Copycat Alert!
Gerhard Schroeder has been reading Tommy Daschle's playbook - Schroeder: Media in Campaign Against Him:

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Friday said his family had received a series of threatening letters and accused the media of a campaign against him.

"The unmistakably threatening letters that we are receiving beat everything," Schroeder told ARD television. Schroeder, who lives with his wife and her daughter, gave no details of the threats.
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Schroeder said he was in favor of tough scrutiny of politicians by the media. But he accused some newspapers, which he didn't name, of going too far.

"The open character assassination that we have in much of the tabloid press at the moment, and not just against me, damages Germany's democratic culture," Schroeder said, according to a transcript of the interview released ahead of its Friday night broadcast.

Irreverent criticism of Schroeder, whose popularity has plunged since his re-election, hasn't been restricted to the newspapers.

Sing along with the Chancellor, kids!

Fire Up the Wayback Machine!
Through the magic of Google, I came across the original article in the The Northern Rivers Echo (Northern New South Wales, Oz) that welcomed Margo Kingston to its pages: Margo Kingston joins The Echo. (If you aren't familiar with Margo, she's rather like Michael Moore, only better looking and Australian. Her latest flap was a slanging match with the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, about her column blaming the victims for the Bali bombing. )



The Echo seems to be a free rural weekly with a circulation of 20,700. Let's see what they had to say about Margo:

Acclaimed political journalist Margo Kingston has been appointed to write on Federal politics for The Northern Rivers Echo.

Ms Kingston, who is currently the online political commentator for The Sydney Morning Herald, spent more than a decade in Canberra press gallery before recently returning to Sydney, where she keeps a weather eye on the National stage.

The Echo's editor, Simon Thomsen, said he was thrilled to have a commentator of Margo Kingston's calibre join The Echo's writing team.
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Her weekly column, Political Corrections, will discuss major political issues facing the community and seek reader feedback. Her first column, on May 17, will discuss dairy deregulation.

Dairy deregulation! I guess that explains the shirt, but I wonder how long it took the locals in Wollongbar and Lismore to discover that she doesn't know one end of a cow from the other.

All of which brings to mind the question of what sort of gnawing hunger drove the powers-that-be at The Echo to insert an intergalactic thinker like Margo into a little local paper?

Must have missed it
It turns out the day after Thanksgiving is "Buy Nothing Day". (Actually if you follow the previous link, there seems to a little confusion about what day Buy Nothing Day actually is, except that it is near the end of November.) It's apparently an ecoweenie and wingnut holiday. Newsday covered the NYC march in On 'Black Friday,' protesters urge consumers to "buy nothing.''

The day after Thanksgiving has long been touted as "the busiest shopping day of the year," but upholding a long-standing tradition, colorful protesters marched down Fifth Avenue on Friday urging shoppers to "buy nothing."

Carrying signs reading "Stop the Marketing of Oppression," and "What Are You Paying For? $Human Exploitation, $Animal Torture, $Environmental Destruction," the roughly 100 protesters went from store to store, handing out fliers and railing against corporate greed and blind consumerism.

"No matter what your cause is, no matter what your philosophy, we all have one common enemy," said organizer Adam Weissman. "That is an ideology of corporate greed, that believes that an animal's body is a product and that a forest should be bulldozed for a cocoa factory."

The protest, which in past years had grown rowdy resulting in broken shop windows, drew a large police presence. But with a somewhat carnival-like atmosphere, it was a mostly peaceable affair Friday.

The line of protesters was led by a group of performance artists who pretended to be "consumer drones" following a man wearing a cardboard television on his head to represent "The TV God."

I didn't spot any of these colorful types this morning at the local Ace Hardware's "One Day Sale". Just some older gents in overalls and feed caps. There must have been some blind consumerism though, since they hoovered all the free (after rebate) sawblades and screwdrivers before I got there.

However, up in Canada they gave the day a new twist - Rampage of thieving feared on 'Buy Nothing Day'

City police say they fear Buy Nothing Day scheduled for today may degenerate into Steal Something Day.

Buy Nothing Day is a day proponents have set aside as a protest against commercialism .

A more radical faction has dubbed the occasion Steal Something Day, police Sgt. Alan Cochrane said yesterday.

Last year, groups of rowdies swept through downtown Victoria, stealing merchandise, terrorizing shoppers and diners.

Didn't see those around here either. Our Ace Hardware is kind of old fashioned - it sells ammunition.

Damn, I stepped in some U.N.
(Via Free Republic) You'll be happy to know that according to the United Nations, November 29 is the day that the UN solemnly marks International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People:

The United Nations today solemnly marked the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People amid widespread calls for efforts to achieve a two-State solution to the Middle East conflict.

"This Day of Solidarity is a day of mourning and a day of grief," Secretary-General Kofi Annan told a commemorative meeting in a message delivered on his behalf by Chef de Cabinet S. Iqbal Riza. Deploring the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, he noted that the human and material losses suffered by the Palestinians over the past two years have been "nothing short of catastrophic."
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The Chairman of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Papa Louis Fall of Senegal, said the root cause of the prevailing violence remains the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel and its perpetuation of illegal actions, including curfews, arrests, detentions, the demolition of houses, the devastation of farmlands, the deliberate pursuit of the settlements policy and extrajudicial executions.

I wonder how much the benighted American taxpayers laid out for this soiree?

That darn anti-Muslim violence
Vincent Schodolski reveals via the Chicago Tribune News Service that Furor surrounds professor who speaks out against radical Islam:

The death threats have stopped and the white van no longer lingers ominously outside his San Fernando Valley home, but the uproar Khaled Abou El Fadl unleashed a year ago has not abated.

El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA, has long been a moderate voice urging Muslims in the United States and elsewhere to speak out against radical elements of Islam.

So when he wrote an op-ed article published by the Los Angeles Times in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he was expressing views he had aired for years - usually to Muslim audiences.

At the time the article was published, many Muslims were speaking out against radical Islam, the kind personified by Osama bin Laden. So what was it about El Fadl's views that provoked such a furious reaction?

"I am the biggest danger to their (version of) Islam, not to Islam, and they don't make the distinction," El Fadl said.

"They," he said, were people who, for various reasons, support a version of Islam that has roots in Saudi Arabia and which, El Fadl suggests, has gained wide sway because of the willingness of the Saudi Arabian government to spend money to export its views.

Our pals, the Sheikhs of Araby.

The FBI and police are investigating the threats and the vandalism of El Fadl's car while it was parked outside a San Fernando Valley movie theater earlier this year. Although the windows were shattered, nothing was taken from the car, the only vehicle vandalized there that day.

Police tapped El Fadl's telephone but never were able to trace the source of the threatening calls.

At first he thought the threats were coming from non-Muslims angered by the terrorist attacks. But soon, El Fadl and authorities concluded that they were from Muslims angered by his criticism of those who failed to speak out against what he calls a "puritanical" form of Islam espoused by the Saudis.

That form of Islam, known as Wahhabism, is in some ways similar to fundamentalist views in Christianity and Judaism. Wahhabism, however, calls for a return to the Koranic interpretations that flourished in the decades that followed the death of Muhammad, the seventh-century prophet of Islam.

Gratuitous reference to Christians and Jews alert! That's getting so old, but it's probably in their style manual.

Where's the Ecoweenies?
News 13 in Tucson reports Immigrants Leaving Mounds of Trash on Tohono O'Odham Indian Sacred Lands:

The Tohono O'Odham Nation faces an environmental crisis. Every day, nearly 1,500 undocumented immigrants pass through the U.S.'s second largest indian reservation, leaving thousands of pounds of trash on tribal lands.

News 13 recently got a first-hand look at some of the areas on the reservation that appear more like a trash dump than sacred lands.

Piles of trash grow to mounds of trash on the Tohono O'Odham lands. In the process of searching for the American dream, some immigrants are trashing Arizona.

Henry A. Ramon, Vice Chairman for the Tohono O'Odham Nation, says, "Mother Earth is something very sacred, and here we see trash all over it."
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Tohono O'Odham officials estimate each undocumented immigrant leaves behind more than 8 pounds of litter. With nearly 1,500 crossing tribal lands every day, that amounts to 13,000 thousand pounds a day, and almost 5 million pounds a year.

Those pesky undocumented immigrants!

But at least they don't have to worry about illegal aliens.

Laughing at the losers
RET in the American Prowler provides Born to Lose:

My colleague, the executive editor of The American Spectator (and editor of this website), Wladyslaw Pleszczynski -- no typographical error intended -- after weeks of scrutinizing the Democrats in defeat has come to an illuminating conclusion. They are cultivating the mentality of the born loser. Rather than going back to the locker room and revising their strategy for the next great contest, they are whining, pointing their fingers at teammates, and blaming the referees. Tom Daschle blames talk radio. Al Gore now blames talk radio, Fox News and the infallible Washington Times. Bill Clinton blames?wait he has been almost totally silent. What can this mean? Has Hillary told him he's been a bad boy again?

My favorite adept of the losers' mentality is the New York Times, the newspaper that is to liberalism what the Christian Science Monitor is to Christian Science -- though Christian Science is so much more plausible as a medical therapy than liberalism is as a public philosophy. The Times, after polling the electorate, reports on its front page that the electorate favors the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. On the other hand the electorate is "ambivalent about" Republican policies such as tax cuts and Social Security reform. Yes, I see what they are getting at. The Americans have been seduced by the voluptuous charms of the raffish Trent Lott and J. Dennis Hastert, the most winsome Casanova ever to emerge from Aurora, Illinois. Is such an incongruous conclusion possible?

They were losers long before the last election.

Tuck it up, Tommy!
Peggy Noonan suggests that the usual cast of crybabies Stand Up and Take It Like an American:

In the America of 50 years ago and a 100 years ago and 1776, this is how it went:

You, a citizen, decide you want to belong to a group but you believe in "A" and they believe in "B." There is a clash. Here the old American myth kicks in. You, the citizen, stick with what you believe, and don't join the organization. You won't lie about what you believe, and they won't change what they believe. So they don't let you in. You pay a price for where you stand. But you can keep standing there.
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Now that rough old myth has been disturbed. Now it's, "I have my views and your group has its views. If you don't accept me with my views you're wrong, and will suffer in court." Now you insist on joining. You insist they change to accommodate you. You don't respect their position, you insist they alter it. You get a lawyer. You weep and rend your garments.
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Let's pick on Tom Daschle.

He, as a leader of a great political party, is an example-setter for the young. Some of them might look to him as a famous man who knows how to be an adult. After the dreadful showing of the Democrats in the election he held a news conference in which he famously blamed Rush Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show hosts for inciting people to . . . well, to not liking Tom Daschle. Rush says mean things about Tom. His listeners, who Tom Daschle subtly suggests are possibly unstable and insane--how could they not be, they're conservative--get a little too excited when they hear Rush, and start to make rude sounds. "The threat level goes up," says Tom Daschle.

Oh, please. Boo hoo.
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Well Anna, and Tom, I have never written of this or even spoken of it, but let me tell you something.

My political philosophy is conservative. I am pro-life. I live in New York City, surrounded by modern people. They are mostly left-wing, they are all pro-choice, many of them passionately and even furiously so. I have written books saying Ronald Reagan is a great man and Hillary Clinton is a bad woman. I know something about being a target, and I know something about hate mail. I have received not hundreds but thousands of the most personal and obscene denunciations; I have received death threats; I have been threatened with blackmail; I have been informed that I do not deserve to live; I have received a three page typed double spaced letter with perfect grammar and syntax the first sentence of which was "Dr. Ms Noonan, Let me explain to you why you are a . . ." and here I cannot suggest the word used. But damned if he didn't make a good case. I used to hear regularly from a woman who'd tell me she hopes I have a brain hemorrhage.

I have never talked about this because I would consider speaking of it both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. But there's another reason. I'm a grownup. I know you pay a price for the stands you take.
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So that's what I think our culture is losing and wants to get back: The old stoic sense that you pay a price to stand where you stand. This, ultimately, is the story not only of all adults who fully take part in the world but of America itself.

Hard cheese to the usual cast of whiners who use "consensus", "multilateralism", and related trappings as a smoke screen for their tedious agendas. But that's just me and I'm unmutual.

Nothing like modern technology
The Wall Street Journal astounds with If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, Here's How to Set It Straight:

Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.

But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its "mind": outfox it.

Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described "straightest guy on earth," he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other "guy stuff."

"The problem was, I overcompensated," he says. "It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich."

And then there is Amazon.com. More hilarity in the full article.

Whoops Alert!
Randall Parker debunks the notion that relentless immigration is the cure for the demographic problem of the declining number of US taxpayers who will have to support the tide of aging baby boomers.