An assault on First Amendment Rights in Minnesota?

Minnesota Democrats Exposed; a blogger, who, in my opinion, has been a thorn in the DFLs side since its inception, has come under a lawsuit by Blois Olson (Blois?!? gads! I thought Pusateri was bad--and Pusateri is a last name (for some belly laughs check this out). Do you pronounce it Blou-ah? You can never tell with French) who is a consultant for this firm. Note:

The lawsuit pits Blois Olson, the president of PR firm New School Communications and a well-known Democratic political commentator, against Michael Brodkorb, a Republican operative who publishes the blog "Minnesota Democrats Exposed."

So Blois is a mere Democratic political commentator while Brodkorb is a--gasp--republican operative (insert musical stinger here)! Seems to me like Blois isn't the only one with an agenda. But I digress.

The issue here is one of libel vs. freedom of political speech, which, until the passage of this encroachment was pretty well protected under the First Amendment. Like the virtual ignorance with regard to the first of the triad of rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence, we are, I am afraid, about to see the erosion of our most basic right to freedom of political speech which was heretofore unfettered under the First Amendment. Should MDE argue and lose its case, you may as well just go and scrap the whole damned bill of rights, as it will be deemed meaningless, with its application subject to the whims of those who would stand to gain the most by having other voices silenced. Even if MDE argues and wins, the financial costs for Brodkorb to mount such a defense will be substantial. Lawyers ain't cheap. The culminative effect of the fear of possible litigation will only serve to put a damper on what would otherwise be robust political discourse; which would still amount to be an absolute abomination in a society supposedly built on unfettered discourse in such arenas.

Either way, this is a lose-lose situation.


(Filed under First Amendment Assaults)

Finally calling a spade...

From here:

Gen. Pace Criticizes Sen. Murtha Remark
Jan 05 5:24 PM US/Eastern
Email this story

By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON

A Democratic congressman's remarks about the military are damaging to troop morale and to the Army's efforts to rebound from a recruiting slump, the nation's top general said Thursday.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked at a Pentagon news conference to comment on remarks by Rep. John Murtha, D- Pa., a Marine Corps veteran who has become a leading voice in Congress advocating an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Pace was asked specifically about an ABC News interview this week in which Murtha, 73, said if he were eligible to join the military today he would not, nor would he expect others to join.

"That's damaging to recruiting," Pace said. "It's damaging to morale of the troops who are deployed, and it's damaging to the morale of their families who believe in what they are doing to serve this country."

It's time Murtha takes a long walk. Off a short pier.


(Filed under The Fifth Column)

Regarding Abramhoff...... plenty of pork to go around...

From here:

Democrats Benefited from Abramoff Contributions, Too
By Melanie Hunter
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
January 05, 2006

(CNSNews.com) - The National Republican Senatorial Committee said Wednesday that 40 of 45 members of the Senate Democrat Caucus have taken money from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his associates and Indian tribe clients.

Abramoff pled guilty Tuesday to conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion. He also plans to implicate a number of U.S. lawmakers and congressional staffers in a bribery scandal.

Among those named by the NRSC as the worst examples of "Democrat hypocrisy" for taking money from Abramoff and his associates are: Sen. Byron Dorgan, (D-N.D.) who received at least $79,300; Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who received at least $45,750; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who received at least $68,941 and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who received at least $6,250.

I agree with The Captain to "let the chips fall where they may" on this affair. But with members of both sides looking like they took a few rolls in the pig pen, this ought to be interesting.


(Filed under Pass the Pork)

Something tells me they're not scoring any brownie points for this...

From here:

.By Gideon Long

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A suicide bomber caused carnage at a Shi'ite funeral and guerrillas ambushed a vital fuel convoy outside Baghdad in a wave of attacks that killed nearly 60 people on Wednesday, the bloodiest day in Iraq for weeks.

Car bombs went off in the capital and in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala, suggesting a level of coordination that may be a response by Sunni Arab insurgents to last month's largely peaceful parliamentary elections.

The funeral attack was the bloodiest single incident since the vote, killing 36 and wounding 40 in the town of Miqdadiya, 100 km (60 miles) northeast of the capital. The area is rapidly emerging as the most violent in the country, eclipsing the previous hotspots of Falluja and Ramadi to the west of Baghdad.

The victims were gathered at a cemetery to mourn a local member of the Dawa party, headed nationally by Shi'ite Islamist Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Assailants fired mortar bombs, forcing the mourners to take cover amid the gravestones, before a bomber wearing an explosive vest blew himself up among them, security officials said.

I don't know where these idiots in dirty night shirts think they're going to get by perpetrating violence on other Muslims. I have a feeling that continued stunts such as this will lead to a backlash of the Iraqi people, not against the U.S., but against the murderous thugs who think nothing of wiping out innocent civilians, and touting it as a "holy act."

(Filed under Religion of Peace?)

Those "peaceful" Palestinians are at it again!

Seems like the Israelis aren't the only ones having problems with them. From here:

GAZA (Reuters) - Egyptian border police fired two bullets in the air to force back Palestinians who tried to cut through a fence on the Gaza Strip's southern frontier on Wednesday, witnesses said.

They said the Palestinians had surged into no-man's land after Gaza gunmen bulldozed a concrete barricade on the border.

(Filed under Religion of Peace?)

A leftist hero assumes room temperature...

The senile old gray lady has This Story:

.
Wilkinson, Defiant Figure of Red Scare, Dies at 91 

By RICK LYMAN

Published: January 4, 2006

 

Frank Wilkinson, a Los Angeles housing official who lost his job in the Red Scare of the early 1950's and later became one of the last two people jailed for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether he was a Communist, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Isn't it something how Rick Lyman manages to toss in this zinger, a la Wellstone Memorial:

Mr. Wilkinson, whose experiences inspired a half-century campaign against government spying (emphases added), had been ill for several months and was recovering from surgery and a fall, said Donna Wilkinson, his wife of 40 years. "It was just the complications of old age, " Mrs. Wilkinson said.

Nope... no agenda there... move along.

The NYT apparently can't help themselves in their quest to resucitate their trite NSA straw man "spy story", even when honoring the death of one of their own. BTW, lest you think that Frank Wilkinson was merely an innocent standing on principle:

Mr. Wilkinson consistently refused to testify about his political beliefs. He had, in fact, joined the Communist Party in 1942, according to "First Amendment Felon," a 2005 biography by Robert Sherrill. He left the party in 1975.

(Filed under The Fifth Column)

And for the latest in the West VA. coal mining incident...

The New York Times, always being on the vanguard of what is current, at the time of this posting, still has this story posted on their web site:

January 4, 2006

12 Miners Found Alive 41 Hours After Explosion

 

By JAMES DAO

 

SAGO, W.Va., Wednesday, Jan. 4 - Forty-one hours after an explosion trapped 13 men in a West Virginia coal mine here, family members and a state official said 12 of the miners had been found alive Tuesday night.

Earlier Tuesday evening, the body of one miner was found 11,200 feet from the mine entrance, within a few hundred feet of a vehicle used to transport the workers deep into the mine, company officials said. The miner was not identified, and the cause of his death was unclear.

Joe Thornton, deputy secretary for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the rescued miners were being examined at the mine shortly before midnight and would soon be taken to nearby hospitals. Mr. Thornton said he did not know details of their medical condition.

Outside the Sago Baptist Church, where people had gathered across the street from the mine, family and friends of the miners hugged each other and shed tears of joy as they learned the news.

"It's a miracle," said Loretta Ables, who said her fiancé, Fred Ware, was among the survivors. "Everyone was telling us they were probably dead."

Now, anyone who has been awake for an hour knows by now that this story is actually the case. But the Old York Times, the gray senile old lady, has somehow neglected to remove this story.

Probably too busy propping up their latest straw man to be bothered with an update.



(Filed under The Fifth Column)

And in the "If things aren't bad enough already"...department

I find out Jesus is a democrat.

From here

Regarding the recent special election results, I'd like to give a shout out to my good friend, Jesus Christ.

Thank you, Jesus, for wriggling your way into the hearts of voters and guiding them to vote in accordance with your teachings.

We are on our way to replacing the blasphemers (the warmongers, the greedy and the pious) who hijacked our Christian faith for the sole purpose of legislative power.

Let's make 2006 the year voters take away the Republicans' ability to enact legislation which furthers human misery on the local, state, national and international levels.

Yeah... I'm sure Jesus does a happy-dance every time an abortion is performed.


(Filed under moonbat adventures)

stranger things have happened... haven't they?

On my "Mitch's Meme" post, I mentioned Nihlist in Golf Pants(http://nihlist.blogspot.com) as one of the blogs which I read daily. Little did I know, that in that post I actually linked to this nihilist (http://nihilist.blogspot.com") instead. I thought perhaps, at first, that it was merely Sisyphus himself, playing a practical joke (that site also had a top-list.. only it was a top 15 list). Then, I thought perhaps I had been flung into a parallel universe (Picard to Worf--beam me up).

Just goes to show what happens when you type in a url from memory.

Oh well.


(Filed under housekeeping)

Regarding the new "talk" station in town.....color me "unimpressed"

I had a chance to listen to Pat Kessler's show today on 100.3 FM (KTLK)... Yawwn radio. Kessler pretty much played an Ed McMahon role with his guests, which included an ACLU degenerate, as well as another moonbat (Scott Cameron) who delights in keeping a public count of our war dead on a sign at a DFL HQ in Duluth, which just happens to be next to a military recruiting station. Never once did Kessler challenge his guests' views. Instead, he actually appeared surprised when some callers, including the mother of a dead soldier, expressed disdain for someone who would display such a tally (Actually, Cameron, a Viet Nam vet, is probably from the same crowd who would protest should the U.S. military put out the stats of enemy kills to measure success in Iraq--but that's fodder for another post).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, that is, if the call letters (KTLK) have anything whatsoever to do with this station.

The fact that they have Limbaugh on in the midday is like putting prime rib in between two slices of moldy bread (Brian Lambert and Sarah Janecek on are after Limbaugh). I had a chance to turn the station back on during my drive home from work (around 3:50p or so)... I was treated to a minute and a half of dead air, followed by four minutes of fill-in PSAs. Real exciting. More like a station that comes from Tower, Minnesota than one that broadcasts from a top 20 market.

It may be interesting to see how this station develops after a year or so on the air.

Then again, maybe not.



(Filed under moonbat adventures)

A meme from Mitch

A meme I picked up on from Mitch's site:

FOUR JOBS YOU'VE HAD IN YOUR LIFE
1) Trade Checker at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange

2) DJ at She-Nanigans in Eau Claire..

3) Radio commercial writer/producer/voiceover

4) Short-order/pizza cook at many establishments (I would also add telemarketer to that list, but I'd never admit to it)



FOUR MOVIES YOU COULD WATCH OVER AND OVER

1) Citizen Kane

2) This Is Spinal Tap (agree with Mitch on this)

3) Night of the Hunter (a 1953 flick with Robert Mitchum)

4) The Blues Brothers



FOUR BOOKS YOU COULD READ AGAIN & AGAIN

1) The Last Jihad

2) Enthusiasm Makes the Difference (Norman Vincent Peale)

3) The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

4) In One Era and Out the Other by Sam Levinson



FOUR CITIES/PLACES YOU'VE LIVED IN
1) Berwyn, IL (a near-west Chicago suburb; born and raised there)

2) Eau Claire, WI

3) Bloomer, WI (jump rope capital of the world)

4) Marty, MN (a/k/a Pearl Lake)

(among others)



FOUR TV SHOWS YOU LOVE TO WATCH (don't watch much TV, but here goes)
1) Family Guy

2) Mythbusters

3) Ghost Hunters

4) The Best of Mother Angelica (EWTN)


FOUR PLACES YOU'VE BEEN ON VACATION

1) Canada

2) Mexico

3) Every state of the Contiguous 48 west of the Mississippi

4) Florida and many East Coast states.



FOUR WEBSITES YOU VISIT DAILY ... OOOOooohhh.. there are SO MANY, but here goes..

1) Peace Like a River

2) Hammerswing

3) KAR; Nihlist (those two just go together like peas and carrots)

4) The Night Writer.


FOUR OF YOUR FAVORITE FOODS

1) My wife's rice stuffing (mom's recipe) with chorizo sausage.

2) An honest-to-pete Chicago-style hot dog (Mitch says Polish), with onions, relish, cucumbers, pickles, tomatoes, and sport peppers, topped with celery salt on a poppyseed bun.

3) A Chicago-style Italian Beef and sausage combination served on a hoagie dipped in its own gravy, with hot Italian giardinera and roasted sweet bell peppers (I just served this on New Years day...if you want a great recipe, let me know)

4) My wife's three-bean hot dish, served on a tortilla with habanero sauce.



FOUR PLACES YOU'D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW

1) Hawaii (never been there, though I'd like to visit)

2) Clearwater Beach, Florida

3) Arizona

4) My travel trailer at my seasonal campsite near Detroit Lakes (if it were summer, that is)




(Filed under Fun Stuff; Fun Stuff with da MOB)

On the Russian-Ukraine Gas Controversy..

Regarding this story, there is no other more reliable authority than St. Cloud's own King Banaian. Read the link, and you will be as up to speed as anyone.

The politics of "Global Inequality"?

In another exercise in liberal self-loathing, Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian writes this:

But perhaps an even bigger worry is that the politics of global inequality is characterised by a wishful naivety. Tony Blair's Commission for Africa in March last year posited its analysis of a turnaround in Africa on the existence of a new generation of African governments. From the start, some argued there was no such thing, and their voices have only grown louder in the summer, as the Ethiopian government, whose president was a member of the commission, shot dozens of demonstrators and detained thousands. More recently, criticism of Uganda's Yoweri Museveni has come to a head over the imprisonment of an opposition leader. A batch of books this year, including Matthew Lockwood's stinging analysis The State They're In and Martin Meredith's history of the past 50 years in Africa, point to the fact that most African governments have a poor, often abysmal, record of delivering development, and there's little reason to believe that has changed.

So there is fat chance that 2005 made poverty history. It finally offered a decent debt deal after 20 years of campaigning; there was a promise, yet to be fulfilled, to double aid by 2010; and there was a surprise goody thrown in - a hugely ambitious target for universal access to HIV/Aids treatment. In terms of G8 summits, it was a big deal; in terms of a breakthrough for Africa, forget it. Aids and climate change will ensure that the suffering of millions of Africans will plague our consciences for decades to come.

But for all its shortcomings, the coming-of-age of the politics of global inequality is being driven by an important issue that will ensure it stays on the international agenda: at its heart is a question of legitimacy. The west's global dominance is being challenged as unjust - whether that is by the World Trade Organisation's new bloc of leading developing countries or even by the fanatical violence of the Islamist extremists. The huge wealth generated by globalisation, with its equally huge ecological footprint, cannot largely be for the benefit of a tiny proportion of the world's population.

Increasingly we question our own legitimacy, as well as being called to account by others. 2005 spurred a new expectation across the developed world from the new campaigns in Japan to the US that politicians have to show they do more than just talk about it. That's no small achievement.

What liberals don't realize, is that their own love affair with oppressive dictatorial governments contributes to world poverty more than anything else. Oh, sure, they'll have their Live-Aid concerts, Bono will go globetrotting to try to shame industrialized countries into forgiving debt; and Mike Farrell will be trotting about the morning alphabet talk shows, decrying the fact of how evil we are for not "sharing our resources". Yet liberals continue to embrace the oppressive systems of government that perpetuate these miseries.

Money can be thrown at the problem of global poverty until the cows come home. There will never, I repeat never, be a solution to the problem until a healthy dose of freedom and capitalism--the very things that liberals loathe and despise, are interjected (yes, even forced) into the situation. Without those ingredients, Bono and other limousine liberals are assured of having a cause celebre ad infinitum.

But then again, liberals have never really been about solutions, have they?

(Filed under World Affairs, limousine liberals)

I hugged my boy goodbye, today...

My son is off to Detroit Lakes, where he will join his comrades on their trek back to Camp Shelby and then to Iraq. It never really hit me until I held him in my arms for the last time for at least another 15 months. But it was hard. Really hard. I told him that I love him. And that I'm proud of him. Doug wasn't his normal joking self. This time he was stoic. He knows what is at stake. He knows the possible dangers that await him. At the point that I released him, he was no longer a boy. He was a man. He was a soldier; steely-eyed, with a firm resolve. Of a human being I have never been more proud. I watched him drive out of the driveway, and went back into the kitchen to finish cleaning after the days festivities. And I wept.

God keep him.


(Filed under Heroes)

A very Happy New Year

I'm still busy doing family things... Right now we're preparing for a party for my son, Douglas, who will be going back to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, on January 3rd for some further training before a year's deployment to Iraq sometime in February or March. I apologize for the lack of posts here in the past few days.. I should be back to regular blogging in the next week.

Know, however, that I appreciate each and every one of you who stops by now and then--and I wish you all, in the words of my dear-departed mother, "An abundance of God's blessings throughout the New Year and beyond."

Peace.

-Leo-


(Filed under Housekeeping, Heroes)