The Euro's hate the death penalty and they hate us for loving it. So when Austrian-born California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, many in the old country threw a fit. Austria's Green Party suggested Arnold be stripped of his Austrian citizenship. Officials in his hometown of Graz have threatened to remove Arnold's name from their stadium and rechristen it after Tookie. The idea is scheduled for a January 19th vote, al...
Most Americans may not have noticed, insular and self-obsessed as we are, but there have been serious racial conflicts going on in Australia. It started when a group of Lebanese-Australians attacked some lifeguards on a beach. Then a bunch of Aussie equivalents to drunken good ol' boys went out to settle the score. You've heard of soccer hooligans? Think beach ball hooligans and you're on the right track. It's been the proverbial snowball rolling down hill ever since. This morning as I re...
A little something I heard on the news last night... Perhaps you know that when a plane ran off the end of a runway in Chicago last week it plowed into a passing car, killing a six year old boy. Just moments before, he, his parents, and two younger brothers had been driving to visit his grandparents, singing Christmas carols as they went. The Woods family buried their oldest child, Joshua, yesterday. In his hand he held a cross and a quarter. The quarter had been pressed into Joshua's ...
Next to himself, Tookie's worst enemy was his supporters. All we ever heard, as if on an endless loop, were the ludicrous arguments "nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize" and "he wrote children's books." The bizarre notion that writing children's books should exonerate someone from murder would be laughable if so many people hadn't just tried it. I hear Dr. Suess wasn't such a lovable fellow. I wonder what he'd have done knowing writing children's books was considered a get off ...
Last week I wrote about a Pennsylvania case of Child Protective Services attempting to get custody of an unborn child because of sex crimes the father committed more than 20 years earlier. CPS sweetened the pot with contested new allegations that the father, DaiShin WolfHawk, previously molested his daughter and that the mother, Melissa WolfHawk, is a drug taking prostitute. Whether unfounded or not, the new charges worked. Mrs. WolfHawk gave birth Tuesday. On Wednesday, a judge gave...
When a substitute teacher in Lake County, Florida heard beeping coming from a student, he acted before he thought. He asked the student what the beeping was, but before the 9th grader could answer, the teacher grabbed the offending item and ripped it from the boy. It seems he thought it was a cell phone. Instead, it turns out the boy is a Type I diabetic, the ripped item was an insulin pump, and the teacher pulled it out of the tube connected to the boy's leg. It had been beeping as war...
Remember back in March, when accused rapist Brian Nichols killed four people, escaped, and took a woman hostage who eventually talked him down with pancakes, sharing God, and readings from "The Purpose-Driven Life"? It turns out there was more to the story. Isn't there always? For one thing, the much ballyhooed "Purpose-Driven" intervention amounted to reading little more than a paragraph. For another, as indicated in the title of her new book, "Unlikely Angel," Ashley Smith is far fr...
In a recent discussion over possible new driver's license requirements, terpfan1980 wondered what people would use for a photo I.D. when most people's photo I.D.'s are their driver's licences. When I got my driver's license many years ago, I used my passport as a photo I.D. (Don't ask me what they use to verify you for the passport, I haven't renewed mine in ages.) But it may be far easier to come up with photo I.D. than you imagine. When I opened my P.O. Box last year, the p...
I'm sitting here watching the Pope's funeral. The mass is over. The choir starts singing, people applaud and cheer. 12 guys walk up, lift the plain cypress coffin and carry it off. John Paul II has left the square. What an exit. Talk about the ultimate curtain call.
It appears Martin Luther will not be attending Pope John Paul II's funeral. I say good for him! They disagreed on so many things. Sure, they had some commonalities like being anti-abortion and finding a trip down the chocolate highway more abominable than a snowman, but so what? Obviously, Marty feels the old dude in the funny hat was just too wrong about too many other issues to pay his respects. And why should he pay his respects? World leader to world leader? Religious man to religio...
Welcome to Marrero, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from New Orleans. What do you do when you move into an apartment owned by a cop? First, you lie to the sheriff deputy that only you, your daughter, and your three grandkids will live there, but crowd in 15 people. Then you have the electricity turned off while you transfer it into your name. Then you spread candles throughout the house to compensate for the lack of electricity. What would you do if all those candles caught a ma...
I've seen theaftermath of at least one Middle Eastern kidnap-victim beheading. Ididn't search it out. The picture was part of a page I was reading.Once I'd seen it, though, I did take a closer look, and it changed myperception dramatically. For a while weheard about beheadings and watched the tapes of frantic prisonersalmost daily. When we in the West think of beheadings, we have thisimage of a gu...
In many of therecent "Fahrenheit 9/11" inspired discussions of Michael Moore, ourleft-leaning blogger friends would attempt to defend their pudgyanti-hero by decrying what they considered the right's "journalists"of excess: Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. Again and again anytimesomething was said against Mr. Moore we'd hear, "What about Limbaughand Coulter, huh? Aren't they just as bad? Why don't you talk aboutthem, huh?" ...
Handing Iraq backover to its people early must have thrown a wrench into al Qaeda'splans. They want America in Iraq. Al Qaeda saw Iraqas "a new front" in their Jihad against the West. If they couldn'tsmuggle themselves into America to mass murder Americans they couldeasily caravan their way into Iraq and start taking shots at will. Itwas the perfect opportunity to kill some infidels and get a cra...
Hot off the criticism over seemingly pre-judging a case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has raised his hand to the press -- minus 4 fingers. Emerging from a special mass at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Justice Scalia was asked by a reporter if he received a lot of questions regarding his impartiality about separation of church and state. Scalia responded, "You know what I say to those people?" and flipped the bird at the press. "That's Sicilian," he said. Cue Dino. "When...