Teri O'Blog

Welcome Back, My Friends to the Show That Never Ends

Darn it! We didn’t get to these stories, although they were in the stack yesterday:

Watch where you step when you go out to check the mail, Mrs. Kravitz!

Reuters reported on 4/22/05 that dog owners in Turin, Italy will be fined upt to 500 euros ($650) if they don’t walk their pets at least three times a day. In addition, people will be banned form dyeing their pets’ fur or “any form of animal mutilation” for aesthetic reasons (tail docking, ear clipping). (Note to myself: when traveling to Turin, leave the Grecian Formula for Dogs at home.) If you’re thinking this will be tough to enforce, at least the thrice-a-day walks, the authorities say they will rely on neighborhood busybodies to rat out their neighbors. Is it just me, or do you suppose that maybe some dog owners might retaliate by leaving some of the by-products of these walks on the doorsteps of these civic-minded neighbors?

When will the WaPo go over Nancy Pelosi’s travel receipts with a microscope?

In its 4/24/05 edition, the Washington Post headline screaming “DeLay Airfare Was Charged To Lobbyist's Credit Card” announces a very lengthy story analyzing a series of credit card receipts ostensibly used by lobbyist Jack Abramoff to pay for Tom DeLay, his wife and some aides to go to London and Scotland in 2000. Here’s the lead:

“The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.”

The WaPo, like all our MSM friends, loves the anonymous sources. It reminds them of their Woodward and Bernstein days, back when they had free rein to conduct their character assassination campaigns against Republicans without anyone pointing out the many factual errors and instances of selective outrage about unethical behavior that are their specialty. Meanwhile, despite the headline, the article doesn’t contain any “smoking gun” or even any evidence period that Congressman DeLay did anything wrong.

With all this socko evidence of what a sleazebag Tom DeLay is, you’d think the Dems would want to reconstitute that ethics committee, wouldn’t you? But wait—that might mean that they have to look into Baghdad Jim McDermott, Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvannia (as CNN reported, he allegedly “helped two Pennsylvania-based companies owned and run by his four nephews and daughter by earmarking more than $9 million in federal contracts and grants for the two firms.”), and even the Minority Leader herself, Nancy Pelosi, who paid a $21,000 fine in November 2002 for illegally operating two PAC’s.

Speaking of Pelosi, when do you suppose the WaPo, the Liberal Death Star (the New York Times), or some other MSM rag, is going to do a front-page analysis of Nancy Pelosi’s 2001 trip to Puerto Rico? That’s the trip that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones said was paid for by a lobbyist until someone tipped her off and she amended her disclosure to match Ms. Pelosi’s and claim the real benefactor was an interest group. When questioned, Ms. Pelosi says "There's no discrepancy in the records on my trip," the California Democrat said. "So that's all I can answer for." (“Pelosi pressed for trip records,” Washington Times, 4/21/05).
Do you suppose that would have worked for Tom DeLay?

We also didn’t get to hear a hilarious Karl Rove soundbite, but maybe we’ll get to it next week. We’ll have a big show, that’s for sure, so don’t miss it!

Thanks so much for listening and for visiting my blog!

This is what I like to see when I open the paper!

They don’t like to talk about it, but the Chicago Tribune has an evil twin, the Libune. The Libune is the one that runs Valentines to democrats on the front page above the fold. If you are reading what is ostensibly a Tribune news story and you think it was written by Molly Ivins, that’s the Libune. I’m sorry to say that more than once, I’ve picked up what I thought was the Tribune, only to discover to my shock and horror that I was reading the Libune! I had that experience on Friday, April 15, 2005 while reading Rick Pearson’s story about Jim Oberweis entering the governor’s race (Sec. 2, p.1, below the fold). Mr. Pearson’s story includes the following quote:

And while Oberweis decried a loss of “good paying” manufacturing jobs in Illinois, he praised the success of the nations’s stell industry by noting production “hit a new all-time high,” albeit with 70% fewer jobs than we had 25 years ago.”

Even though it is a quote from the article, I omitted any quotes in the above paragraph so that you could see that it’s not at all clear where that last quote begins, since the phrase contains only one set of quotation marks, the ones at the end. But that doesn’t stop Mr. Pearson from continuing by saying

"Similar inconsistencies and controversies plagued Oberweis when he ran unsuccessfully campaigns for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004."

Is it just me, or are you a little confused about what Mr. Pearson means by “inconsistencies and controversies?” I know that stringing together a couple of out-of-context phrases is enough for liberals because they believe that “everybody knows” that Republicans are not only inconsistent and controversial, but also evil, but the rest of us find this sort of “reporting” unpersuasive. I wonder if the Libune will be documenting Barack Obama’s inconsistencies and controversies as they follow him around Washington documenting his first year in the Senate. Why do I envision a different sort of story, such as one about him walking across the Potomoc and then parting it?

It’s not always like that. For example, also on Friday, April 15, 2005, I was delighted to pick up the Metro section and see the following items above the fold:

The headline “Daley gun bills take a beating.”

The subhead, “State senators vote in step with NRA,” was a little less satisfying. I would have preferred “State senators vote in step with the rights of citizens,” but I guess that’s too much to expect. This is the MSM after all. In the story recounted the passage of the bill to get rid of those suburban handgun bans in the senate on a 37-21 vote. The bill needs a three-fifths vote to pass in the house because it would pre-empt the home rule powers of criminal-friendly towns like Wilmette, whose Village President Nancy Canafax was quoted as saying “People in Wilmette do not want handguns in their homes.” Really? Have you talked to Hale DeMar, Ms. Canafax? The spokesman for another town that should emblazon the slogan “Where Criminals Have Nothing to Fear From Our Cowering Citizenry,” Oak Park said “We certainly believe it’s the type of power that shouldn’t be taken from a municipality.” This guy is speaking for a town where a woman was recently killed with a hammer after leaving her abusive husband who had tried to starve her. Too bad this husband didn’t live in Florida. There, when your wife becomes inconvenient, the government not only allows you to starve her. It mandates it. But I digress …What I’m really wondering is when Oak Park is going to institute a ban on hammers. These quotes were good, but the best was one from our old buddy John Cullerton, a Chicago democrat who based on the legislation he sponsors, thinks we all need him to be our nanny. He said “When the suburban constituencies find out about these votes, they’re going to be upset. The NRA is going to start losing their grip on the legislature. These votes are going to get closer.” Keep dreaming, Senator. The hey day of gun grabbing is over because the Big Lie doesn’t work any more. Over 40 states allow law-abiding citizens to carry firearms. What you and the rest of your elitist, paternalistic buddies need to worry about is constituencies, suburban and otherwise, realizing how out of touch Chicago is with the reality that most of the rest of the country has accepted.

“I can attest, as a single fellow, looking for a relationship of the heterosexual kind, that the women of Chicago are positively absolutely dog crazy.”
So says a guy identified as K.A. in Mary Schmich’s column of April 15, 2005 about trends, including the “petrosexual,” a person who goes everywhere with his dog or is too close to her cat. As for the women of Chicago, and Chicagoland, being dog crazy, all I can say to K.A. is the cool ones are, so you’d better get over your dog aversion or you’re going end up with someone like that crazy cat lady on “The Simpsons.”

There's your trouble: you're an idiot!

DUH! I realized when I got off the air today that I had not identified our second "Who Said it?" the one who said

"if you want it just guns, we'll go beyond that because they're now trying to get it through that you can buy this fertilizer that everyone makes bombs with and they blew up Oklahoma with and you can get it by the truckload without a permit but a farmer has to get a permit to have the fertilizer for their hay or to have anything for their farm, but you can go--they've made it how where you can just load up your truck with this bomb-making fertilizer and go across the Brooklyn Bridge."
on Real Time with Bill Mahre, 4/15/05

I know what you're thinking: that has to be a brilliant thinker, maybe Condoleeza Rice or someone equally intelligent. No, that Einstein is none other than one of the Left's (and Saddam Hussein's) favorite public policy analysts, Dixie Chick Natalie Maines. She makes Janine Garofolo sound smart!

It's not easy to decipher this airhead's gibberish, but I think she is referring to ammonium nitrate, which is currently not subject to federal regulation, but is regulated by the states. About ten days ago, Cong. Maurice Hinchey (yes, the guy who said at a forum last fall that Karl Rove "set up Dan Rather" when speculating about the phony National Guard documents CBS used to try to swing the presidential election) introduced a bill to regulate ammonium nitrate at the federal level.

I can't tell you who "they" are. Natalie, maybe you should up your dose.

What I learned from the Schiavo Case, Part 3

Don’t let yourself get out-lawyered
At the end of the day, when all is said and done (insert your own cliché here), the Schiavo case was decided at the trial court level, when Judge Greer decided that the hearsay submitted by Michael Schiavo (his testimony, his brother and his brother’s wife, plus a friend of Terri’s) was “clear and convincing” evidence that she would not want to be kept alive with a feeding tube. In retrospect, many are stunned that evidence could carry the day, but as we learned in the O.J. trial, it’s not always about the best evidence. Sometimes its about the best lawyers.

Don’t say “no tubes for me” in front of your in-laws, even in jest
Has any young, healthy person in history, watching a gut-wrenching show about a tragically-disabled person ever said, “if that happens to me, and I’m not on a ventilator, don’t starve and dehydrate me. Keep me going until they find a cure.” OF COURSE NOT! When young and healthy, we all think “I wouldn’t want to live like that.” I’m sure that Christopher Reeve, when he was out riding horses and making movies, would have said the same thing. After an accident, perspective changes to where the disabled watching Terri Schiavo being euthanized by her adulterous husband think “I wouldn’t want to be killed like that.” If you have a tough time understanding this one, the next time you meet someone in his 70’s or 80’s, tell him about the death of an elderly relative and blithely remark “He was 79 and had lived a good life.”

Frank Capra understood the public better than anyone
In his classic films, like “Meet John Doe,” Capra shows the American people perfectly, at first being taken in by demagoguery, but gradually finding their common sense, learning the facts and rejecting the dishonesty of the villains who are trying to dupe them to advance their malignant agendas. Initial polls showed overwhelming support for Michael Schiavo’s decision to eliminate the inconvenient disabled wife. As people learned the facts of the case, the did a 180. (see next item)

The “Big Lie” still works

“A poll completed after the controversial death of Terri Schiavo finds that eight-in-ten (80%) likely voters say that a disabled person who is not terminally ill or in a coma, and not being kept alive by life support should not, in the absence of a written directive to the contrary, be denied food and water. By a three-to-one (44% to 14%) margin, likely voters say that, when there is conflicting evidence on the wishes of a patient, elected officials should order that a feeding tube remain in place. The survey, conducted by Zogby International on behalf of the Christian Defense Coalition, was conducted March 30 to April 2, 2005 and has a margin of error of +/-3.2 percentage points.


The same poll also finds a majority (56%) agree that Schiavo’s husband Michael should have turned guardianship for the severely-disabled woman over to her parents based on his decision to have a long-term serious relationship with another woman. By a two-to-one (44% to 24%) margin, with one-in-three (32%) undecided, the survey finds that an incapacitated person should be presumed to want to live in the absence of written instructions such as a “living will.”
Zogby Poll, conducted March 30 to April 2, 2005

The MSM’s disinformation campaign seemed effective, but sadly for the Left, they no longer have a monopoly on information.

The Terri Schiavo Case: What I Learned, Part 2

Many people don’t know what constitutes “the government.”

In the two weeks leading up to Terri Schiavo’s deliberate killing by government action for the crime of not being able to speak for herself, our mainstream media friends decided that rather than actually report on the facts of the case they would better serve the public by conducting a series of polls. These polls consisted of misleading questions and were designed to demonstrate how the overwhelming majority of Americans were outraged that “the government” (read Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist and President Bush) interfered in Michael Schiavo’s plan to eliminate the inconvenient existence of his disabled wife.
“Keep the government out of my private medical decisions!” they quoted the angry public as demanding. So here’s my question: just who do they think was demanding that the Schindlers be strip searched prior to visiting their daughter? Who insisted that police be posted in Terri’s room to make sure that her mother didn’t violate the judge’s order by daring to place an ice chip in her dying daughter’s thirsty mouth? Was it the Boy Scouts? The American Humane Society? It was---are you ready for this?!—THE GOVERNMENT! Yes, Terri Schiavo was deliberately killed by government action, so I ask those who say “keep the government out of my private life!” and yelp that Congress had no right to interfere, where were you when Mrs. Schindler’s insides were being ripped out by watching her daughter die of thirst, being told by the government that she couldn’t help?
If it weren’t so tragic, it would be hilarious to listen to this nonsense.