Nine days since the [Al Qaeda Torture Manual] material was released, neither ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times nor The Washington Post has run a story with the photos of this shocking evidence of al-Qaeda’s barbarism,
reports Newsbusters, noting that it’s been reported only by CNN and Fox News among major news outlets.
Not by Chi Trib or Sun-Times either, of course, which goes without saying.
The one (S-T) runs what’s available, the other (Chi Trib) has its head somewhere else most days.
This may have been reported, but I missed it. Fr. Pfleger getting wild?
A gun rights advocate wants the Justice Department to investigate a Catholic priest who during a weekend anti-gun rally threatened to “snuff out” a Chicago gun store owner.
As Cybercast News Service reported earlier, Rev. Michael Pfleger said Saturday in comments aimed at Chuck’s Gun Shop owner John Riggio, “we’re going to find out and snuff you out.”
Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina’s Church in Chicago, told the crowd “we’re going to snuff out John Riggio, we’re going to snuff out legislators that are voting … against our gun laws and we’re coming for you because we are not going to sit idly.”
To “snuff” can mean to sniff, inhale, or extinguish. It is also commonly used as a slang term for “to kill.”
I would say so. Once on the West Side, I was “fingered” by black activist Chester Robinson, who has since gone to his reward. Friends told me to lie low, said wherever I go, be sure to wear my Roman collar. This was in the mid-60s, when the street would catch on to what a leader said.
Pfleger doesn’t mean it that way, I’m sure. But how will he be taken and how far need he go to keep his audience?
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Later, email comment:
I don’t listen to rap or Jay Leno, but “snuff out” means “blow away” or “kill” in my street lexicon. And street jargon is Pfleger’s stock in trade.
Now he’s had his effect, and got his headlines, and he’ll play dumb and innocent.And cardinal George will let the civil authorities deal with him. When did he resign from being cardinal to Fr. Pfleger? No longer his boss?
I do believe the cardinal is in over his head with Chicago. He’s a bookish fellow, ready to duke it out from podium or pulpit, but not able to deal with the shrewd likes of Pfleger, who is as clever a rascal as has arisen in the archdiocese for many years.
Tony Peraica is still running for Cook County Board president, FYI. Has You Tube video PERAICA TV: STROGER’S FRIENDS AND FAMILY here.
He’s a Republican. If that’s not OK with you and you’re not OK with that, then visit the site of the reform-minded Democrat who is running to unseat Todd Stroger in the next primary.
And look at the long list of Dems who are fed up and won’t stand any more of Todd. Can’t find them or it myself. Tell me when you do.
SPRINGFIELD — Political pressure for schools to pinch pennies collided with state lawmakers’ loyalty to teachers unions Tuesday, creating a conflict at the Capitol that some area educators fear will increase costs for schools — and eventually taxpayers.
At issue is a union-backed measure that would require outside companies to offer comparable benefits when hired by school districts for jobs that range from security and transportation duties to food service and maintenance work.
The Senate approved the plan 35-16 Tuesday. It narrowly passed the House last month and now goes to the governor’s office for review.
The bill is sponsored by Oak Park’s own Don Harmon, next time you wonder why taxes rise. Thanks also to Harmon-endorsed Todd Stroger over at the county board, preparing to raise property taxes to pay for relatives and friends in his employ.
Tax and spend, tax and spend, tax and spend: thank you, party of Todd Stroger!
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.
That’s Peter Collier in Wall St. [Opinion] Journal, who takes us through three wars and heroism in moving accounts.
What if carbon dioxide didn’t cause global warming but it was the other way around? What a fine kettle of carp that would be. But that’s how the world has worked, to judge by one of the trusted recorders that led to our present panic-stricken state.
The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved [since the late 90s]. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!
Oops. This is part of a most interesting, concise debunking by mathematician David Evans, a computer and electrical engineer, in his “I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.”
This [late 90s] evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.
“Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.” The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.
And thereby hangs a tale. Follow the politics, follow the money.
Evidence here that the world is not COMPLETELY filled with celebrity jerks:
INDIANAPOLIS — Have you seen the trailers for Ashley Judd’s latest performance? They’ve been all over TV.
She’s a race driver’s wife, running barefoot in a pouring rain down the pit lane at Indy, soaking wet, hair and dress stuck to her skin, shivering more with joy than cold—just ecstatic.
Credible performance, by her, him (nice guy not finishing last as Leo Durocher generalized), and Chi Trib’s Ed Hinton, whose byline this reader will be looking for.
Chi Trib surprises this morning, with p-1 story about oil-drilling from a “big oil” company’s point of view. It even gives a nod towards supply shortage leading to demand increase causing price rise — an elementary piece of economics that seems mostly to escape criers after corporate scalps.
Another story worth noting is James Janega on the Anbar Province success, including J’s scepticism about its meaning, which is fair enough as long as it’s presented that way openly, and from someone who’s been there, to boot.
Finally, the long piece on the all-boys prep school in Englewood is inspiring as sign of what can be done to arrest the “cycle of violence” and all-around ghetto failure. It features a young man whose mother feared the worst from the culture in which they were living. Quite thought-provoking.
However, the Perspective section is back to its old left-wing ways with a takeout on the horrors of war focusing on bereaved family of dead GI. This is vintage anti-war stuff in which editors and writers depict sorrow and grief, period. No heroism here, no cause worth dying for. Leaves one to presume they think there ain’t no such thing. A Memorial Day dirge from the pacifist camp.
Time Mag’s Joe Klein wandered from the anti-war, anti-Bush reservation long enough to report what embedded “warbloggers” such as Michael Yon have been telling us about Anbar province. Instapundit here is a good place to start with this secret story that can’t quite make it to our Mainstream Media friends.
The good news is success being achieved. It will kill Pelosi and friends, already reeling as they see themselves losing two wars right now, on Bush and corruption, about which look here.
The bad news is a yawner by now. MSM is slow, clumsy, and wedded to its prejudices. Something’s got to give.
Wow. Why didn’t I think of this? Sensible Muslims are not silent about Mad Muslims, says Stephen Schwartz. They just aren’t being reported.
The problem is more that of “MSM silence” than of “Muslim silence.” . . . MSM silence about moderate Islam discourages the recruitment of moderates to anti-terrorist activism, but also deters the solidarity of non-Muslims who could otherwise assist moderate Muslims.
For instance, the Fort Dix Six, four of whom are ethnic Albanians, stimulated an anti-Albanian binge (though with no mention of Mother Teresa, of course). Not reported was this from “the Presidency of the Albanian Muslim Community in the U.S. and Canada”:
We condemn all acts of terrorism. … [We] fully support United States Government efforts to end terror. . . . We are against all those ‘so-called Muslims’ who misuse and humiliate Islam and create ugly images of the Muslim people… We pray to Almighty God to save and protect the United States.”
Does stuff like that not pass the fit-to-print test?
Blithe Spirit 