Lies, And The Lying Liars That Tell Them

Oh my...what a large nose you have, grandmother...

I keep ranting about this topic. I keep saying that it isn't all about my politics.

It’s about telling the TRUTH.

I just want to open a newspaper or turn on the TV and have the journalists and other so called "news people" give me information I can use to decide what is going on in the world--not inundate me with editorial commentary and skewed, mindless bullshit that I have to filter through or ignore totally as I go about my life as a voting citizen of the United States of By God America.

Now a French TV exec admits that he would rather publish lies than deliver the truth if the TRUTH would help a political party that he personally opposes.

One of France's leading TV news executives has admitted censoring his coverage of the riots in the country for fear of encouraging support for far-right politicians.

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been "excessive" and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

"Politics in France is heading to the right and I don't want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television," Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

"Having satellites trained on towns across France 24 hours a day showing the violence would have been wrong and totally disproportionate ... Journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting," he said.

I have just one rhetorical question for Messier Dassier:

"Messier Dassier, you have to THINK about what you're broadcasting, do you?"

Yes Messer Dassier, that is EXACTLY the problem I have with the so called “professional” media types like yourself. You aren’t satisfied with merely delivering the news. YOU want to SHAPE the news to match your own worldview and political agenda.

I want INFORMATION....

Not editorials.

And I want, as a minimum, to be informed in advance of the difference.

OK, So I'm Busy...

Call Me A Thespian

I feel guilty if I don't have a few hundred words posted by 6:00 AM most days, but today I've had other obligations like sleeping and working on the design for the set for the Ritz Theater Dickens Play and and doing lighting for the CAPE Theater and as a result...

I haven't had time to write down what is bouncing around in my head.

For a guy that has very little theater background, I must admit that I've been fortunate enough to hit a couple of home runs in the past couple of years. I've acted and built/designed sets in the St. Simons Island Casino Theater that was built back in the 1940's, and now I'm working in the Ritz Theater that was constructed in 1898.

You can almost hear the echos of the fameous old Vaudville artists in the wings...

The newest troup, the CAPE Theater, uses borrowed space. Here is a picture of my friends doing their thing in the fellowship hall at the local Presbyterian Church.

The show opened tonight...

Important Health Warning

Caution: Look Before You Sit…

I thought that I should point out to you that there is a guy out in Colorado that claims that having your rear end glued to a toilet seat causes nightmares and diabetes.

You heard me right—mixing super glue, porcelain, and your butt cheeks together can cause your pancreas to stop making insulin. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen the story in the news with my own eyes:

Denver-A man who sued Home Depot claiming a prank left him glued to a toilet seat in a bathroom said Tuesday he's willing to take a lie detector test to dispel any doubts about his story.

Bob Dougherty sued the home-improvement chain last month, alleging employees at a Louisville, Colo., store ignored his pleas for help after he got stuck on a restroom toilet seat in October 2003…

The lawsuit said Dougherty, 57, was recovering from heart bypass surgery at the time and thought he was having a heart attack.

Dougherty said he suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, nightmares and diabetes after the incident.

"It's not about the money. I want my health back. I want to be back to normal," he said. "I want to make sure this doesn't happen to anybody ever, ever again."

Don’t get me wrong here because I don’t mean to make fun of Mr. Dougherty, I just want to warn everybody of the potential health hazard this represents and demand that the government and perhaps the American Medical Association get to work spending a few million dollars doing some research on this phenomena.

If it is true, this is serious stuff. I’m afraid that I’m going to develop some kind of bathroom phobia unless the medical “experts” and my government “officials” don’t step in and reassure me a little.

What is even worse is that apparently Bob has had this problem before:

The Rocky Mountain News reported Dougherty made similar allegations in his hometown of Nederland. Colorado Bureau of Investigation records show Dougherty pleaded guilty to filing a false police report in 1976, something Dougherty said he did not remember, KUSA-TV in Denver reported.

Ron Trzepacz, former director of operations in Nederland, where Dougherty lives, told the News in Tuesday's editions that Dougherty came to him in the summer of 2004 claiming he had been glued to a toilet seat in the town's visitor center but pulled himself free.

Trzepacz said he inspected the bathroom and found "no indication that anything had been on the toilet seat." He said no police report was filed. Trzepacz, who now lives in Franklinville, N.Y., did not immediately return a telephone message left by the AP.

Dougherty called Trzepacz's claims "nonsense" and said, "I don't even know the guy."

Dougherty's lawyer, Mark Cohen, said his client was willing to take a polygraph test.

"The allegation (by Trzepacz) doesn't make any sense," Cohen told The Associated Press.

I just had a horrible thought.

Maybe it’s not diabetes and post traumatic stress that we should be worrying about. Maybe Mr. Dougherty has developed some kind of rare medial condition—a condition that causes him to secrete super glue from his ass cheeks. How horrible it would be if you could never sit down with a book or newspaper in the restroom again without fearing spending the rest of your life there glued to the seat.

Wouldn’t a remedy be to just go ahead and glue your own toilet seat to your own ass and just live with it 24/7?

You could have custom tailor made pants made to fit, and wouldn’t it be great if you could have a special seat installed in your car that would eliminate having to stop in rest areas on long trips?

There is some hope for our safe restroom future, because if you read a little further you learn that “it really is about money:”

Dougherty's suit against Home Depot, filed late last month in Boulder County District Court, seeks $3 million. It claims he suffered pain, humiliation and financial loss.

OK, I’m through fooling around here.

The REAL reason that I mentioned this story in the first place is to say that I believe that we need to make a fundamental change to the tort laws in this country.

If we changed the law so that the LOSER PAYS the cost of the winner’s legal fees in these type of lawsuits, most of this kind of stupid crap would be eliminated.

Fingers in Wendy’s chili, old ladies scalding themselves with McDonald’s coffee, self-adhesive toilet seats--where does it all end?

If firms like Home Depot knew that they didn’t have to settle out of court to avoid the risk of spending MILLIONS of dollars on lawyers defending themselves against the allegations made by idiot morons like Bob Dougherty, they could do a much better job selling me cheep lumber and paint.

Don’t you agree?

Everyone Complains About Taxes...

More Local Voter Insanity


I voted yesterday, did you?

I must be a really good citizen because the only thing I could vote for or against was one item--the new Special Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST V for short.

SPLOST V is a 1% sales tax, added on top of the 6% state sales tax and the "regular" 1% local option sales tax we pay here in Glynn County Georgia.

Are you confused yet?

Well, I'll keep my point simple.

I voted against the SPLOST V because I thought that it was too early to be voting on a tax that wouldn't begin being collected until 2007. In my opinion, a good deal can change in 14 months, and the list of projects that the county commissioners was proposing to spend the expected $120 million on was too vague and needed to be further qualified and explained.

I thought that SPLOST V should have been voted on next November after the commission and the voters had the opportunity to discuss things further.

The government sells these sales taxes using the idea that a sales tax in a resort area like St. Simons makes our tourists share in the cost of providing and maintaining our infarstructure--things like water and sewer pipes.

The only problem with this premis is that a tourist stays here and pays the tax for a week or two, I live here 50 weeks a year. It seems to me that I end up paying more of the tax than Joe Tourist when it is all said and done.

Anyway, as it turns out, my negative vote didn't matter because the new tax was approved by a 60% margin and beginning in 2007 it will guarantee that our residents and tourists continue to pay 8% tax on their purchases until the year 2012.

The sad thing is that only 13% of the eligable voters turned out to vote on this issue. This means that this sales tax INCREASE was approved by only 7.8% of the voters.

Less than 8% of the voters determined what 100% of the residents will pay.

A perfect illustration of Democracy in action...

No one needs to be coming to me complaining about high taxes in the future.

More Voter Stupidity

San Franciscans Just Don’t Get It…


They’re at it again out in San Francisco—once again supplying proof that at least half of the voters are pacifistic idiots.

In yesterday’s elections the so called responsible adults in the city passed two voter initiatives that virtually guarantee the inability of their citizens to protect themselves. In fact, if the entire country chose to take the same track and pass Proposition I, we’d completely emasculate the military’s recruiting efforts:

Proposition I, dubbed "College Not Combat," would oppose the presence of military recruiters at public high schools and colleges. However, it would not ban the armed forces from seeking enlistees at city campuses, since that would put schools at risk of losing federal funding.

Instead, Proposition I encourages city officials and university administrators to exclude recruiters and create scholarships and training programs that would reduce the military's appeal to young adults.

So in a world where the bleeding heart liberals lament the lack of good employment and educational opportunities for young people, the citizens of San Francisco are “suggesting” that recruiters not be allowed to recruit in public schools in California. The resolution is symbolic and non-binding because they want to make an anti-military statement while still remaining ellegible to receive federal funding.

People in San Francisco don’t want to send THEIR own young men and women into the military. Instead they want the rest of us to be responsible for their national security.

Then there is Proposition H, another load of pacifist crappola:

Proposition H would prohibit the manufacture and sale of all firearms and ammunition in the city, and make it illegal for residents to keep handguns in their homes or businesses.

Although law enforcement, security guards and others who require weapons for work are exempt from the measure, current handgun owners would have to surrender their firearms by April.

This means that all of the gun shops in the city limits will be closed down, and everyone has to either sell their pistols to someone outside of the city limits or GIVE their gun to “the authorities.”

Let me lay this out for you.

It was already against the existing laws to use a handgun in the commission of a crime like robbery or burglary. Further, it was already against the law to shoot and wound or kill someone. Using a gun against people has always been a crime, but that's not good enough in San Francisco (and New York and Chicago.)

Now the morons in the government and the imbeciles that exercise their right to vote have made it against the law for a law abiding citizen to keep a handgun in their glove box or nightstand to protect themselves against the people that might choose to commit a crime against them while wielding a weapon.

Do you see the insanity here? People that are criminals already are breaking the law by their actions. Does anyone honestly believe that adding a charge for the possession of a pistol will keep someone from beating your head in with said pistol while robbing a Pizza Hut Restaurant?

I say not.

If I lived in San Francisco (something I would never, ever do in a million years—even if you gave me a free house), I would comply with the law by selling my old Smith & Wesson Model 41 pistol:

Then I'd buy one of these, a Robinson XCR L5.56 Close Quarter Combat Rifle with folding stock, a weapon that just happens to still be legal under their new laws:


I'd also go out and get one of these to go with my new XCR, just in case I run out of bullets:


Then I'd sit on my front porch in downtown San Francisco every Saturday morning and clean my new gun and sharpen the chain on my new chain saw.

That aught to make all of the liberal weenies head's spin around real fast. Every once in a while I'd yell out:

"Hey all you robbers and burglers (and anti-gun government pacifists), YOU WANT SOME OF THIS???"

You're Being Watched...

The NY Times Gets It Wrong—AGAIN

Blaa, Blaa, Blaa...

What else could you expect to receive other than apologies, cover-ups, and rationalizations from the leftist appeasers at the NY Times?

What about getting some ACTUAL NEWS along with the editorializing they publish and attempt to pass off as being news stories?

Following up on this mornings earlier posting (see the next post below), I was reading the latest NY Times edition and I just had to write to point out their continued predictable spin on the situation in France.

Two hundred and seventy four French cities have been set on fire to date and the French authorities are pretty darn sure who's doing it, but the NY Times waited until paragraph twenty-nine of a two page, thirty three paragraph article to mention the words Muslim or Islam:

While the violence has not taken on religious overtones, most of the young people involved are nominally Muslim, raising fears that Islamist groups could capitalize on the unrest to recruit new members. Internet postings from one such movement encouraged young Muslims elsewhere in Europe to riot in the name of Islam.

"Oh, you Muslim people in Europe, walk with and like your brothers in Paris and learn that these people are dogs," read a message posted on Monday on the popular Web site of a dissident based in London. "Teach them that we are a single nation and if a single member is touched, then all the others will erupt like a burning volcano."


Holy Toledo...there are Muslims in the crowds?

Imagine that...who knew?

And what exactly is a "nominal" Muslim?

Is a "nominal" Muslim better than an "average" Muslim or an "optimal" Muslim. Do they have any tips on how I can tell the difference when they walk into my business or board a bus with a backpack bomb?

I can’t be sure, but it seems that the Times thinks that it would be easy for me to visit France, in spite of the nightly violence if I want to:

Indeed, for all the televised images of burning cars and chaotic streets, central Paris and even its suburbs show no obvious signs of crisis. The highway to Charles de Gaulle Airport, which passes by some of the hardest-hit suburbs, was flowing normally on Monday, with no visible police presence.

"No obvious signs of crisis"?

So the Times writer thinks that the television reports are biased and we should take his word that things aren't really as bad as they look?

Well, that certainly makes me feel better, I think I’ll call Air France and spend next weekend in Paris.

Anybody out there want to come with me?

No?

I thought not...

Yet in an uncharacteristic moment of actually providing meaningful information, their article provides this little tidbit that I hadn't heard before:

France was slow to react to the spreading violence set off by the accidental deaths of two youths on Oct. 27, in part because the initial nights of unrest did not seem particularly unusual in a country where an average of more than 80 cars a day were set on fire this year even before the violence.

An AVERAGE of EIGHTY cars were burned?

EACH DAY?

BEFORE the current violence erupted?

Clearly many of the French government positions are occupied by mindless, politically correct idiots if they could allow a normal night in France to include the burning of 80 cars. Based on the relative populations, that would be like having 400 cars torched by vandals each night here in the US. I think that the American people would have demanded the enforcment of laws before now.

I wonder how many “officials” cars have been torched so far?

Can you say NONE?

France Should Have Seen It Coming

They Were Warned…

For the past weeks I’ve been watching the spectacular TV footage of what the media insists are “disenfranchised French youths” or the children of “African and Arab descent” burning up cars and otherwise wrecking mayhem on the Paris suburbs.

You do realize that these uncivilized bastards are better described as Muslims or Islamists, right?

You also realize that these “demonstrations” are not really unorganized, spontaneous outbursts--they’re being supplied with firebombs and being directed by outside adult forces, not a bunch of pimple faced teens?

Well they are, although the NY Times, LA Times, Associated Press, et.al. just can’t bring themselves to make much mention of these realities.

In the vivid images of torched cars and buses you can see the rewards that France is reaping in return for all of their post WWII social tolerance and inclusiveness. I still think that there is something more than social unrest and hooliganism at work here.

To find out what is really going on you have to go to the foreign media outside of Paris. This Guardian story gives some good insights to the origins of the problem.

The government cannot admit it, but more and more voices in France are being raised to say that the country's worst urban unrest since the student uprising of 1968 reflects the failure of a whole model.

"The crisis is total," one leading sociologist, Michel Wievorka, said yesterday. "This is a structural problem that neither the right nor the left have dealt with for 25 years. France cannot cope with the shortcomings of its republican model. The whole system needs to be rethought."

The modèle républicain d'intégration is based on perhaps the most sacred article of all France's grand republican creed: that everyone is equal and indistinguishable in the eyes of the state. No matter where they come from, all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness.

It is a fine principle born of the ideals of the 1789 revolution. But it has practical drawbacks. For example, statistics based on ethnicity or religion are illegal in France; no one knows how many residents are of Arab or African origin, how they perform at school compared with white pupils, or what percentage are jobless or in prison. If analysing a problem is halfway to solving it, it is not a good start.

Under the model of integration, the idea that ethnic, linguistic and religious groups might enjoy rights and recognition due to their particular minority status is unthinkable. The model is defended on both political wings. When the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, suggested last year that affirmative action was needed in education and jobs, he was slapped down by both President Jacques Chirac and leftwing leaders for propagating "anti-republican" and "un-French" ideas.


Here is a little known story that has changed my view on the situation in France:

PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) - An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.

"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying…

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."

Then Captain Ed over at Captains Quarters Blog pointed out this Washington Post article:

PARIS -- French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.

One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq."

Of course the foreign liberal media, like our own domestic leftists, continue to claim that the underlying motives are poverty and exclusion from society.

Their solution?

Throw more money at the situation, and try to understand them better.

More money?

Hah!

More understanding?

Total BS.

I think that the French need to impose a sunset curfew, then start arresting everyone caught outside after dark and start bouncing a bullet off of the skull of anyone caught carrying a weapon or lighting anything on fire.

They’ve put up with this crap for 12 nights now and French president Chirac still wants the police to handle the situations. He needs to call out his pansy assed French Army and give them permission to shoot to kill.

And regarding Syria’s and Iran’s continuing training and support of these type of Jihadists and "insurgents," I think that President Bush should lift his middle finger to the Democrats and our domestic media, park a few extra aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and ship an extra fifty thousand troops into the region.

Then I’d like him to tell Iran to cease and desist with the nuclear bullshit and warn the little weasel running Syria that one more false step and he’ll be looking up the nose of a cruise missile.

Of course, no one asked me what I think...did they?

Pirates?

"Avast Ye Swabs...Arggggggg"


Just when travelers thought that they could avoid terrorism by taking cruises rather than flying, "Pirates" attacked and attempted to board a cruise liner off the coast of Africa yesterday.

NAIROBI -- Pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at a US-owned cruise ship carrying more than 300 people in the Indian Ocean yesterday, but no one was hurt, its owners said.

Men in two small boats approached the Seabourn Cruise Line ship Spirit about 100 miles off the Somali coast, fired on it, and tried to board in an apparent bid to rob passengers and crew, cruise line spokesman Bruce Good said.

''I looked out of the window and saw a small boat with about five people in it about 20 yards away," said Norman Fisher, 55, a passenger.

''They were firing the rifle and then fired the rocket launcher twice. One of the rockets certainly hit the ship. It went through the side of the liner into a passenger's suite."

I looked into the specifications of The Seaborn Spirit on their website. It's quite a plush ship--what is known as a high end luxury cruise ship.

Seabourn Spirit - Ship facts:

Tonnage: 10,000
Length: 440 feet
Width: 63 feet
Draft: 16.5 feet
Speed: 18 knots
Passenger Capacity: 208 guests
Crew Capacity: 150

Notice that there are almost as many crew members as passengers? Having that much hired help hanging around makes me nervous.

It looks like that the cruise line is going to have to add some gunners mates to their crew listing and a couple of 50 calibre machine guns to the specification sheet.



A few grenade launchers wouldn't be a bad idea either, I think.

The sad thing about this story is that the cruise line had previous knowledge about pirates. In July of this year the US State Department issued the following warning:

U.S. citizens are urged to use caution when sailing near the coast of Somalia. Merchant vessels, fishing boats and recreational craft all risk seizure and having their crews held for ransom, especially in the waters near the Horn of Africa and the Kenyan border.

Don't get me wrong here--I like an exotic destination just like the next wealthy traveler, BUT...It seems to me to be a no brainer to not be floating around in this part of the world right now.

Of course all of the passengers were UNARMED, and at most the crew might have had a few shotguns used for trap and skeet shooting off the fantail while at sea.

I think that it would be safe to say that this was the last trip for the cruise line in this area of the Indian Ocean.