"They were mine. Those were my testicles," DuMond told a sickened courtroom in 1988. "He didn't have no right to take them and he didn't have no right to show them around and he didn't have no right to flush them down the toilet."

DuMond






This is yet another Clinton saga of genitalia that fell into the wrong hands.
The rape victim's daddy, mortician Walter E. "Stevie" Stevens, was part of a Democratic machine that ruled the Arkansas Delta and nurtured Clinton's career.

Wayne DuMond, guilty or innocent, didn't have a chance at justice.
As Clinton was abandoning Arkansas for national politics, he stymied DuMond's release from prison, ignoring the judgmentof his own parole board in June 1990 thatDuMond's continued incarceration was a "miscarriage of justice."

It's the word humanitarian that makes Wayne DuMond, now in his early fifties, chuckle a little. He knows it's all politics.

"In the eleventh hour-the eleventh hour and 59th minute," DuMond told the Voice in an interview last week, "Clinton capitalized by gaining monetarily from exercising the duties of his office in a perverted kind of way."

Clinton argues that years ago prosecutor Rudy Giuliani unfairly hounded Marc Rich. Has Clinton forgotten about the torment that his old Arkansas ally, Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, perpetrated on Wayne DuMond?

Or, for that matter, what Clinton himself did?
As Clinton was vying for the presidency, he sat on the parole board's DuMond clemency recommendation. Insisting that he wanted to wait until the appeals process was complete (the opposite tack he took in the Rich case), Clinton met with Stevie Stevens and powerful state representative Pat Flanagin (whose sister used to shoot craps with Conlee in the sheriff's office) and convinced the board to reconsider its recommendation.

In late 1991, on the campaign trail, Clinton began to be pestered about the DuMond case. Recusing himself, in April Clinton turned over the matter to his lieutenant governor, Jim Guy Tucker. Unlike Clinton, Tucker read every word of DuMond's voluminous file, a DuMond lawyer told the Voice. Tucker promptly reduced DuMond's sentence, making him eligible for parole. Seven years later Republican governor Mike Huckabee signed DuMond's release papers.

Releasing Wayne DuMond earlier would have been a tough call, but many people were willing to show the decorated Vietnam veteran mercy, despite his admitted bad past-booze, drugs, mayhem. DuMond has told the tale of how he helped slaughter a village of Cambodians. Later, stationed in Oklahoma, he was charged with participating in the claw-hammer murder of a fellow soldier. Turning state's evidence, he insisted that he merely stood by and watched. In Tacoma, Washington, he accosted a teenage girl, an incident that led to five years of probation.

"Yeah," DuMond conceded in his Voice interview, "but what's that got to do with anything? That had nothing to do with the alleged case against me in Forrest City."

Governor Clinton ignored pleas on behalf of DuMond at the same time that he was ignoring pleas on behalf of Rickey Ray Rector.

In early 1992, when the Gennifer Flowers story broke, Clinton interrupted his presidential campaign to stoke his stance as the one Democrat who would lock up and kill criminals. He flew back to Arkansas from New Hampshire so he could be standing on state soil while the convict was put down. It didn't matter to him that Rector had shot himself in the head immediately after the murder, in effect giving himself a lobotomy that left him without the power of reason.

Clinton recently noted the persuasive power of his former counsel Jack Quinn's last-minute phone call on behalf of Marc Rich. But in early 1992, Clinton dismissed a similar last-minute phone appeal from Rector's attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, a Clinton friend since boyhood. Strapped down, the brain-damaged Rector screamed for 50 minutes while the executioners dug into his arm before finding a vein in which to shoot the poison.

DuMond thinks Clinton's rejection of his own bid for humanitarian handling was just as cynical, although it did have the personal element. "It would have been politically incorrect on both fronts," said DuMond, "the stand he had already taken about crime and being, maybe not a player in my case, but certainly in the background as a relative."

Many of the details of DuMond's life, and how it intersected with Clinton's reign as Arkansas governor, are laid out in the 1993 book Unequal Justice by Guy Reel, a mainstream reporter for The Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Given his past in the army, Reel writes, DuMond was hardly the most sympathetic character when he crossed paths with Clinton's relatives in late 1984 in Forrest City (named after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest). He was an anonymous handyman, married with kids. One day, the daughter of prominent mortician Stevie Stevens saw DuMond driving down the road in his pickup. She identified him as the man who had raped her 45 days earlier.

That introduced DuMond to Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, a notorious gambler, bootlegger, dope dealer, and racketeer. He was so corrupt that, as it was later revealed in court, he even used crooked dice to shoot craps against his own deputies. Even as he threw dice in the sheriff's office, Reel writes, he was busting black-run gambling houses, except the ones that paid off his chief deputy, Sambo Hughes.

In early March 1985, with Wayne awaiting trial, his wife, Dusty, wrote a letter to a local newspaper defending her husband and blasting Sheriff Conlee.

Only days later, Wayne DuMond was sitting at home, drunk, when two men broke in, hog-tied him, and made him give one of them a blowjob-"just like you made her do," the perp snarled. Then they castrated him with a knife.

One of them, DuMond later said, chortled, "Mr. C would be proud." They left him to be discovered by his children.
Sheriff Conlee strolled into the DuMond home a few hours later. By his own court testimony, related in Reel's book, Conlee scooped up DuMond's testicles from the evidence scene and put them in a matchbox. He drove home, dumped the balls into a fruit jar, and then sped over to Stevens's funeral home. There, Stevens and funeral home employee Regan Hill were waiting. Hill poured formaldehyde over DuMond's balls. Clinton's cousin Stevens recounted later in a deposition that the sheriff said to him, "Here are DuMond's testicles. Do you want to see them?" Stevens, continuing his testimony, recalled, "Of course, they are looking at me, so that was it."

Over the next few days, Sheriff Conlee proudly showed the jar of DuMond's balls to several people. Eventually, he flushed them down a toilet.

No one was arrested for castrating Wayne DuMond. But after he was convicted of the rape, DuMond sued Conlee and St. Francis County in federal court for humiliating the DuMond clan by displaying the balls. He won a judgment of $110,000.

It was during that trial that DuMond angrily talked about "my testicles." Dusty DuMond, who stood strongly behind her husband, told the court, "When we found out the sheriff had his testicles in a jar, we felt that maybe the sheriff would put my breast in a jar. We didn't know what he would plan next, so that was one of the things that made us decide to go into hiding."

While waiting for Wayne's rape trial, they fled Forrest City. After they left, somebody burned down their house, another crime for which no one was charged.

DuMond's chances at his trial were hopeless. There would be no change of venue. The prosecutors were Clinton ally Gene Raff and his top local aide, Fletcher Long, who was also Sheriff Conlee's personal attorney. Raff and Long were old college frat brothers of Stevie Stevens. The sheriff himself was the courtroom bailiff.

No evidence linked DuMond to the teenager's abduction, forced submission to oral sex, and brief penetration. In the primitive blood-semen testing that had been done (DuMond's lawyer said a more expensive DNA test wasn't needed), DuMond's semen, as a match to a spot on the teen's jeans, couldn't be ruled out. (A DNA expert later testified in one of DuMond's numerous appeals that the spot did not match.) The judge wouldn't delay the trial for a single day so the defense could bring in its own witness. The teen had said her attacker had blue eyes; DuMond's are hazel. But she insisted (and still insists) that DuMond did it. It was her word against his. DuMond's trial lawyer never brought up her previous identification of someone else as her attacker.

DuMond was convicted and sent to prison. He got out on parole in October 1999. Now he lives in a small Missouri town outside of Kansas City. Dusty didn't live to see it; she died from injuries in a Christmas Eve 1998 car crash on her way to visit relatives in Ohio.

The pain of all those events seems to have left Wayne DuMond. He sees his torment as a political act.
"As to the reasons," he told the Voice, "there's never been but one: money. My wife and I were actively campaigning against the sheriff. We were being mouthy toward him in the wrong direction, you might say."

In 1986, Sheriff Conlee lost a bid for reelection. A couple of years later, he was put on trial for racketeering and other felonies. Several pals turned against him, including deputy Sambo Hughes, who tearfully testified about the routine extortion of black-owned nightclubs. Conlee was convicted and died in prison.

As the sheriff faded into a bad memory, Wayne DuMond was still in prison. The DuMonds organized a campaign to get Governor Clinton to free him. They weren't exactly Marc Rich, but Dusty rounded up friends and family.

"Most of the people I know are blue-collar workers, trying to eke out the best living they can," said DuMond. "How do you take the savings of lower- and middle-class people and persuade some high-powered politician to do something of this nature? When he was running for president, there were people jabbing at him. They were jabbing at him in Ohio, in Florida, in Texas-'What are you going to do about Wayne DuMond?' "

Dusty struck pay dirt in Houston, where she was seeking work and living with relatives.
"She interviewed for a job with my husband," Debbie Riddle recalled. "And he asked her her primary goal, and her primary goal was to get her husband out of prison. It was a real shock to us."

Dusty DuMond was hired as a secretary in Mike Riddle's law firm. On October 12, 1991, Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton came to Houston. The big crowds flocked to Jackson. An active Republican, Debbie Riddle sought out the lesser-known Clinton at a health clinic where he was working a small gathering.

"I went up to him," she recalled, "and said, 'There is a man in your home state, incarcerated, and you put together a pardon committee to look and said you would respond according to their findings. And you didn't. And the young woman allegedly assaulted is related to you.'

"He got very angry. He said, 'He was convicted by a jury of his peers.' I said, 'Yes, without the DNA evidence.' He said, 'That was his defense attorney's fault.' "

Press reports at the time noted that the national reporters on the candidate's campaign trail were befuddled by the encounter, and Clinton's handlers steered him away from Riddle.

And he steered clear of a decision on DuMond.
"Bill Clinton is the only person in Arkansas without any balls," recalled John Wesley Hall, DuMond's attorney during their futile appeals and no enemy of Clinton. "He would fence-straddle to the extreme, and that created false expectations in some people."

Even after the details of Coolidge Conlee's ghoulish behavior surfaced, Clinton didn't abandon his Arkansas cronies. In December 1991, two months after Riddle confronted him, Clinton appointed Regan Hill, the Stevens Funeral Home employee, to the governing body of St. Francis County.

Walter "Stevie" Stevens

The way DuMond sees it, when Clinton had nothing to lose, why not help his buddies and why not pardon rich and powerful friends? Especially now that he's not only left Arkansas but left D.C.

"What does he care about that?" said DuMond. "He's gone as far as he can go."

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Mitt Romney's Mormon speech; The Coming of the Mormons

I did not hear Mitt Romney's speech today about his religion. But the speech has received national attention, as MSM/DNC commentators strive to apply their usual victim-group script to every situation. In this case, the MSM/DNC plays the religion card by asking whether America is "ready" for a Mormon president. While the MSM/DNC hates Republicans, its real target is America itself. The MSM/DNC doesn't mind letting a Republican play the coveted "victim" role once in a while, so long as MSM/DNC gets to portray America as a bigoted, ignorant country that fears and "hates" diverse religions.

I am also stricken by the modern tendency to view issues in terms of the superficial headlines of the moment instead of the deeper facts that might truly educate us all. In this case, we hear a constant discussion on the MSM/DNC news, in which various commentors speculate as to what Mormons really believe and what they practice. But the MSM/DNC provides few tools for us to make up our own minds about this religion (or any other issue). We hear a constant din of white noise, consisting of superficial sound bites, but we learn little of any use.

Here is my contribution to the issue. I am not a Mormon, nor do I support Mitt Romney (for reasons other than his religion. My reasons for preferring a different Republican nominee include Romney's flip-flopping on major issues (and see Debbie Schlussel's discussions)). But I do think a further study of Mormonism is in order. Decades ago, American students used to learn a little history in addition to the usual leftist indoctrination. One history book was entitled, "The Coming of the Mormons." This book detailed not only the Mormon migration to Utah, but provided good background into the whole pioneer era.



Regardless of how I feel about Mormonism, I would have a lot more confidence in what I see on television if the television mouthpieces knew even a fraction of the material featured in books like this before assembling stories that impact Presidential races. This is true not only for the Mormon "issue", but for every issue that receives the usual MSM/DNC white noise, race-politics, PC, superficial treatment.

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Quote of the day - Joe Sobran [Peter Benchley, Great White Sharks]

A contrite Peter Benchley now says: "I couldn't
write JAWS today." He's learned a lot about sharks
lately, and he feels they're misunderstood: "Except in
the rarest of instances, great white shark attacks are
mistakes." Spoken like a true liberal, Benchley. Soon
Steven Spielberg will reach the sorrowful conclusion that
tyrannosaurus rex was more sinned against than sinning.
How do some people manage to get more naive with age?

Joe Sobran

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