Fox News Answers All Your Questions

Ken AshfordRight Wing and Inept MediaLeave a Comment

A typical day for Fox.

Hume asked Cheney the pressing question — I’m not kidding — of whether or not he hit the bird.  Jeez.  Like that old joke "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?", except it’s, you know, real. 

[UPDATE:  Shakespeare’s Sister’s line is good, too: "Mrs. Kennedy, did you at least get to do some shopping before you left Dallas?"]

To Cheney’s remarkable credit, he basically answered that he didn’t know and didn’t care.

And even though a 78 year old man with a faceful of buckshot is hospitalized and recovering from a minor heart attack because the Veep shot him in the face, Fox’s Neil Cavuto wants to know how Dick Cheney is doing:

Cavutochen

The transcript:

CAVUTO: This is a Fox News alert. The lawyer accidentally hit by Vice President Dick Cheney suffering a mild heart attack this morning. Doctors say he’s doing just fine and could be released in a week. Meanwhile, the White House press corps again beating a dead horse as it tries to find out why they were not told right away about the Vice President’s hunting accident. Not one person bothering to ask, in the meantime, how Dick Cheney’s feeling about all this. After all, he’s a human being and injuring someone else in an accident can take a huge toll. With us now someone who knows the Vice President pretty well. Ron Christie is a former Cheney advisor and author of Black in the White House. Good to have you back my friend.

The sycophancy is nauseating.

The War On St. Valentine’s Day

Ken AshfordGodstuffLeave a Comment

Shit, I missed it.

No, not Valentine’s Day itself, but the War On St. Valentine’s Day.

It seems that CYA  (Catholic Youths Abstaining) wants to put the "Saint" back in St. Valentine’s Day, arguing that the holiday is being besmirched by oversexualization and commercialization.

Cyaprotest1Pictured here, courtesy of The Stranger, is a massive CYA Seattle demonstration in which four CYA soldiers hold up signs that are pretty big and took them a couple of hours to make in their parents’ basements.

From the CYA website:

Valentine’s Day has become a day when merchants order people to give candy, cards and flowers to people they lust after.

Yeah.  I hate it when merchants order you to buy stuff, because . . . how can you say "no" to a merchant?  Why, just the other day, this Hallmark lady grabbed me as I walked through the mall and forced me to buy a Whitman’s sampler!

It is celebrated in our schools, and even children in pre-schools are encouraged to exchange valentines.

Those bastards!

But the real Valentine’s Day is not about cards, candy, flowers, and our romantic love for each other, but about God’s love and the martydom of a Catholic saint.

Listen, you Catholic Youths Abstaining!  I applaud your decision to abstain from sex.  Goody for you.  But the rest of the us live in the real world.  Can you imagine what would happen to me if I went through life telling my girlfriends that the real Valentine’s Day isn’t about cards, flowers or our romantic love for each other?  Why, I would end up being 43 years old and unmarried!

Why don’t most people know this? Because we’ve been leaving the saint out of Saint Valentine’s Day.

Exactly!  And when people call me by my first and last name, and leave off the "Mister", they don’t know that I’m a guy!

Secularists and merchants who make money off Saint Valentine’s Day want you to believe this day has nothing to do with Christianity. The same people who want us to wish each other “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” want us to buy “Valentines Day” cards and gifts, and not “Saint Valentine’s Day” cards and gifts.

So, um, edible underwear is out, right?

Secularists and commercial exploiters have succeeded into turning Saint Valentine’s Day into a holiday where Saint Valentine and Jesus Christ are never mentioned.

Sadly, there never was a Saint Valentine’s Day in which St. Valentine and Jesus Christ was mentioned. 

You see, each year on February 15, Roman priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year’s grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility.

This was all very very B.C.  The actual exploiters were the Christians who came along centuries later and toned down the holiday, making it about romance rather than eroticism.

So if you want to go back to the original celebration of what became St. Valentine’s Day, that’s fine.  Start whapping women with your loincloths, guys.  But I don’t think the CYA will care for that very much.

Instead this is a day when we celebrate lust and even encourage children to take part.

No, actually, we DON’T encourage children to celebrate lust.  You’re thinking of Saint Pedophile’s day.  That’s in April, I think.

But we live in a Christian culture and there is more than one Christian holiday on our calendar.

Halloween?

Just as all Christians demand that we remember that Jesus Christ is the reason we celebrate Christmas, Catholics demand that we remember that February 14 is Saint Valentine’s Day.

Or, at least, the handful of Catholic kids at CYA with too much time on their hands.

What can you do? Don’t buy cards that leave off the Saint. Don’t buy Valentines chocolates that leave off the Saint. And don’t shop at stores that leave off the Saint.

Killjoys.

But the CYA website does inform us that the real "Saint Valentine was sentenced to death for his LOVE OF GOD but cured his jailor’s daughter of blindness before the emperor had his head cut off."

So, apparently, the proper way to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day is to WRITE IN ALL CAPS, cure blindness, and cut people’s heads off.

Sorry, honey.  No flowers for you.

Looks like St. Patrick’s Day is going to be a real barnburner with these people, too.

I Part With My Liberal Friends Here

Ken AshfordEconomy & Jobs & Deficit1 Comment

I think this story is being overblown by the left:

The Bush administration spent $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars on 137 contracts with advertising agencies over the past two-and-a-half years, according to a Government Accountability Office report released by House Democrats Monday.

With spending on public relations and other media included, federal agencies spent $1.6 billion on what some Democrats called "spin."

The six largest recipients of ad and PR dollars were Leo Burnett USA, $536 million; Campbell-Ewald, $194 million; GSD&M, $179 million; JWT, $148 million; Frankel, $133 million; and Ketchum, $78 million. The agencies received more than $1.2 billion in media contracts, according to the report.

On its face, it sounds like a waste of taxpayer money . . . and some of it might be.  But (as the article goes on to explain) $1.1 billion of the $1.6 billion was spent by the Department of Defense.

Why?  Recruitment.  Certainly, we can all agree that that expenditure is worthwhile.  (I do question where the money went, because from my humble sitting post, I haven’t seen much evidence of heavier recruiting advertisements).

The article also states:

A Food and Drug Administration contract had the objective of warning the public about the "consequences and potential dangers of buying prescription drugs from non-U.S. sources."

Again, that is (arguably) money well spent.

So, without more information, I’m largely unmoved by this story.

George Will On NSA Wiretapping

Ken AshfordWiretapping & SurveillanceLeave a Comment

I like it when he’s right:

The next time a president asks Congress to pass something akin to what Congress passed on Sept. 14, 2001 — the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) — the resulting legislation might be longer than Proust’s "Remembrance of Things Past." Congress, remembering what is happening today, might stipulate all the statutes and constitutional understandings that it does not intend the act to repeal or supersede.

But, then, perhaps no future president will ask for such congressional involvement in the gravest decision government makes — going to war. Why would future presidents ask, if the present administration successfully asserts its current doctrine? It is that whenever the nation is at war, the other two branches of government have a radically diminished pertinence to governance, and the president determines what that pertinence shall be.

***

Administration supporters incoherently argue that the AUMF also authorized the NSA surveillance — and that if the administration had asked, Congress would have refused to authorize it. The first assertion is implausible: None of the 518 legislators who voted for the AUMF has said that he or she then thought it contained the permissiveness the administration discerns in it. Did the administration, until the program became known two months ago? Or was the AUMF then seized upon as a justification? Equally implausible is the idea that in the months after Sept. 11, Congress would have refused to revise the 1978 law in ways that would authorize, with some supervision, NSA surveillance that, even in today’s more contentious climate, most serious people consider conducive to national security.

***

Besides, terrorism is not the only new danger of this era. Another is the administration’s argument that because the president is commander in chief, he is the "sole organ for the nation in foreign affairs." That non sequitur is refuted by the Constitution’s plain language, which empowers Congress to ratify treaties, declare war, fund and regulate military forces, and make laws "necessary and proper" for the execution of all presidential powers . Those powers do not include deciding that a law — FISA, for example — is somehow exempted from the presidential duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

The administration, in which mere obduracy sometimes serves as political philosophy, pushes the limits of assertion while disdaining collaboration. This faux toughness is folly, given that the Supreme Court, when rejecting President Harry S Truman’s claim that his inherent powers as commander in chief allowed him to seize steel mills during the Korean War, held that presidential authority is weakest when it clashes with Congress.

Immediately after Sept. 11, the president rightly did what he thought the emergency required, and rightly thought that the 1978 law was inadequate to new threats posed by a new kind of enemy using new technologies of communication. Arguably he should have begun surveillance of domestic-to-domestic calls — the kind the Sept. 11 terrorists made.

I wonder how long it will be before wingnuts start calling Will an America-hating liberal.

Excerpts From Harry Whittington’s Blog

Ken AshfordWeb RecommendationsLeave a Comment

Harry Whittington’s Blog:

Have you ever been in a situation

where somebody you thought was your friend did something that hurt you very much, and then they tried to blame it on you? And then that person waited 18 hours to report it to the media, and that person’s colleagues tried to make a joke out of it, until you had a heart attack? Just wondering.

posted by Harry Whittington at 4:00 PM 14 comments
******

Any doctors out there?

I heard there was some woman overseas who got a face transplant. Anybody know how that works? After Dick shot his wad of pellets in my face, I feel dirty.

posted by Harry Whittington at 6:23 AM 0 comments

Dick To Brit

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

When asked why there was a delay in reporting this story, Dick said this:

It was important that it be accurate. I do think what I’ve experienced over the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated, speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as possible, and I think Katherine was an excellent choice. I don’t know who you could get better as the basic source for the story than the witness who saw the whole thing.

Really, Dick?  Katherine was accurate?  Hmmmmm, let’s see:

What Katherine said:

"It broke the skin … It knocked him silly. But he was fine."

What Dick said:

"He was struck in the right side of his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body. …He was laying there on his back, obviously bleeding…"

What Katherine said:

"But he was fine.  He was talking…"

What Dick said:

HUME:  What did he say?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn’t respond. He was — he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn’t — he was, I’m sure, stunned…

and let’s not forget the part where Katherine said there were no beers, but then Cheney said he had one at lunch, and so then Katherine said yes, there were beers available, and, oh yeah, now she remembers that Cheney had a cocktail afterward as well.

It doesn’t sound like Katherine was an eyewitness to the event.  Or she’s a liar.  Or Dick is.  Or they all were drunk, running around the Texas ranch like some Benny Hill skit.

Why Sometimes We Should Throw Podhoretz Away

Ken AshfordRight Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

Man, are these guys stupid.

Here’s John Podhoretz, at the NRO’s Corner:

WHY SOMETIMES THEY SHOULD THROW POLL RESULTS AWAY

New Gallup poll, not kidding, says on the one hand that 52 percent of those polled believe things are going well in the country, and on the other hand that 59 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction. Umm…that’s simply absurd. The poll is a Rube Goldberg machine. Does it ever occur to Gallup that maybe when it gets results like this that clearly indicate those polled have no consistent idea about what they think from one second to the other, the poll might be trash and should be thrown in the garbage can and tried again?

Emphasis mine.

Wow, I thought, reading that.  Is that what the Gallop poll really says?

So I clicked the link to the story.  Here’s what the CNN report about the poll actually says:

Nevertheless, most of the respondents — 52 percent — said things are going very or fairly well in the country, a statistically similar response (49 percent) to the last time the question was asked in November.

***

But many respondents said something made them upset about the direction the country was headed. Fifty-nine percent said they were angry about the way the country was moving along, while 32 percent answered they were generally content.

So Podhoretz (again) gets it wrong.  59% said that they were angry about the way the country was moving along, while 52% said things are going along very or fairly well in the country.

A contradiction?  Hardly.  It is possible, for example, that 7% of those surveyed think the country is moving along "fairly well", but they are angry because it could be doing better.  Or they are angry because they think that the "fairly well" situation will turn around in a year or two’s time.  Or something.  The point is that people are responding to different questions.

But don’t expect Podhoretz to understand that.  His head will explode.

Mystery Solved

Ken AshfordRandom MusingsLeave a Comment

The following is from the State of Ohio’s missing person’s database:
Raymond Power Jr
AKA:
Missing Since: 8/2/2005
Sex Male Race White
Age 57 DOB 08/25/48
Hgt 5Ft9In Wgt 190
Hair Grey Eye Blue
Raymond Power Jr. age 57 was reported by his wife Jane as missing to New Rochelle NY Police on Tuesday August 2, 2005. Ray is an ex New Rochelle Police Officer who left the Department in the mid 1980’s and became a lawyer. Ray is suffering from depression. Ray had left his New Rochelle residence at about 3:30 am on Monday August 1 and drove to the White Plains NY law office where he works. New Rochelle Police determined through video cameras that Ray had driven his 1994 Ford Taurus 4DSD white NY plate CFK3062 into a White Plains parking garage on Aug 1 at about 4:10 a.m. where he normally parks his car, stopped momentarily, and then exited the garage in his car. At this time police cannot determine if any crime occurred in this garage. He has not been seen or heard from since. By tracking credit card use New Rochelle Police have ascertained that Powers credit card was used to purchase gas at gas stations in the following order on Aug 1, 2005 8:19 a.m.Citgo Pit Stop Travel Plaza- RR1 Exit 28, Interstate 80 Loganton PA 12.35 p.m.Sunoco Ohio Turnpike 9270 Lime Ridge Rd. Plaza 7 Mantua Ohio 5.20 p.m Fuel Mart 404 Urbana St. South Vienna Ohio. SInce the last gas transaction in Ohio, there have been no further transcations. Ray’s cell phone has been powered off since 6:00 pm. on Monday Aug 1. Ray is a white male, blue eyes, left ring finger and his middle finger top digit is missing. salt and pepper hair and moustache possibly wearing a business suit. Ray is dedicated and loving family man and this disappearance is totally out of character

Fortunately, there is a happy, if not bizarre ending:  New York Man Found In Chicago With Apparent Amnesia

A man missing from his New York home for nearly seven months has turned up at a homeless shelter here, unharmed but apparently oblivious to how he ended up 1,000 miles from home or that he had a family searching for him.

Raymond Power Jr., 57, an attorney from New Rochelle, N.Y., and a former police officer, has been living in a shelter under the name "Jay Tower" and selling newspapers on the street, police said Tuesday.

Chicago detectives said Power apparently suffered from amnesia and did not know he had a wife and two kids in New York.

Tragically, he still doesn’t remember his family or his previous life. An unnamed relative rushed to Chicago once police found him, but Power did not recognize the person … and then he broke down crying again, realizing his memories were gone.

ANOTHER NSA Program?!?

Ken AshfordWiretapping & SurveillanceLeave a Comment

UPI reports that former NSA employee Russell Tice, one of the whistleblowers of the NSA surveillance program, is now saying that there is another "more wide-ranging program" beyond the one that’s been so much in the news:

A former NSA employee said Tuesday there is another ongoing top-secret surveillance program that might have violated millions of Americans’ Constitutional rights.

Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless [sic] wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.

Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution’s protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees – members or their staff – because they lack high enough clearance.

Cheney Speaks

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

Of course, his first words on the shooting incident will be on Bush-friendly Fox News.*

I suspect it will go something like this:

HUME:  Do you have any regrets about the incident?

CHENEY:  Oh sure.  I wish it never happened.  I wish he had let us all know he was out there in the field.  Obviously, if I had known that, I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger.  So . . . wishing all those things to be true, means that I "regret" that it happened.

HUME:  What about the media response to this?

CHENEY:  Well, you know how leftist the media is.  They just want to bash this Administration.  They’ll take something like me shooting a 78 year old man in the face, and turn into something, you know, bad.

HUME:  But why did it take you so long to go public?

CHENEY:  Obviously, my first concern was with Harry himself.  Shooting someone in the face is a very distressing matter, and very personal to both the shooter and the guy who got shot.  So my thoughts were with Harry for the first few days, not with the J– New York Times.  I think all good Christians can understand that.

HUME:  You are so great.  Seriously.

CHENEY:  Thank you.

HUME:  No, I mean it.  Can I get you anything?  How can we in America help you through this difficult time?

CHENEY:  Pray.  Stay the course.  Don’t get distracted by people wanting to know what their government is doing.  I love America, and because I do, you can rest assured that you can trust me.

HUME:  Is your chair comfortable?

CHENEY:  It’s fine.

HUME:  You can have mine.

CHENEY:  No, I’m good.

HUME:  Well, thanks for coming on and giving us the real truth.  Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Cheney, the Vice President Of These United States!!!

CHENEY:  God Bless you, Brit.  God bless Fox News.  But most of all, God bless America, and God Bless God.

*  What a pussy!

“Intelligent” Design Loses Again

Ken AshfordEducation, GodstuffLeave a Comment

This time in Ohio:

The Ohio Board of Education voted 11 to 4 Tuesday to toss out a mandate that 10th-grade biology classes include critical analysis of evolution and an accompanying model lesson plan, dealing the intelligent design movement its second serious defeat in two months.

The board, which became the first in the nation to single out evolution for special scrutiny under the academic standards it adopted in 2002, stripped the language from the curriculum partly out of fear of a lawsuit in the wake of a December ruling by a federal judge that teaching intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., public schools was unconstitutional.

While the Ohio lesson plan does not mention intelligent design, which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, critics contend that the critical analysis language is simply design in disguise.

11 to 4?!?  Really, it shouldn’t have been that close

The Felonious Ann Coulter

Ken AshfordRight Wing Punditry/IdiocyLeave a Comment

Heh:

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections records show Coulter voted last week in Palm Beach’s council election. Problem is: She cast her ballot in a precinct 4 miles north of the precinct where she owns a home — and that could be a big no-no.

Coulter, who owns a $1.8 million crib on Seabreeze Avenue, should have voted in Precinct 1198. It covers most homes on her street. Instead, records show, she voted in Precinct 1196, at the northern tip of the island.

A fave on the college speaking circuit and the occasional target of cream-pies-to-the-face, Coulter registered as a Republican (no kidding!) with the supervisor’s office June 24. That’s three months after she bought the home and moved to Palm Beach from Manhattan.

Here’s the sticky part for The Right’s Lady Macbeth: She wrote down an Indian Road address instead of Seabreeze on her voter’s registration application. And she signed to certify the information as true.

"She never lived here," said Suzanne Frisbie, owner of the Indian Road home. "I’m Ann’s Realtor, and she used this address to forward mail when she moved from New York."

…Florida statutes make it a third-degree felony to vote knowingly in the wrong precinct. Lying on a voter’s registration can cost up to $5,000 and five years behind bars.

Cheney And Willeford Up In A Tree….

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

Lb03The scuttlebutt is this: Cheney’s delay in reporting that he shot Whittington was not due to the fact that he, you know, shot Whittington . .. but because he was afraid word might get out that he was hunting with Pamela Willeford (pictured here), U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. 

Lynne Cheney is apparently not enamored of the close relationship between Cheney and Ambassador Willeford. 

Willeford’s participation in the hunting group was not initially revealed.  Her involvement was only discovered Monday.  And for those keeping score, the hunting party was two men and two women.  I’m just sayin’….

The other woman was Katherine Armstrong, a divorcee and the owner of the ranch where the group hunted.  Willeford, on the other hand, is married to a gastroenterologist from Austin.  She was on vacation from D.C., but was not with her husband — she was with Cheney.   (Dr. Willeford was reportedly hunting with someone else, in a different field a mile away).

Willeford, by the way, was standing right next to Cheney when the ill-fated shot was fired.    This might explain why Cheney was (and is) slow to talk to the public about what happened.  He’s got bigger issues on his plate . . . i.e., Mrs. Cheney.

An interesting note about Willeford:  In 2000, she was chair of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.  Now she holds one of the most coveted U.S. ambassadorship posts.  Anyone care to speculate on her high rise?

UPDATE:  Was there alcohol involved?

An MSNBC story quoted Armstrong as saying there "may have been" a "beer or two" at the hunting party’s picnic.

The odd thing is that the Armstrong quote was excised from the article within one hour after it first appeared on the MSNBC site, so the article now reads without the beer-related paragraph.

Fortunately, someone captured the screen of the original story.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: 

Now, they’ve restored the paragraph, slightly reworked:

In a recorded, on-the-record phone call with NBC News, Armstrong said that beer may have been available at lunch that day. “If someone wants to help themselves to a beer,” she said, “they may, but I did not see anyone do that,” Armstrong says. She says she was not sure if there were beers in the coolers but wasn’t ready to rule it out: “There may be a beer or two in there, but remember not everyone in the party was shooting,” she told NBC News.

The story also now suggests that the White House misled MSNBC about whether Cheney had consumed alcohol. A new paragraph from the revised article:

NBC News called the vice president’s office for comment four times Tuesday and Wednesday and asked whether the vice president or anyone in the hunting party had consumed any alcohol on Saturday prior to the accident. In an e-mail statement Wednesday to NBC News, the vice president’s press secretary referred NBC News to the Kenedy County Sheriff’s Department report on the incident.

The sheriff’s report says “there was no alcohol…involved in the incident.” Cheney told Brit Hume that he drank beer prior to the accident.   Hmmmmmm…..  I guess the sheriff’s report is technically correct.  There was no alcohol involved . . . in the incident.  The dude was sprayed with shotgun pellets, not a shook-up beer.