Degree of Madness

Whose culture is it anyway?

This is getting ridiculous.  From the Chicago Sun-Times:

So long, Halloween parade. Farewell, Santa's gift shop.

The holiday traditions are facing elimination in some Oak Lawn schools this year after complaints that the activities are offensive, particularly to Muslim students.

Final decisions on which of the festivities will be axed will fall to the principals at each of Ridgeland School District 122's five schools, Supt. Tom Smyth said.

How is it that people can come here from anywhere else in the world and demand we change our traditions for them?  What in the hell is wrong with this picture?

Elizabeth Zahdan, a mother of three District 122 students, says she took her concerns to the school board this month, not because she wanted to do away with the traditions, but rather to make them more inclusive. "I only wanted them modified to represent everyone," she said.

More inclusive?  The damn traditions are what they are.  If they are changed they are effectively done away with.  And how in the hell do you modify Halloween to represent Muslims?  Maybe everyone wears a burka? 

Mrs. Zahdan, if you don't like our traditions, please feel free to go back to where you came from.  This is the United States of America.  We have our traditions, our holidays, our celebrations.  No one is forcing you to participate.  Do not expect us to change to accommodate YOU.  You chose to come here, deal with it.  If our culture is so offensive to you, then you came to the wrong place.   

Coach Bobby Bowden and the Crimson Tide

Florida State coach Bobby Bowden could have been Alabama coach Bobby Bowden.  But it wasn't meant to be.  Things work out the way they're supposed to, my sister always says, and they did for Coach Bowden.  Tomorrow Coach Bowden's Florida State team will be on the field against the University of Alabama, the team he loved so much as a child growing up in Birmingham. 

Ivan  Maisel has written a wonderful story about Coach Bowden and Alabama.  "The Tide That Binds".  This is the end:

"One of my goals in life is to go back to Tuscaloosa and attend a football game," Bowden said. "You know, just for old times. Sit up in the stands. Of course, it looks so different now. One of these days, I hope I can do that."

He gazed up at his office ceiling, lost in the reverie.

"I hope we ain't playing Florida State."

We?

We.  I guess you have to be a Bama fan to understand it.  Good luck, Coach Bowden and Yea, Alabama!

Huntsville's "all-hazards" disaster plan

The city of Huntsville, Alabama is preparing for the worst.  From the AP:

In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation's most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community's shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county.

[...]

"If Huntsville is in the blast zone, there's not much we can do. But if it's just fallout ... shelters would absorb 90 percent of the radiation," said longtime emergency management planner Kirk Paradise, whose Cold War expertise with fallout shelters led local leaders to renew Huntsville's program.

Huntsville's project, developed using $70,000 from a Homeland Security grant, goes against the grain because the United States essentially scrapped its national plan for fallout shelters after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congress cut off funding and the government published its last list of approved shelters at the end of 1992.

After Sept. 11, Homeland Security created a metropolitan protection program that includes nuclear-attack preparation and mass shelters. But no other city has taken the idea as far as Huntsville has, officials said.

[...]

As fallout shelters go, the Three Caves Quarry just outside downtown offers the kind of protection that would make Dr. Strangelove proud, with space for an arena-size crowd of some 20,000 people.

Last mined in the early '50s, the limestone quarry is dug 300 yards into the side of the mountain, with ceilings as high as 60 feet and 10 acres of floor space covered with jagged rocks. Jet-black in places with a year-round temperature of about 60 degrees, it has a colony of bats living in its highest reaches and baby stalactites hanging from the ceiling.

"It would be a little trying, but it's better than the alternative," said Andy Prewett, a manager with The Land Trust of Huntsville and North Alabama, a nonprofit preservation group that owns the mine and is making it available for free.

In all, the Huntsville-Madison County Emergency Management Agency has identified 105 places that can be used as fallout shelters for about 210,000 people. They are still looking for about 50 more shelters that would hold an additional 100,000 people.

Good for Huntsville.  Maybe some other cities in Alabama, and elsewhere, will follow suit.

Saudi Arabia...It's time to face reality

Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe?

There's new evidence the Saudis aren't cooperating in our battle to eradicate terrorists or those who bankroll them. Their negligence is shocking even to cynics.

According to the Treasury Department's top anti-terror official, the kingdom has not prosecuted a single person named by the U.S. or the United Nations as a terror financier. Asked by ABC News how many Saudis have been charged with funding terror since 9/11, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey said, "There have not been any." Not one? "No," he asserted.

In a rare public rebuke of our alleged war ally, Levey pointed out that the Saudi government has failed to go after even men like Yasin al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom both the U.S. and U.N. blacklisted as an al-Qaida financier one month after the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Qadi remains free, still a prominent figure in the kingdom. "And he remains designated to the United Nations for his material support to al-Qaida," Levey fumed. "When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terrorist organizations and knowingly done so, then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism."

Friend or foe?  Well, the Saudis are sure pumping a boat load of money into the United States.  Funding universities:

The King Abdulaziz Chair for Islamic Studies. The King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies. The Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Program in Arab and Islamic Studies. The H.E. Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani Islamic Legal Studies Fund. The King Fahd Chair of Oncology and Pediatrics. The Bakr M. Binladin Visiting Scholar Fund.

That's an awful lot of Arabic and Islam. If all that didn't faze you, maybe this will: All of these institutions are here, in the United States. All of them are branches of American universities. And all are financed by Saudi Arabia. In order, the above institutions exist at: the University of California at Santa Barbara, Harvard University Law School, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University Law School, Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University Law School. Rice University has taken Saudi money for implementation of an Islamic Studies Chair. The Saudis have also set up research institutes at Duke University, Syracuse University, American University of Colorado, American University in Washington, D.C., and Howard University.

Building mosques:

...After Sept. 11, it became clear that mosques dominated by radical clerics were a potentially lethal threat. Many such mosques are funded by Saudi Arabia, which spends heavily to propagate Wahhabism, a fanatic and aggressive strain of Islam. The Saudi government, reported the 9/11 Commission, "uses zakat" -- Islamic charity -- "and government funds to spread Wahhabi beliefs throughout the world, including in mosques and schools. . . . Some Wahhabi-funded organizations have been exploited by extremists to further their goal of violent jihad against non-Muslims." Its findings were reinforced by Freedom House, which in 2005 documented the penetration of US mosques by Saudi-supplied Wahhabi hate literature.

Senator Chuck Schumer:

...Saudi Arabia boasts of directly supporting over 18 mosques and schools across the country, including Islamic Centers in Washington and New York.

Even our children are being influenced by Saudi Arabia. 

Boat loads of money.  The question is why?  Saudi Arabia is not spending all this money for the benefit of the United States, of that we can be sure.

This is bordering on insanity.  When is enough enough?  Sometimes it's best to just say no:

The reason I gave the money back to the Saudi prince was precisely because he was trying to create obfuscation about the cause of September 11 and I thought from the very beginning one of the things that if we're going to make ourselves safer is we're going to face reality. If you can't face reality, you can't lead and you can't lead people safely. The reality is 19 people attacked us. They are organized around the idea that they are Islamic terrorists. It does not mean that all Islam is involved by any means.

I went on television on the night of September the 11 and I said to the people of New York, I don't want you to attack anybody, I don't want you to hurt anybody, I don't want you to assign any kind of group blame because it isn't a group that attacked us, but what we have to be clear about is it is a certain number of people that attacked us. I think 14 or 15 of them happen to have come from Saudi Arabia. That's a fact. They were all Islamic and they organized themselves around being Islamic terrorists. That's the truth, that's the reality. Now let's deal with it.

Friend or foe?

Last December, we agreed to release into the custody of Saudi authorities 29 Saudi killers from Gitmo. What did they do with them? Jail them? Work them over for information about new terror plots or leads on other terrorists?

No, Saudi police freed all 29 of them.

That now makes 53 Gitmo terrorists we've returned to Saudi Arabia only to watch them go free. Some have rejoined the battlefield after being released.The Saudi government wants the remaining Saudis held at Gitmo returned. No doubt all of them will be set loose too.

Saudi Arabia's promise to crack down on terrorists is as empty as its vow to clean up its hateful textbooks calling for jihad against infidels.

With friends like the Saudis, who needs enemies?

Rep. Terry Everett will not seek reelection

Rep. Everett represents Alabama's 2nd Congressional District.

The Hill:

Rep. Terry Everett (R-Ala.) announced Wednesday that he will retire at the end of his eighth term, saying that he recently changed his mind about whether to seek reelection.

Everett was elected to the House in 1994 and cited his impending 71st birthday as one of the reasons he will depart from the House in January 2009.

[..]

Everett handily won his southern Alabama district last year with 68.1 percent of the vote. President Bush received 67 percent of the vote there in 2004.

Doc's Political Parlor:

Because there has been much speculation that he might retire, there has also been much speculation about who would run if he did. Names on the Republican side have included state Representatives Steve Clouse, David Grimes, Jay Love, and Greg Wren, state Sen. Harri Anne Smith, Attorney General Troy King, and possibly even PSC President Jim Sullivan.  Add former PSC Commissioner George Wallace, Jr., state Representatives Benjamin Lewis and Barry Mask, and state Sen. Larry Dixon as possibilities.  Larry Dixon ran for the seat in 1992, losing in the GOP Primary to Everett.

Names mentioned on the Democratic side have included Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright, state Sen. Wendell Mitchell, state Rep. Terry Spicer, state Senator Jimmy Holley, Speaker of the House Seth Hammett, and Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks.

Check the comments for more speculation.

"Let me be blunt, this is madness"

Mark Levin.  This is good. (via Kathryn Jean Lopez)

Related, Atlas Shrugs:

Got this report from the State Dept. Read it and weep. WTF do we need to spend obscene amounts of  US  tax payer dollars on the continuing  Islamization of the UN and the world? For what? Why are we funding the enemy? An avowed mortal enemy that lives for our destruction? Peacekeeping forces? C'mon, those small forces engage in human trafficking,child rape, torture  and pedophilia. We are paying for that?

All of that and Oil for Food, too.  And what are we paying?

The United States has been the largest contributor to the United Nations every year since its creation in 1945. In fiscal year 2006, the U.S. contributed over $5.3 billion to the United Nations system to support UN agencies and peacekeeping operations. The U.S. contribution to UN peacekeeping alone totaled nearly $870 million in fiscal year 2006.

Madness.

Clinton campaign to GQ: "Kill the piece" or else...

And GQ caved.

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

Mickey Kaus has a challenge for the blogosphere:

Uncover what it is that the Clinton folks are so determined to hide.

Kaus has also offered to publish the article:

...there's one way to find out how good the piece was. Publish it--somewhere. That's what the Web is for, no? ... Note to Josh: I'll do it if no one else will. ... Or is GQ not only spiking the piece but refusing to let Green place it elsewhere? That would be full-service journalism for the Clintons. ...

"Full-service journalism for the Clintons".  What we can look forward to if we wind up with another President Clinton.  And that's not the half of it.

Shame on GQ.  Keep this in mind when reading the upcoming cover story on Bill Clinton.  I have a feeling it will be a kissy-face suck-up.

***Update***

The Times (UK):  Hillary and Bill Clinton show muscle as cover boy Bill gets a negative story dumped.

"Unfriendly treatment"? Oh, please

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, under fire for inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak as part of the World Leaders Forum, promised to ask "tough questions" and he delivered.  The skeptic in me believes he did so to appease critics of the invitation, including state and city lawmakers:

As the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , prepares to address Columbia University today amid a storm of student protest, state and city lawmakers say they are considering withholding public funds from the school to protest its decision to invite the leader to campus.

In an interview with The New York Sun, the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, said lawmakers, outraged over Columbia's insistence on allowing the Iranian president to speak at its World Leaders Forum, would consider reducing capital aid and other financial assistance to the school.

Lawmakers warned about other consequences for Columbia and its president, Lee Bollinger, who has resisted campus and public pressure to cancel Mr. Ahmadinejad's appearance today, arguing that Columbia's commitment to scholarship requires the school to directly confront offensive ideas.

"There are issues that Columbia may have before us that obviously this cavalier attitude would be something that people would recall," Mr. Silver said. "Obviously, there's some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of … knowing that this is that kind of an institution."

I guess that added to the outrage expressed by many of the students and alumni got Mr. Bollinger's attention.  At any rate, he pulled no punches.  Fox News:

Columbia President Lee Bollinger opened the program with a blistering introduction in which he lambasted Ahmadinejad for calling for the annihilation of Israel, denying the Holocaust and supporting the execution of children, and told the leader of Iran that he resembled "a petty and cruel dictator."

Bollinger levied repeated criticisms against Ahmadinejad, calling on him to answer a series of challenges about his leadership, blasting his views about the "myth" of the Holocaust as being "absurd," and saying that he doubted he "will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions."

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader's Holocaust denial. "Will you cease this outrage?"

After sitting through the blistering introduction by Lee Bollinger — in which he was lambasted for calling for the annihilation of Israel, denying the Holocaust and supporting the execution of children — Ahmadinejad said it was insulting to be spoken about that way.

"At the outset, I want to complain a bit about the person who read this political statement made against me," Ahmadinejad said. "In Iran, we don't think it's necessary to come in before the speech has already begun with a series of complaints ... It was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here."

He said Bollinger's speech was full of "insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully," and accused Bollinger of offering "unfriendly treatment" under the influence of the U.S. press and politicians.

Unfriendly treatment.  Can't handle the truth, Mr. Ahmadinejad?  At least you're still alive.  The victims of your murderous regime are not so lucky. 

Bollinger might have redeemed himself somewhat but he should never have allowed Ahmadinejad on campus in the first place. 

Michelle Malkin has the picture of the day:

"Absolute moral authority."

Blogger digs deeper and finds more " Hsocking Hsu Secrets"

Blogger Suitably Flip is connecting more dots in the Hsu department:

If there's one thing that can be said about Clinton financial scandals, it's that they tend to be complex.  And thus far, the Norman Hsu debacle is living up to the archetype.

This rabbit hole is proving to be a fair bit deeper than anyone might've guessed and we're about to plumb its depths.  If you're reading this, it means you're taking the red pill.

Two of the biggest open questions were always 1) where is Hsu - a convicted con man and fugitive with no documented ability to turn a legitimate buck - getting these gobs of money, and 2) why is he squandering it on all these Democrats?

These specific Democrats.

We seem to have gotten at least part of the answer to the first question, as Hsu has recently been accused of swindling investors out of as much as $70 million in a variety of Ponzi schemes and other bogus investments.  The second question though, has been naggingly impenetrable.  After all, if Hsu was simply buying his way into the inner circles of various celebrity politicians, whether for his own ego or to project more credibility and gravitas to his marks (or both), why would his fundraising have been so unwaveringly partisan - targeting only members of the minority party and only very specific members of that party.  Hsu's network finance the campaigns of more than 80 Democrats - from Presidential candidates to state legislators and town supervisors.  From the newest newbies (including a majority of the first-time candidates who became Senate freshmen this year) to some of the body's dustiest relics (Kennedy, Biden, et al).

Yet Chuck Schumer, for example, Hillary's senior counterpart in New York, never saw a dime.  Fellow New York politicians Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, Anthony Weiner, Kristen Gillibrand, and others received hundreds of separate contributions, totalling many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Schumer: bubkes.

That's just a little teaser.  There's much, much more, including a convincing connection to catalog company Lillian Vernon which leads right to Bill Clinton.  Flip has the goods.  Check it out.

***Update 9-29***

Flip posted a correction on the Lillian Vernon connection.

Ahmadinejad to speak before National Press Club

So that's two speaking gigs for the Iranian terrorist.  He is scheduled to speak at Columbia University on Monday.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will speak and take questions at the National Press Club’s first- ever videoconference luncheon at noon on Monday, Sept. 24.

Ahmadinejad will appear in the NPC Ballroom in Washington via videolink from New York, where he will be attending the UN General Assembly. After Ahmadinejad’s speech, NPC President Jerry Zremski will ask questions handed up from the audience for a minimum of a half-hour.

Please note: the format of the luncheon with President Ahmadinejad will differ from the typical NPC luncheon program in many ways. President Ahmadinejad will be introduced at noon. His speech will last a half hour, and will be followed by 45 minutes of questions. Lunch will be served after the speech and question period.

Ahmadinejad will also get some "tough" questions from Columbia President Lee Bollinger:

Columbia was under a lot of pressure to cancel him, especially given their history of comparative hostility to the ROTC.  Lee Bollinger issued a statement yesterday assuring everyone he’d personally be asking some tough questions which Ahmadinejad’s already answered a thousand times before in every western interview he’s ever participated in. His intoning about freedom of speech is especially fragrant given the Middle Eastern Studies department’s alleged history of intimidating student who support Israel and going easy on scum who rush the stage to silence speakers they don’t agree with.

Maybe someone will ask him about this:

 

A teenage girl is buried to the waist in preparation for being stoned to death.  This happened in Iran.