Random Readings, September 16

This is a new thing I'm going to try to post.

I typically read at least a dozen articles/blog posts daily, keep the tabs open (right now I'm counting 34, including the window I'm typing in, and NOT including the tabs in the 2 or 3 restorable Firefox Sessions I had open days ago), slow my browser to a crawl, and never figure out how to share them with anyone who reads this blog.

So - I'm going to just share the links with minimal or no commentary. Here goes:

2010 Elections

A peeping Tom campaign staffer for Rep. John Adler (D-NJ) is accused of trespassing on the property of his GOP opponent, Jon Runyan, and taking pictures of Runyan's 8 year old daughter in front of the house.

Courtland Milloy, in a WaPo opinion piece, goes nuts with vindictiveness at the primary defeat of current D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, complete with allusions to the Soviet Union, the Confederacy, and fascist Italy, because Fenty and D.C. Schools chair Michelle Rhee had the nerve to fire a bunch of government employees and stop abetting homelessness, and apparently didn't meet with Maya Angelou quickly enough. Really. No, really.

TheRightScoop shares a great monologue from Mark Levin.

Sean Duffy (via Allah at HotAir) has an absolutely awesome ad. Gotta love all the non-professional politicians running this year:


Rep. John Boozman is absolutely destroying incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln(D-AR) in the polls (as in left-leaning Talking Points Memo's poll average has him up by almost 30 percentage points.)

Frank J. at IMAO aims his delightful snark toward Harry Reid's calling Chris Coons(D-Senate Candidate, Delaware) his "pet".

C. Edmund Wright, at American Thinker, takes Karl Rove to task for hurting the conservative cause.

The Christian Science Monitor: "Could Christine O'Donnell Actually Win In November?" (HT to Stacy McCain for this one)

Exurban Jon offers his thoughts on how Christine O'Donnell can win the general election, after her victory in the Delaware GOP Senate primaries Tuesday.

Islam, etc.

IHateTheMedia has this analysis of zakat(usually translated as "alms-giving", one of the 5 pillars of Islam) and Barack Obama's remarks in support of facilitating it.

Molly Norris, who suggested (and later backed away from) "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day", has now been advised by the FBI to effectively disappear. DaTechGuy has a challenge to the scum who've threatened her and others.

Jimmie Bise schools Robert Wright of the New York Times on his ignorance of the Bible.


Miscellanea

Susan Sarandon thinks that "The nation mourned" when she and Tim Robbins ended their conspicuous non-marriage late last year. Greg Gutfeld helpfully (and humorously) destroys that notion.

Thomas Sowell, one of my intellectual heroes, points out the ways in which the terms "liberal" and "conservative" today connote almost exactly the opposite of their original meaning.

Erick Erickson gets hate mail. I'd like to receive this level of vitriol sometime soon.

John Hawkins at RightWingNews names his 40 favorite conservative blogs for the third quarter of 2010. Which reminds me, I need to do a post on BlogCon and the 9/12 march which I attended last week thanks to FreedomWorks.

A Screenshot Tour Of The New Twitter.

Cubachi on the United Kingdom's impending privatization of its Royal Mail postal service.

P.J. Gladnick at NewsBusters, on a conservative student group being kicked out of the campus club rush at Palm Beach State College, and the silence of the local newspaper.

John Bolton just might make an awesome president.

9/11 - beyond the numbers

Some of us have a tendency to remember great historical events as facts and figures, tangible and quantifiable. This is completely necessary if we're to avoid inaccurate interpretation of these events. But it also presents an incomplete picture; any current or historical event is much, much more than a count of those killed and injured, a list of names of those involved, an estimate of financial cost, a beginning and ending time.

The Al-Qaeda launched attacks 9 years ago are no different. We can state empirically that 2,977 innocents died (among them 341 firefighters, 10 EMTs and paramedics, and 60 police officers), but that doesn't remotely capture the shock, the horror, the anger of that day.

WARNING: graphic images below. View them anyway.



We can easily remember that hundreds of people jumped thousands of feet to their certain deaths. We can and should also remember the unimaginable inferno that made that decision reasonable to them.



It's accurate history to say "United Flight 175 struck WTC2 at 9:03 AM". But those words don't remotely capture the sudden clarity to everyone who saw this happen in person or on live TV - that this was not an accident, that our country was under attack by evil men unknown to almost all Americans prior to that day.



No statistics can describe the awareness that other cities were targeted, and the worry about how many more attacks would occur before the day was over.



The courage of the first responders, who went towards the scene when others were running away, cannot be quantified and analyzed logically. Yet who among us doubts its existence?



3 men, 50 stars, and 13 stripes. And with them, a gesture of patriotic defiance amid the loss of a battle in a long fight.

Remember everything about that day. And fight on.

Times Square bombing suspect arrested

MSNBC reports:

NEW YORK - Authorities arrested a suspect in the attempted weekend car bombing in Times Square, NBC News' justice correspondent Pete Williams reported early Tuesday morning.

A U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, Shahzad Faisal, was arrested Monday night on Long Island, Williams reported.

Earlier, an official told The Associated Press that the potential suspect recently traveled to Pakistan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the case was at a sensitive stage.

If you haven't read much on this yet, the above MSNBC link is pretty good background.

My thoughts?

1. The fact that the truck was parked at the front door of the Viacom building (Viacom owns Comedy Central) should strongly suggest, to anyone with a modicum of sense, that the recent South Park controversy might have had something to do with this.

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's warning against dismissing the threats of "nobodies" was spot-on.

3. I wonder if the idea of blaming "Hateful Racist Teabaggers" for violence will be slowed down at all by the arrest of a perp from a country that's 96% Muslim?

4. No one should take that much comfort in this guy's incompetence. All he needed was a little bit more skill with detonators to succeed in his mission, and then you'd have hundreds of dead New Yorkers.

5. If he bought the SUV before the South Park episodes aired (the MSNBC article describes it as "weeks ago", which doesn't make this clear) then what other targets did he have in mind?

UPDATE(1): Melissa Clouthier posts more details and analysis.

UPDATE(2): Dan Riehl suggests Faisal may have been selling real-estate on Craigslist.

UPDATE(3): And The Other McCain, with the fantastic title "NYC Bomb Suspect Faisal Shahzad Arrested at JFK; Glenn Beck Still at Large"

Comedy Central surrenders to petty thugs

I'm a huge South Park fan. It probably helps that the creators' generous streaming of every episode online works well for someone like me who doesn't DVR or watch TV as scheduled very often. So naturally, I find it absolutely appalling that Comedy Central has censored the most recent episode.

What disgusts me even more with this incident is that the group "Revolution Muslim" "warning" South Park creators that they'll end up like Theo Van Gogh are absolute nobodies. They're nothing but talk. And Comedy Central's creators have given into their threat, which is absolute cowardice, especially considering that these clowns are 5 or 6 steps from being willing and able to do actual harm to anyone.

If anyone's interested in letting these fools know what you think, contact info for Revolution Muslim (their website is down, I got this from the cached version):

• Phone: (212) 203-7606
• E-mail: revolutionmuslim@gmail.com

Contact info for Comedy Central:

• Viewer feedback form
• Phone: (212) 767-8600
• Fax: (212) 767-8592
• E-mail: mail@comedycentral.com
  

In remembrance of Gayle R. Greene (d. September 11,2001)

Gayle R. Greene was 51 years old, a vice-president at financial services company Marsh & McLennan, an enthusiastic Christmas decorator, and a young-at-heart woman who enjoyed spending time with her close-knit circle of friends.

Though she was heartily committed to her work, almost always having her laptop at hand, Gayle was also widely traveled, and took her expeditions seriously. She loved Alaska, having stood on a glacier there, and Hawaii - her ashes were scattered off of the Na Pali coast on Kaua'i several months after her death, as she had asked for.

Her brother-in-law Don Welch writes this on the Legacy guestbook in her memory:

Gayle will be greatly missed, not only by Eileen, Donna and Janel, but many others who's lives she touched. Gayle was very special and caring for others. This is evidenced by the life long impact that she has made on these 3 women's lives. We will miss you Gayle, but never forget you.

On September 11, 2001 Gayle Greene had planned on finishing her work in advance of another trip with her friend and roommate Eileen Carey. Sadly, she would never get the chance to make that journey; her office was on the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center, which was shortly to be struck by American Airlines Flight 11.

Let's celebrate the life of Gayle Greene, and the lives of the other 2,996 which were cut short 8 years ago, and remember the evil men and those behind them who perpetrated this crime. Let's remember, and have the resolve to keep this from happening again.

Gayle Greene, you are loved and missed, and I hope honored by this as well.