* James Dobson is resigning as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Focus on the Family. In his place will go Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Caruana (Ret.), who was als once an executive with defense contractor Northrup Grumman. Doesn’t anyone else find it a little bit weird that someone who made a living by making instruments in order to kill people is going to head a Christian organization? I know James Edwards will have more to say about this.
* The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) gang of copyright extremists is making major staff cutbacks. What else would happen to a group that picks on the very people that they want to buy their music? It would be like Jack Daniels sponsoring a prohibitionist preacher.
Every time the RIAAs and MPAAs of the world try and stop a new technology they think will kill them, it winds up helping them. Music wanted to kill radio in the 1920s and 30s because they thought nobody would buy records if they could hear them on radio; turned out radio drove record sales. TV and the Movie Studios tried to sue the VCR out of existence in the early 1980s; turns out VCRs helped the studios make more money off movies because home video was a lucrative secondary market for successful films that people wanted to see again or for ones that flopped in the theaters but might be more popular in the home setting.
* Some of Chicago’s black community are finally starting to realize that most of Official Illinois wans the only black member of the U.S. Senate to resign. In Roland Burris’s defense, they say:
U.S. Rep. Danny Davis said Friday that many blacks don’t believe Burris should resign, in part because the person who appointed him — now-ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich — hasn’t been convicted of a crime.
“I would say … there is overwhelming support for Roland Burris in the black community,” said Davis, who turned down an offer from Blagojevich for the appointment to President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.
I thought that was the total opposite of street cred. I thought you did have to have a rap sheet in order to get more credibility in certain sectors of the black community.
* Now that’s what I call karma — Florissant Mayor Robert Lowery said that he’s not going to allow conceal-carry in his city (like the city is his personal possession and he’s the sovereign). I highly doubt he was able to pull this off, but there have been six bank robberies in Loweryissant since the beginning of the year. How much you wanna bet that they all have the “No CCW” signs on their doors?
* The other Lowery has been invited back to his O’Fallon, Mo. city job. Nice knowing ya, O’Fallon.
* Oh, no. If the National Guard leaves New Orleans, then its people might start committing violent crimes.
* A Kansas City ghetto girl once thought that hiking in the woods wasn’t her thing, because “There’s bugs and snakes. It’s nasty in there.” (As opposed to the pristine ghettos of Kansas City.) Just call it “Hot Wilderness Mess.”
* The State of Connecticut is going to become for daytime trash talk shows what Canada is for film production. The state has successfully bribed Jerry Springer, his protege Steve Wilkos and Maury “Whomybabydaddy” Povich to move their shows to the Nut(meg) State. At that, then every DNA paternity testing company and lie detector polygraph firm better move to Connecticut as well.
Whoa — Springer, Wilkos and Povich in the same building. I can see a crossover show now — Fourteen transgendered transsexual child-molesting stripper/prostitute wild teen midgets are being tested to see if he/she/it is the father of my child and if he/she/it cheated on his/her/its significant others, after being sent to boot camp then jail by our big muscular ex-con black dude who screams in their faces.
This is the same state that has nothing but scorn and abuse for gunowners and the gun manufacturers that are based there.
* Robert Mugabe is only going to spend $250,000 for his 85th birthday party. If that’s in American dollars, he’ll have outspent Zimbabwe’s GNP for the rest of time. If it’s in Zimbabwe dollars, it’ll buy one drop of wax for one of the candles.
* President Obama says that he’s ready to battle special interests. Judging from the hat he’s wearing, by “special interests” he means Cubs fans.
* Bob Scheiffer, who briefly was the CBS Evening News anchor in between Dan Rather and Katie Couric, actually gives Ron Paul a fair interview. It just so happens that when Scheiffer was doing the Evening News, its ratings were higher than they were during the late Rather years or at any time during the Couric regime. Looks like CBS stumbled into a good thing and then chucked it. I don’t think A-Rod would have lied to him.
* FBI pours cold water all over the SPLC’s contention that “hate groups” have increased by over half since the beginning of the decade. (Read: The Center has an increasingly loose definition of “hate” and “group” with each passing year, meaning that more and more existing “groups,” if they even exist beyond Mark Potok’s fertile imagination or as a matter of FBI informants dressing up in funny uniforms, qualify as “hate groups.”)
The FBI’s response is that in the time period from 1995 to 2007, hate crimes have decreased by 4% in raw numbers, and even more in per capita numbers, as America’s population has increased. Also, the FBI claims not to use the term “hate group” or track them.
I don’t know if I can believe that, because every once in awhile the FBI issues reports or official pronouncements to the contrary. Also, most of the “groups” that dress up in funny white uniforms and bent crosses are mostly filled and led by FBI informants.
Also, a George Mason University graduate student was working on a Ph.D. dissertation about a decade ago, and its thesis was that Federal law enforcement (including the FBI) have a symbiotic but unofficial relationship with Paranoia-Industrial Complex groups like the SPLC and the ADL. The Feds use SPLC/ADL to do the spying they legally can’t, and the SPLC/ADL’s gift in return is to be able to gloat (and raise money) when such information leads to actual arrests of some drunk who popped off in a bar to an FBI informant about wanting to blow something up, even if he wouldn’t be able to get near the capacity to do so in his wildest dreams.
