Georgia Justice!

Yet another fugitive covered by America's Most Wanted has been caught:

NEW Zealand fugitive Nai Yin Xue, suspected of murdering his wife and abandoning his toddler daughter, has been arrested in the US.

Mr Xue is suspected of murdering his wife, Anan Liu, in Auckland last September and stuffing her body in the boot of a car.

He is also suspected of dumping his three-year-old daughter, Qian Xun Xue, who became affectionately known as Pumpkin, at a Melbourne train station.

"He was arrested in Atlanta," said Tom Hession, head of the Los Angeles US Marshalls, today.

Mr Xue had been living with members of the Chinese community in the southern US city and his acquaintances tipped off local authorities after seeing news reports about him.

"He was either associated with, or staying with some folks, who realised he was wanted and they called authorities," Mr Hession said.

Mark Johnson of Chamblee Police in Georgia said Mr Xue had been prepared for capture by his informers.

"They took matters into their own hands," he said. "When we arrived he was hog-tied with rope and duct tape."

University of Michigan history professor, Juan Cole, goes to absurd lengths to say that Obama's name doesn't matter

We can debate whether or not it is fair to use Barack Hussein Obama's full name, but Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, goes to ridiculous lengths to say it doesn't matter.

In response to the brouhaha over controversial remarks made by talk radio's Jim Cunningham as the opening act to a John McCain rally, Cole has a blog post entitled, Barack Hussein Obama, Omar Bradley, Benjamin Franklin and other Semitically Named American Heroes, where he argues in great detail that names like Barack Hussein Obama are no different than names like John Adams because they share "semitic" roots:

I want to say something about Barack Hussein Obama's name. It is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Cunningham is a serial jackass in my opinion, but this theory ignores the Judeo-Christian Biblical roots of names like "John" (you know, like John the Baptist) and the Muslim roots of names like "Hussein". This fatuous thinking would have us believe that the fact that Arabs and Jews are Semites somehow trumps their chasmal religious and cultural differences.

He then takes it a step further and implies that not only was it bigoted for Cunningham to use Obama's middle name, Cunningham wants to take away the citizenship of people with Muslim names:

I won't go into all the great Americans with Arabic names in sports, entertainment and business, against whom Cunningham would apparently discriminate on that basis. Does he want to take citizenship away from Kareem Abdul Jabbar [meaning "noble the servant of the Mighty"] and Ahmad Jamal [meaning "the most praised, beauty"]? What about Rihanna ["sweet basil," "aromatic"]? Tony Shalhoub [i.e. Mr. Monk]?

Uh, no, Mr. Cole, I don't recall anyone demanding any such thing (unlike the New York Times, who fantasize that John McCain is ineligible for the White House because he was born in Panama, but I digress). And what pray tell does the fact that a name can be translated to mean "sweet basil" have to do with the topic at hand? Isn't he getting a bit off course here?

Cole goes on to makes a questionable claim here:

Barack Obama's middle name is in honor of his grandfather, Hussein, a secular resident of Nairobi. But it has been reported that that Obama's grandfather, Onyango Hussein, was one of the first Muslim converts in the village.

Barack's grandfather's religion may be be irrelevant (unless Obama were to romanticize it to the point of where it adversely affected his foreign policy positions). Personally, I am more troubled by the fact that Barack's spiritual mentor Rev. Wright, who gave him the phrase, the audacity of hope, is an afro-centrist who greatly admires Louis Farrakhan and traveled with him to meet with Khadafi. However, when history professors claim that a Muslim convert is "secular" it raises questions about their agenda.

Indeed, If one reads Professor Cole's biography, one learns that he is (surprise!) a "progressive". At his home page he goes into great detail about his own American roots and genealogy, and we learn:

He married the former Shahin Malik in Lahore in 1982, and they have one son, Arman, born in 1987.

Gosh, I wonder if that could be clouding his perspective, and mushing all people with "semitic" names into one big bowl of progressive oatmeal, while ignoring the cultural and religious influences of the upbringing of men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, which were in no way, shape, or form Middle-Eastern, African, or Islamic?

The simple fact is, we are not all the same, and it's more than our names which make us different. Obama clearly thinks his heritage is important, and identifies with his biological father's African side, so why should we be asked to ignore it?

Idgit Watch banned by Air Force!

Actually, all Blogspot blogs have been banned:

AFNOC has imposed bans on all sites with "blog" in their URLs, thus cutting off any sites hosted by Blogspot.

Ironically, Maj. Henry Schott may want to read some blogs himself (particularly those which covered the McCain/Iseman story) because he is still laboring under some dubious assumptions about the go-to places for reliable news:

The idea isn't to keep airmen in the dark -- they can still access news sources that are "primary, official-use sources," said Maj. Henry Schott, A5 for Air Force Network Operations. "Basically ... if it's a place like The New York Times, an established, reputable media outlet, then it's fairly cut and dry that that's a good source, an authorized source," he said ...

There are some sane people in the Air Force who dissent from this decision:

Within the Air Force, there's also a strong contingent that wants to see open access to the sites -- and is mortified by the AFNOC's restrictions. "When I hear stuff this utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.... Piles of torn out hair are accumulating around my desk as we speak," one senior Air Force official writes in an e-mail. "I'm certain that by blocking blogs for official use, our airmen will never, ever be able to read them on their own home computers, so we have indeed saved them from a contaminating influence. Sorry, didn't mean to drip sarcasm on your rug."

The Audacity of Hope indeed

Like it or not, Obama has big plans for you and me. Even Mother Jones is catching on to the cultishness of it all. This is from the Messiah's stump speech as transcribed on their pages:

That moment when we shed our fears and our doubts. When we don't settle for what the cynics tell us we have to accept. Because cynicism is a sorry sort of wisdom. When we instead join arm in arm and decide we are going to remake this country, by block, precinct by precinct, county by county, state by state. That's what hope is.

I like my block, thank you very much, and the last thing I want is a mob of Obamacrats joining arm in arm to remake it. From my perspective, what he describes is not "hope", but a freaking nightmare. Indeed, his lofty platitudes are sounding more and more like the threats of a liberal fascist, and I'm not liking this one bit.

NRO found these plans, as described by his wife, Michelle:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

It's Pretty audacious to make all these plans for us, isn't it? As Jim Geraghty asks, And what if we kind of like our lives as usual?

Update: Here is Allahpundit's take on this whole creepy scenario.

Does Chelsea Clinton think work is a four-letter word?

Sen. Hillary Clinton took a swipe at her daughter's profession today at an economic roundtable discussion at a restaurant in Parma, Ohio, suggesting wealthy investment bankers and hedge fund managers on Wall Street aren't doing real 'work.'

The former first lady's daughter, Chelsea Clinton, works for New York-based hedge fund Avenue Capital Group. She previously worked in New York for McKinsey & Company, her first job after graduating with her master's degree from Oxford University.

Hillary does not hide her disapproval.

It's not the first time Clinton has taken a swipe against her daughter's profession. Campaigning in Wisconsin yesterday, Clinton railed against hedge funds as Chelsea sat off to the side.

Indeed, it's not the first time or the second time - apparently Hillary really thinks Chelsea is a worthless loafer:

In 2006 the AP reported that Hillary had to apologize to Chelsea for saying , young people have a sense of entitlement after growing up in a "culture that has a premium on instant gratification.".

After telling an audience that young people today "think work is a four-letter word," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she apologized to her daughter.

Hillary really should learn to be less derisive of her daughter's vocation. Surely she knows that it's impossible for Chelsea to follow in her footsteps after all that backbreaking work she did in the cattle futures market. Give the poor girl a break!

Madonna's directorial debut less than triumphant

With a plot like this, one could have safely predicted that this "romantic musical comedy-drama" which she wrote, directed and executive-produced was doomed from the start:

Filth and Wisdom is the 81-minute story of a Ukrainian immigrant who finances his dreams of becoming a rock star by moonlighting as a cross-dressing dominatrix.

Set in London it stars Eugene Hutz, the lead singer of New York gipsy punk band Gogol Bordello, in the main role of a philosophising S&M escort.

The ensemble of characters also includes a thieving pharmacy worker and a ballet dancer who is forced to lap dance.

The money quote:

The Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm said: "Madonna has far to go before she can breathe the same air as Godard, Pasolini, Fellini and Visconti, whom she insists she admires in a director's statement in which two of the four are misspelt."

McCain advisor plans to cut and run from campaign

McCain may be the warrior candidate but Mark McKinnon plans to pre-surrender in the battle for the White House if Obama is the Democrat nominee.

"I would simply be uncomfortable being in a campaign that would be inevitably attacking Barack Obama," said McCain adviser Mark McKinnon in an interview with NPR's "All Things Considered." "I think it would be uncomfortable for me, and I think it would be bad for the McCain campaign."

Uncomfortable? This strikes me as being jaw-droppingly wussified, but then again I'm not opposed to waterboarding terrorists either.

The Jyllands-Posten newspaper incites Danish Muslims to whine in protest.

I'm taking Michelle Malkin's lead and showing my solidarity with the Danish cartoonists.




This cartoon caused riots around the world, 100 deaths, and a most recently, a foiled murder plot against the cartoonist. In a commendable act of defiance and solidarity, the newspaper dared to reprint the cartoons again.

The newspapers said they republished the cartoon to show their firm commitment to freedom of speech after the arrest Tuesday of three people accused of plotting to kill the man who drew the cartoon depicting the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

Predictably, this action was not well-received.

Danish Muslim leaders condemned the alleged murder plot, but also said reprinting Westergaard's cartoon was the wrong way to protest.

"There could have been other ways to do it without the drawing, which I personally do not like," Abdul Wahid Petersen, a moderate imam, told The Associated Press.

Imam Mostafa Chendid, the leader of the Islamic Faith Community, said his group was considering staging a rally in front of Parliament. The Copenhagen-based group spearheaded protests against the cartoons in 2006.

"We are so unhappy about the cartoon being reprinted," Chendid told the AP. "No blood was ever shed in Denmark because of this, and no blood will be shed. We are trying to calm down people, but let's see what happens. Let's open a dialogue."

Whatever. Why not start a dialogue in their own community, because if a 2 year old cartoon is enough incentive to hatch a murder plot, there is still something rotten within the Muslim "community" in Denmark.

Update: Captain's Quarters shows solidarity too.

Update: Here's a video flashback from Bryan Preston at Hot Air. Taqiyya

My Saudi Valentine is like a [censored], [censored] rose that's newly sprung in June

Saudi Arabia's religious police have banned red roses ahead of Valentine's Day, forcing couples in the conservative Muslim nation to think of new ways to show their love.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has ordered florists and gift shop owners in the capital Riyadh to remove any items colored scarlet, which is widely seen as symbolizing love, newspapers said.

Update: Michelle Malkin suggests we fight Sharia by celebrating Valentine's Day and includes a roundup of anti -Valentine fevah from the usual suspects.

XXXOOO

Is Barack Obama Oprah's newest James Frey?

In 2005 Oprah promoted James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces. You may recall, this memoir took a great deal of license with the truth:

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states."

Fast forward to the race to the Presidency, where Oprah has chosen to promote another writer, this time the author of the 1995 book, Dreams From My Father. There seem to be some similarities between Obama's tendency to embellish his rakishness and the liberties taken by shamed author, James Frey.

In a New York Times story entitled, Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part for Obama, we are told:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

This particularly dramatic paragraph caught my eye as it was very Manchild in the Promised Land:

Mr. Obama describes a scene in that period where, in the meat freezer of a deli, he watched someone named Micky — “my potential initiator” — pull out “the needle and the tubing,” apparently to shoot up heroin. Alarmed, Mr. Obama wrote that he imagined how an air bubble could kill him. Neither Mr. Kakugawa or the others interviewed for this article who knew Mr. Obama at Punahou recalled hearing that story from him.

Who are we to believe? I myself am wary of people who change their names and identities, like this witness to Barry's college days who was Kim but is now Amiekoleh:

While he would sometimes attend parties held by black students and Latinos, Amiekoleh Usafi, a classmate who also spoke at the rally, recalled seeing him at parties put together by the political and artistic set.

Ms. Usafi, whose name at Occidental was Kim Kimbrew, said the most she saw Mr. Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer.

Time will tell whether any of this apparent tendency to embellish becomes subject to any meaningful scrutiny. I tend to doubt it as his supporters seem very content to believe in an illusion and would resist any and all attempts to bring this man back to Earth.

Clearly, this New York Times story does add to the aura of unreality which surrounds the candidate who runs with the theme, "The Audacity of Hope". However, lest one offend the easily offended, it is probably ill advised to have the audacity to challenge the carefully constructed biography of the man who would be President, and in any case, Hillary Clinton is hardly in a position to challenge him in that regard.

Shut Up & Sing

Or more precisely, 80 year old Leon Fleisher did not have the wisdom or grace to just Shut up and Play.

The Octagenarian was among 5 musicians honored recently by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Alas, one of the conditions of receiving the honor was unacceptable to him:

What made me unhappy and continues to trouble me was that I was required to attend a White House reception on the afternoon of the gala...

He goes on to describe a litany of Moonbat complaints with the "illegal war", the "torturing of prisoners", the "flagrant dismantling of environmental protections", the "shredding of the Constitution, and so forth, and thus refused to attend the reception.

He explains:

I was asked to attend all of the scheduled events and to follow the well-established protocol of silence.

While this might have made for a glamorous experience, it also presented a profound irony. Turning a blind eye to the political undercurrents of the event dismantles the very force of art in this country that the honors celebrate: the freedom, nay, the obligation to express oneself honestly and without fear. Ultimately, there is no greater honor than that freedom.

What political undercurrents? What fear? It's a freaking concert and the only thing that is profoundly ironic is that an 80 year old man would behave like an infant. I have zero tolerance for idgits who think that refusing to engage those we disagree with somehow advances the cause of freedom.

Oh well, here's to empty gestures:

In the end, I decided to attend wearing a peace symbol around my neck and a purple ribbon on my lapel, at once showing support for our young men and women in the armed services and calling for their earliest return home. My family did the same, as did a number of fellow attendees who, over the weekend's various events, asked me for ribbons of their own.

All that's missing from this picture is a purple dunce hat.

Update:

Here's a photo of the ill-mannered impresario!

Multiple wives a drain on your pocketbook? No problem! British taxpayers will fund your harem.

Islamic law has been officially sanctioned in Britain:

Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal.

Yep, bigamy is punishable by up to seven years in prison for the rest of you poor sods, but one must be willing to make sacrifices when seeking cultural rapprochement.

The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife, as is permitted under Islamic law. Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.

Chiefly but not exclusively Muslim men? Hmmm. We'll see how that works out. And I predict they'll soon know exactly how many bigamists there are - after all it would be foolish to turn down this taxpayer largesse.

The decision has been condemned by the Tories, who accused the Government of offering preferential treatment to a particular group, and of setting a precedent that would lead to demands for further changes in British law.

No kidding! What's next? How about a little stoning of errant wives and children? Why not drop all those annoying investigations into honor killings since it's part of their Islamic culture, dontcha know, and we must celebrate diversity.

Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband's bank account, if the family so choose. Under the deal agreed by ministers, a husband with multiple wives may also be eligible for additional housing benefit and council tax benefit to reflect the larger property needed for his family.

Isn't it nice how convenient they make it. Three cheers for a well-functioning bureaucracy!

Islamic law permits men to have up to four wives at any one time - known as a harem - provided the husband spends equal amounts of time and money on each of them.

I'm not clear as to whether this tradition is being adhered to. If so, no doubt taxpayers will be asked to pick up the plane fare and other travel expenses.

First they came for your shopping bags, now they're coming for your ATM receipts and chewing gum.

The New York Times is running a story entitled, Motivated by a Tax, Irish Spurn Plastic Bags. Fine, I don't have a huge problem with taxes being levied on plastic bags since there is a fairly easy solution to the problem and the government is not actually outlawing plastic bags.

However, this story illustrates what can happen when people decide to go tax crazy in the name of saving the planet:

Ireland has moved on with the tax concept, proposing similar taxes on customers for A.T.M. receipts and chewing gum. (The sidewalks of Dublin are dotted with old wads.) The gum tax has been avoided for the time being because the chewing gum giant Wrigley agreed to create a public cleanup fund as an alternative. This year, the government plans to ban conventional light bulbs, making only low-energy, long-life fluorescent bulbs available.

The light bulb thing drives me nuts and I will dedicate a post to the folly of outlawing conventional light bulbs, but when you start taxing ATM receipts you are either letting the inmates run the asylum, using environmental issues to excuse rapacious government greed, or both.

I suspect that the reason they are picking on ATM receipts is that they figure that banks have very big pockets and that they can extort money from them. Otherwise, why not go after 'polluters' like, say, The New York Times whose Sunday paper alone could be said to be far more of an environmental nuisance than ATM receipts.

Bush wary of Jeopardizing Military Industrial Profits

*sigh*

That headline is the work of a practical joker Useful Idiot at Digg, who has rewritten this headline at Breitbart dot com: Bush Wary of Jeopardizing Iraq Gains.

The Lolita Midsleeper Combi bed for very young girls has a very short shelf life.

A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

How did this happen?

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

Marines told to high tale it out of Berkeley

Why does it not surprise me that Doug Oakley, staff writer for the Contra Costa Times thinks that the word hightail is spelled high tale? Because he is writing about the town of Berkeley, California where it is evident that lunacy and bad behavior know no bounds and there's a whole lotta smoking goin' on. To wit:

On January 29, Berkeley declared itself a Sanctuary City for medical cannabis patients, providers, and landlords .

Now, in a 6-3 vote, the City Council has declared that the U.S. Marines recruiting station "is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders."

... And it officially encouraged the women's peace group Code Pink to impede the work of the Marines in the city by protesting in front of the station.

In a separate item, the council voted 8-1 to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m.

Groovy.

There's a "Peace and Justice Commission" in Berkeley, and these are their poster children, er, elderly ruffians:

An employee of a nearby business who asked not to be identified said Wednesday the elderly Code Pink protesters are aggressive, take up parking spaces, block the sidewalk with their yoga moves, smoke in the doorways, and are noisy.

Peaceful resistance through yoga!

Here's where the spelling error came in:

Anderson, a former Marine who said he was "drummed out" of the corps when he took a stand against the Vietnam War, said he'd love to see the Marines high tale [sic] it out of town.

"We are confronted with an organization that can spend billions of dollars on propaganda," Anderson said. "This is not Okinawa here; we're involved in a naked act of aggression. If we can provide a space for ordinary people to express themselves against this kind of barbarity, then we should be doing it."

Let's hope that these ancient and disorderly members of Code Pink who are classified as "ordinary people" if you live in Berkeley don't also decide to take their clothes off in a naked act of aggression.