After Comedy Central cut a portion of a South Park episode following a death threat from a radical Muslim group, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris wanted to counter the fear. She has declared May 20th “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
Norris told KIRO Radio's Dave Ross that cartoonists are meant to challenge the lines of political correctness. “That’s a cartoonist's job, to be non-PC.”
via Seattle cartoonist launches “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” – Seattle News – MyNorthwest.com.
YouTube – GM Repaid Government Loan Ahead of Schedule.
This is absolutely not the truth.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer today signed a controversial immigration bill into state law, advancing a politically charged debate that is already having reverberations in Washington.
“Respect for the rule of law means respect for every law,” said Brewer, a Republican. “People across America are watching Arizona.
Republicans are beginning to attack the financial regulatory reform bill by attacking the Democrats pitching it as simply not believable.
“Just think about some of the things Americans have been told,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said on Thursday. “As a senator, the current President railed against deficits and debt. He said America has a debt problem and that it was a failure of leadership not to address it. Yet last year his administration released a budget that doubles the debt in five years and triples it in 10. The debt has increased over $2 trillion since he took office. And in February, the federal government ran the largest monthly deficit in history.”
“There’s a lot of skepticism” among the American people about what Washington is promising these days, a senior GOP leadership aide tells ABC News.
Now “South Park” can't even say the words “Prophet Muhammad.”
After last week's episode of the Comedy Central series sparked a threat (and yes, it was certainly a threat) from a radical Islamic website, the network has cracked-down-for-their-own-good on creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone during last night's continuation of the show's storyline.
For those who missed the drama, the show's 200th episode last week mocked the one “celebrity” that the series has been largely unable to depict, the Prophet Muhammad, who was hidden from view in a bear costume. A U.S.-based website RevolutionMuslim.com then warned Parker and Stone they could end up like Theo Van Gogh (the Dutch filmmaker who was murdered by Muslim extremists after depicting Muhammad on his show) and even posted the address of the show's production office. The site has since been shut down.
via ‘Muhammad’ now a dirty word on ‘South Park’ — The Live Feed | THR.
The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they're not in power.
From the halls of the Ivy League to the halls of Congress, from the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq to the anticapitalist protests during International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, we're used to seeing leftist malcontents take to the streets. Sometimes they're violent, breaking shop windows with bricks and throwing rocks at police. Sometimes there are arrests. Not all leftists are violent, of course. But most are angry. It's in their DNA. They view the culture as corrupt and capitalism as unjust.
via Rush Limbaugh: Liberals and the Violence Card – WSJ.com.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission's computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.
The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC's internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.
via SEC and Pornography: Employees Spent Hours Surfing Porn Sites – ABC News.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has issued a stay on the December 2009 injunction by Clinton-appointed Judge Nina Gershon that declared the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) funding ban was unconstitutional.
The result of the stay is that the Congressional funding ban will go back into effect, and ACORN will not receive taxpayer dollars while the court reviews the case.
via Appeals Court Reinstates ACORN Funding Ban – HUMAN EVENTS.
Last week, Matt Kibbe posted the voicemail from voiceover actor Lance Baxter (A.K.A D.C. Douglas). The voicemail was very calm, very steady, asking how many FreedomWorks employees were “mentally retarded”, and then goes on to ask what our spin will be when one of our members finally kills someone. And then he left his name and phone number.
Let’s state the obvious: This is sheer stupidity. If you’re even remotely recognizable and you are representing a company, you don’t alienate customers. It’s as simple as that. GEICO obviously saw the damage, and fired him.
The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.
via FDA plans to limit amount of salt allowed in processed foods for health reasons.
When liberals advocate a value-added tax, conservatives should respond: Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it — after the 16th Amendment is repealed.
A VAT will be rationalized as necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium. But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.
Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration — which understands that, for liberalism, worse is better — has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great Recession accelerated. During the downturn, federal revenues plunged and spending soared. And, as will happen for two decades, every day 10,000 more baby boomers are joining the ranks of recipients of Medicare and Social Security, two programs with unfunded liabilities of nearly $107 trillion.
via George Will : If VAT, Ditch the Income Tax – Townhall.com.
Al Gore, the self-styled squeakiest-clean and deepest-green politician in American history, has some explaining to do this weekend. His environmental organisation has taken money to raise awareness about the need for clean water from a controversial chemicals company involved in the aftermath of one of the world's worst pollution disasters.
Dow Chemical, the US firm which now owns the leaking pesticides factory responsible for thousands of deaths in Bhopal, India, is sponsoring Life Earth events in 150 cities today. The event aims to raise money for clean water programmes. Research by environmental organisations has found dangerous levels of highly toxic chemicals in rivers, lakes and other water supplies close to several other factories owned by Dow and its subsidiaries in countries including the United States, Brazil and South Africa.
via Gore takes cash for water campaign from chemical firm – Americas, World – The Independent.
An elaborate state funeral for Poland's President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, was held Sunday bereft of many world leaders whose travel plans were paralyzed by the plume of volcanic ash that blanketed Europe.
The couple's bodies were flown from Warsaw to Krakow early Sunday for the tradition-laden ceremony and burial in the nearby Wawel Cathedral, the final resting place for Poland's kings, poets and statesmen, including Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, the exiled World War II leader who died in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.
via Poland buries president as ash cloud threatens – Europe- msnbc.com.
Former President Clinton on Sunday broadened his warning that Tea Party protesters could feed violence reminiscent of the Oklahoma City bombing, suggesting “right-wing media” and the blogosphere could be culpable for any future politically fueled extremism as well.
The former president, speaking on ABC's “This Week,” elaborated on his controversial comments from Friday, when he drew parallels between the modern Tea Party movement and the anti-government rage of the mid-'90s that preceded the 1995 Oklahoma City attack that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.
via FOXNews.com – Clinton Warns ‘Demonization’ of Government Leads to Threats, Chides ‘Right-Wing Media’.
The American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, considered by some to be one of the most wanted terrorists behind Usama bin Laden, was educated in the United States with taxpayers money, an ongoing Fox News investigation has found.
Awlaki, now believed to be recruiting for Al Qaeda from hiding in Yemen, is connected to at least two recent suspected terrorism cases – the Fort Hood attack and the attempted Christmas Day jet bombing.
A former diplomatic security agent who was tasked with investigating Awlaki immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks told Fox News that the Yemeni-American national lied on his visa application to attend Colorado State University, where he studied engineering. Rather than tell U.S. immigration officials that he was born in Las Cruces, N.M., in 1971, Awlaki stated that the was foreign born, the security agent, Ray Fournier, said.
via FOXNews.com – Radical Muslim Cleric Lied to Qualify for U.S.-Funded College Scholarship.
The new health care overhaul law – that promised increased access and efficiency in health care – will prevent doctor-owned hospitals from adding more rooms and more beds.
These hospitals are advertised as less bureaucratic and more focused on doctor-patient decision making. However, larger corporate hospitals say doctor-owned facilities discriminate in favor of high-income patients and refer business to themselves.
The new rules single out physician-owned hospitals, making new physician-owned projects ineligible to receive payments for Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Existing doctor-owned hospitals will be grandfathered in to get government funds for patients but must seek permission from the Department of Health and Human Services to expand.
Actress Dixie Carter, who played an outspoken liberal on the sitcom “Designing Women” and received an Emmy nomination for a guest role on “Desperate Housewives,” has died, according to TV gossip show “Entertainment Tonight.” She was 70.
Details about the time, place and cause were not immediately known.
Polish president Lech Kaczynski and other senior officials are among dozens of people killed when their plane crashed in western Russia.
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who had a central role in the health reform fight as the leader of anti-abortion Democrats, plans to announce Friday that he will not run for reelection, a Democratic official said. Without Stupak on the ballot, the seat becomes an immediate pickup opportunity for Republicans.
“Now with health care done, he’s retiring,” a friend said. “He has thought about retiring for the last three cycles, but was always talked into staying: to elect John Kerry to help end the war, to elect a Democratic majority to get health care done.”
Don’t let the door hit ya….
via Rep. Bart Stupak to retire, putting seat in play – Mike Allen and Josh Kraushaar – POLITICO.com.
Here’s a measure of how President Robert Mugabe is destroying this once lush nation of Zimbabwe:
In a week of surreptitious reporting here (committing journalism can be a criminal offense in Zimbabwe), ordinary people said time and again that life had been better under the old, racist, white regime of what was then called Rhodesia.
War is a dirty affair where innocents die and evil men sometimes triumph.
The intensity and uncertainly of combat is increasingly caught on camera, as embedded journalists and combatants themselves capture images and video of the brutality. Even in an age where the fake violence of the video game and the cinema have desensitized many of us to imagined carnage, real images of war can still strike us like the bitter steel of a bayonet. This is especially true in circumstances where we are guided by politically motivated players — in not-so-subtle ways — to view a jarring slice of the horror of war presented through a flawed and incomplete prism.
via Pajamas Media » Shame on WikiLeaks: Framing Lawful Engagement as Anti-American Propaganda (Part One).
WikiLeaks has declared that American forces engaged with armed elements of the Mahdi Army during the 2007 surge are guilty of “collateral murder.”
Part of that claim is based upon the fact that two Reuters employees, embedded with a band of armed militants, were destroyed by 30mm cannon fire from Apache helicopters. The Apaches were providing support for ground forces that had been under sporadic rifle and RPG fire throughout the morning. Wikileaks would have us hold the pilots responsible for not discerning the armed militiamen from the identically dressed Reuters employees that so comfortably moved with them.
via Pajamas Media » Shame on WikiLeaks: Framing Lawful Engagement as Anti-American Propaganda (Part Two).
Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it’s simply somebody else’s problem.
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
via Nearly half of US households escape fed income tax – Yahoo! Finance.
Union officers’ pension plans are significantly better funded than the plans they negotiate for their rank-and-file counterparts, raising questions about whether union members have been manipulated by those they trust to bargain for them.
The average union staff plan is funded at over 95 percent, while the average funding percentage of a rank-and-file member’s pension plan is 79 percent, according to a September study by the Hudson Institute. None of the staff pensions is on the Department of Labor’s list of critically underfunded pension plans, while more than half of rank-and-file pension plans are endangered. (A pension is considered “endangered” by the government when it contains less than 80 percent of the assets needed to cover its liabilities.)
Two weeks after President Barack Obama signed the big health care overhaul into law, Americans are struggling to understand how — and when — the sweeping measure will affect them.
Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.
“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.
via Health care overhaul spawns mass confusion for public | McClatchy.
Chubby Lin Yu Chun blew away a panel of judges on Taiwanese singing competition Super Star Avenue with this rousing rendition of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’.