Monday, December 13, 2004
 HERE COMES THE FEDERAL CENSORSHIP COMMISSION AGAIN
This time the FCC is snooping around the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics. They're investigating complaints of indecency and they want tapes from NBC. And just what was the indecency? It seems that two opening ceremony actors depicted two lovers dancing in the sea. One was the goddess of fertility and the other was a pregnant woman with a glowing stomach. My guess is that the indecency complaints were filed by the Parent's Television Council. If you visit the Parent's Television Council website you will see a headline which reads "News Stories Try to Downplay Outrage over TV Indecency Even While FCC Complaints Soar." What the story doesn't explicitly mention is that about 99% of the complaints are being filed by Parent's Television Council members. I think it's safe to assume that these members are being encouraged to file those complaints. There's a link on the Parent's Television Council website for you to "File an FCC Complaint." The Parent's Television Council also seems to be targeting South Park. How about a Parent's Responsibility Council? How about parents getting together to share ways that they can control television use in their own homes? Maybe one parent can share stories with another parent about how to use the built in controls most televisions have that won't permit the children to access certain channels! Who knows, maybe parents can even share stories about how they control the number of hours their children can use the "plug-in-drug" every week. If these parents are really concerned maybe they need to remove televisions from every room in their home except the parent's bedroom. There's something to be said for getting the TV out of the parent's bedroom too. I wonder how many marriages out there would improve immediately if all TVs were removed from bedrooms. I'm not supporting the Parent's Television Council's position here, but I can make the case that insofar as children are concerned, the television has been one of the most negative technological improvements of the last 100 years. Simply put, televisions rob children of their minds. When a child reads he uses his powers of imagination. With every page, with every scene presented in the book the child involuntarily creates a mental image and puts that image into real-time motion. We put faces and voices with characters and create elaborate mental images of the interaction between them. The same can be said about radio. You listen with your ears, and create the moving images in your mind to fill in the rest. Years ago old Stan Freeberg created a promotional radio spot featuring a helicopter dropping a giant cherry onto the top of a mountain-sized ice cream sundae. Any child -- any parent listening to that created the mental image of the cherry under the helicopter and the drop. Man cannot accomplish that which he does not first imagine, and when we rob our children of their powers of imagination we limit their potential for achievement. Television uses the visual as well as the aural senses. The person watching a television show has no need to crank up the imagination for anything. The scene is presented to you in its entirety. You just sit there like a lump and soak it up. Not much mind-stretching there. But back to the Parent's Television Council and its campaign. We Americans are prudes. We need to get over it. We can watch movie after show after movie on television showing graphic violence. We can watch women being raped, people getting murdered, and nobody seems to get all that upset. But show two people making love and the world is about to come to an end. Show a gaping, sucking chest gunshot wound and all is fine. Show a breast and its the end of human civilization. If you read the story on the Parent's Television Council website you'll see L. Brent Bozell (whom I generally admire, by the way) compare the baring of Janet Jackson's breast to the Exxon Valdez disaster. Tell me again, how many waterfowl were killed by Janet's breast? SERVES THEM RIGHT Gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts. Fine. There is no way in the world that is going to have any affect on my life or marriage. I do think, however, that if they want to be married they should take all that comes with it. Now it seems that they are. Gay couples who got legally married back in the Spring are now filing for divorce. How long will it be before the Boston Yellow Pages have listings for gay divorce attorneys? How will the ads be worded? Is the attorney gay? Or does he just represent gay couples? One gay couple recently had a mighty custody case ... over the three cats. The cats eventually went with the professor. Another interesting twist .. and more evidence of the law of unintended consequences. Companies in Massachusetts who used to offer "domestic partner" benefits are canceling those programs. These companies see no sense in offering benefits to unmarried couples who could legally marry and qualify just the same way breeders do. The gay rights activists are saying that this just isn't fair. It isn't fair because the decision for a gay couple on whether or not to get married is "harder." Boo hoo. MORE ZERO COMMON SENSE POLICIES
 Yet another of the many reasons why responsible parents should never surrender the souls of their children to the totalitarian government schools. In case you were comfortable with your decision as a parent to turn over your most precious possession to the nanny state, time for a wakeup call.
Today's lesson in government idiocy comes to us courtesy of the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia. It seems last Thursday little 10-year-old Porsche Brown took a pair of scissors to school. That's right, a pair of scissors. These were 8-inch scissors. In other words, full-sized scissors...like sewing scissors. About the length of a width of a piece of paper.
And what did the fourth-grader do with the scissors? Did she threaten anyone with them? Of course not. But because the empty-headed wastes of oxygen that pass for "administrators" cannot think for themselves, they decided that just because she possessed the scissors, she violated their "zero tolerance" policy for potential weapons.
So what did they do? Did they take the scissors away from the child and call the parent? Not at all. That would be at least remotely sensible. No....they called the police and had the girl arrested. So the police arrived, handcuffed the 10-year-old child, and hauled her away in a patrol wagon. To their credit, the police eventually realized she had done nothing wrong and let her go.
But the government school overlords weren't done with their stupidity. They decided to suspend the girl for five days. They're now deciding whether she can return to her school, or be sent to a reform school. All over a pair of scissors.
Where you send your kids to school could be the most important decision you make as a parent. Turn them over to the government to be brainwashed, and this is what you get. This is how our government schools are teaching children to think, reason and resolve disputes. Good luck trying to sleep tonight.
THE POODLE NOT LETTING GO
The General Election of 2004 is now 6 weeks old and President Bush's Ohio victory has been certified. He won the state by over 100,000 votes. John Kerry conceded November 3rd. Game over. The Inauguration is January 20, 2005.
But wait...that's not all. The Poodle is asking Ohio county elections officials to allow his witnesses to inspect 92,000 ballots cast in that state for which no vote for president was cast. The Kerry campaign admits that this will not change the outcome of the election. So why bother?
Apparently John Francois Kerry can't let go of his defeat. Perhaps if he thinks he can hunt up a few extra votes and get his margin of defeat below 100,000, he'll be able to use it to raise money from the conspiracy nuts in 2008. Who knows.
sKerry was blown out on November 2nd. All this recounting and ballot inspecting is just the Democrats laying the excuse groundwork for 2008. After all, it's much easier to whine about being ripped off at the polls than it is to advance an actual agenda that might get you elected.
NOBEL STUPIDITY
Remember when I told you that the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize would be liberal, hate the United States and support the crippling of our economy through the disastrous Kyoto treaty? Well all of that has come true -- and more.
Collecting her Nobel Appeasement Prize on Friday, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai (that's really her name) whined that "Activities that devastate the environment and societies continue unabated." Translation: The United States is polluting the Earth and must be stopped.
When asked what her environmentalism had to do with peace, she said "The state of any country's environment is a reflection of the kind of governance in place, and without good governance there can be no peace." That's a bit of a stretch.
Remember, when it comes to the Euro-weenies that hand out these awards, whoever trashes the United States the best wins. 
Ah, Neal has been farked again. I wonder if he's burned that shirt yet? See more unlikely Playboy covers.
READING ASSIGNMENTS Tom Daschle is gone. Good. Or is it good? Could his replacement, Nevada Democrat Harry Reid, be even worse? Read of the experiences of a Reno talk show host. Gay marriage. Quite the triumph, right? Well .. here come the Gay divorces. Man, they ought to make a television show out of this. In one case cat custody was the big issue. This article says that snowboarders are now coveted by the ski industry. That's too bad. I was almost seriously hurt by a snowboarder last year in Breckenridge, Colorado. A friend of mine has just undergone six months of surgeries and rehab after being slammed by a snowboarder last year. Of course, the snowboarder didn't stop in either instance. Snowboarding is a thug culture .. the rap artists of the slopes. Most of them have no regard for skiers or others on the slopes. A few of them need to be put in jail to get a message across. An 87-year-old man uses a rifle to defend his property and his life. When the cops finally arrive they take his rifle. He didn't have a permit. Isn't America great! How long will it be before most telephone calls will be placed over the internet? Goodbye land lines? Here's Carl Luna .. mipping and mupping about something called "The Republican Talk Radio Machine." We understood it all when we saw that he is a college professor. After the botched Bernard Kerik nomination. Joe Lieberman's name is being tossed around for Secretary of Homeland Security. One of the few Democrats (Zell Miller being the other) that understands the need to defeat Islamic terrorism. Good choice, if he'll do it. Plus, the GOP governor of Connecticut would appoint his replacement, giving the Republicans a bigger edge in the Senate. An internal Army report is leaning toward allowing women in combat. It will be interesting to see how this goes over at the National Organization for Women.
A British columnist is calling Dulles Airport outside of Washington DC "A Third World Hell Hole." That about sums it up.
A good example why speech should not be banned, just because somebody doesn't like it, courtesy of Professor Mike Adams.
Protesters in the Ukraine have succeeded in forcing a second, fair presidential election, and Michael Barone says it was achieved through nonviolent means. He says this should serve as a lesson for U.S. foreign policy.
Robert Novak looks at a recent decision by President Bush not to meet an Italian visitor. Was it an effort to appease the Euro-weenies, or just an oversight?
'Tis the season for the annual barrage of efforts to ban Christmas, and John Leo runs down some of the more outrageous attempts. You never hear of any attempts to ban Kwanzaa displays, do you?
Incoming Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was only showing his ignorance by bashing Clarence Thomas on 'Meet The Press.' Armstrong Williams explains that you would never hear Reid say such things about Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
By all measures, the war in Iraq is going very well with light casualties. Unless of course, writes Frederick Chiaventone, your family members are the casualties. He says everybody is losing perspective on the largely successful Iraq war.
There are two sides to every story, unless of course you're a liberal, in which case there's the fairy tale side and that's it. Colin McNickle has some of the most ridiculous examples.
What's the best way to fix Social Security? The market-based system, which would cost a lot less. William G. Shipman of the Cato Institute tells us why.
A lot of people think that reporter that set up Rumsfeld with the question was out of line, but Zev Chafets disagrees, and says guys like that keep the Military and its Generals honest.
If the Democrats are going to rebound, they're going to have to kick out Michael Moore and Moveon.org. George Will finds another parallel example in history for this. | 
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