Sgt. Hassan Akbar Sentenced

Death.

Attention Firefly Fans

Serenity trailer.

Watch River kick some ass.

I'm back up

My internet connection at home came back up about fifteen minutes ago. It's now much better than the barely-above-dialup-speeds I've had for the last month or so.

Hypothetically speaking

Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.

Let's examine this hypothetical scenario:

The year is 1995. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh plays the following skit during his show:

"President Bill Clinton is telling us the Second Amendment isn't for citizens anymore, so he is going to take it away from us. Well, here's your answer, you lecherous hump: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

Imagine the (entirely justified) outcry from the media and the DNC.

The year is now 2005, and the situation is no longer hypothetical. This skit was aired this week by Randi Rhodes, a talk radio host who has a show on Air America:

"A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

As Ms. Malkin states on her own blog, this isn't the first time Ms. Rhodes has used such rhetoric.

Light blogging

My internet connection at home has been down for a week and Time Warner doesn't seem to want to pull their heads out of their asses long enough to fix it. Some assclown from TW showed up last night - two hours after the scheduled apointment time - said he couldn't fix it, then left without even looking at anything.

Update

TW says it'll be another week before they'll even try to fix the problem.

The challenge - one final time

A quick look at the right sidebar will show that I've made a couple of changes, namely, changing the "Blogs I Read" section to the "Right-Wing Blogs I Read." It will also show the addition of a new category: "Left-Wing Blogs I Read." There's a reason behind this change. And, no, it doesn't mean that I'm becoming a liberal.

I'm issuing a challenge to my regular and semi-regular readers: find rational and sane left-wing blogs that you would like to see added to my blogroll. I already have a few in mind, but I'd like to see what my readers suggest before I start adding them. I would also like to point out that the "rational and sane" clause automatically eliminates DailyKos, AmericaBlog, BlogActive, and Oliver Willis, so don't even bother submitting those.

I also won't object if someone recommends rational and sane right-wing blogs to add to my list. And, of course, the "rational and sane" clause will cause Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, David Limbaugh, and Mike S. Adams to be dismissed outright.

Please post your recommendations in the comments section for this post. Off-topic comments and flames will be deleted with extreme prejudice.

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day, bitches.

Sgt. Hasan Akbar found guilty

Court-martial finds soldier guilty in desert grenade attack
Updated: 4/21/2005 4:26 PM
By: Associated Press


(FORT BRAGG) - A military jury at Fort Bragg Thursday convicted a 101st Airborne soldier in a grenade and rifle attack on fellow soldiers waiting for orders to invade Iraq.

The court-martial determined Sergeant Hasan Akbar murdered the two officers killed in the attack two years ago. Fourteen other troops were wounded.

The jury's unanimous guilty verdict means Akbar could be sentenced to death. A sentencing hearing will be Monday.

The jury deliberated the verdict for about two and a half hours Thursday.

Akbar, 33, stood at attention as the verdict was read by the colonel who headed the jury panel, chewing his lip but giving no other outward sign of emotion.

It's the first time since Vietnam that an American has been convicted for killing fellow soldiers during wartime.

Akbar's defense lawyers didn't deny the Muslim soldier carried out the assault. They said he was insane during the attack at a desert camp of the 101st Airborne Division in Kuwait.

Prosecutors say he was sane and that the crime was premeditated.

The new pope

Shame on you, Mr. Smith.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Michelle blogs about a man who a man who spit tobacco juice on "Hanoi" Jane Fonda. This guy is no better than those who have been systematically assaulting conservative speakers on college campuses. There are better and more civil ways of expressing your displeasure than using pies or tobacco juice.

Update

Via Drudge:

Michael Smith apparently has no regrets about spitting on Fonda.

Way to go, dumbass. While I emphatically understand your dislike of Hanoi Jane, what you did was childish, churlish, and downright stupid.

Grow up.

Mr Bush, put up that wall!

I was watching the news yesterday, and there was a report about the weekend arrest of twenty-one memebers of a gang calling themselves MS-13. These arrests were made following a spree of gang-related crimes, including robbery, vandalism, and nine counts of murder. One of those murders was that of a nineteen-month-old toddler. Of the twenty-one that were arrested, only one was a U.S. citizen. One. The remainder of those arrested are in the U.S. illegally.

This is hardly an isolated incident. Stories such as this echo throughout the border states, and yet, the federal government makes absolutely nothing more than a token effort to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. The Minuteman Project that is currently taking place in Arizona has proven that an increased presence along the border can make a huge impact on the number of illegals entering the U.S. To date, the federal government has failed to take notice of this fact.

America is, and always has been, a nation for immigrants. It is also a nation of laws; laws that both citizens and would-be citizens are expected to obey. Some of those laws pertain to immigration and how to become a full-fledged U.S. citizen. There are even laws that govern being a foreign national living in the U.S., without being a citizen. The key point here is that all of these are here in accordance with existing law.

This is not true for so-called "undocumented" immigrants.

According to the Federation for Immigration Reform, public services for illegal immigrants cost the state of Texas an estimated $4.7 billion per year.

The porous border along the southern states is costing way too much, in terms of both lives and money. It's time to man that border with adequate personnel. It's time to start holding Washington accountable for doing its Constitutionally mandated job of protecting the U.S. from invasion by foriegn nations.

It's time to put up a wall.

Not-So-Happy Anniversary

Twelve years ago today, Janet Reno, with the approval of Bill Clinton, ordered the summary execution of 75 American men, women, and children in Waco, Texas.

Ten years ago today, total nutjob Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city. His "rationale" (if such a word can be applied to his lunacy) for the bombing was to retaliate against the federal government for the Waco Massacre.

White Smoke and Tolling Bells

Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope John Paul II's right hand man, has been selected as Pope Benedict XVI.

Update

Wikipedia's information on the new pope.

Update II

Michelle Malkin has oodles and oodles of links regarding the worldwide reaction to the selection of Pope Benedict XVI.

Force it, not abolish it.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the Republicans in the Senate invoking the "nuclear option" of killing the filibuster. Personally, I think this is a horrible idea. If someone threatens a filibuster, then they should have their copy of War and Peace or the Houston phone book ready to go on a moment's notice.

Wanna do a filibuster? Start talkin', pal.

Here's the deal, folks

Anyone caught spamming my comments section or trackbacks, especially with pornography, will be banned. And, when I ban, I don't just ban IPs, I ban entire subnets. This is the first, and only, warning.

The deafening sound of silence

Where, oh where, have the "hate-crimes" advocates gone?

---

Non-Bias Attack

April 11, 2005

By Marianna Hernandez

Invoking the name “Martin Luther King” and screaming “Black Power!” a gang of up to 30 black teens attacked four white girls in Marine Park in what police are saying is not a bias crime.

The March 30 attack was a hot topic at state Senator Marty Golden’s recent public safety forum.

According to witnesses and parents of the victims, four young girls from St. Edmund’s had the day off from school due to Easter recess. They were playing basketball during dismissal from nearby Marine Park Junior High School, when several Marine Park students demanded to use the court.

After adults intervened and asked them to wait their turn, the teens left - but returned in a pack of up to 30, both boys and girls, and stormed into the park.

Witnesses say the attackers were all black and called their victims “white crackers” during the bloody melee, which raged for almost 20 minutes.

“This is not being looked at as a bias crime,” NYPD Deputy Inspector Kevin McGinn said at the meeting.

“When I pulled my car up to the park, I witnessed a pandemonium I’ve never seen in my life,” said Debbie, a mother of one victim who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

Her daughter ran to the car, screaming, “They’re going to kill us,” Debbie recalled. My daughter was so scared and kids were running around like crazy.

Pursued by dozens of teens, some of the girls were “literally running into traffic to save their lives,” she said.

One girl made it as far as a nearby house, but was dragged by her hair back into the playground by a “wolf pack of children,” Debbie said.

The St. Edmund girls were bleeding and beaten to the point where they had cuts, scrapes, footprints and dirt all over them - and the attackers surrounded her car and started pounding on the windows as Debbie tried to herd the terrified children into her vehicle.

Two girls were hospitalized - one with a broken nose and one with a head injury, according to Edith, the mother of another girl.

According to Lt. Mark Molinari, from the 63rd Precinct, five of the assailants, who attend Marine Park Junior High School, were arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault. But since the attackers are all under the age of 16, they are facing charges in Family Court, and were arraigned last Friday.

“I always felt safe in the area and after hearing about such an incident, you start thinking what else could happen. These situations should not be happening, not in Marine Park, or anywhere else, and the safety of our kids should be of most importance,” said Denise Williams, a parent from Gerritsen Beach.

“It’s getting progressively worse in the community - these types of gangs are not only taking away our parks, they‚re ruining our neighborhoods,” said parent Cathy Miller.

“Nobody expects their child to go to a park and get beaten, with footprints on her head and arm, everyone just wants their child to be safe,” said Edith. “Everyone should have the right to be safe from teens, to small kids, to seniors, to mothers with strollers, no one should fear of being beaten while enjoying a day in the park.”

---

I feel safer already

After seven years in comittee, the UN has finally decided to outlaw the use of nukes by terrorists.

I guess that will teach those pesky terrorists a lesson or two.

Terrorist pleads guilty

Eric Robert Rudolph, a member of the Christian terrorist organization called "Army of God," pleads guilty of bombing a lesbian nightclub, an abortion clinic, and the Centennial Olympic Park. Unfortunately, this plea bargain will save him from the death penalty.

One would hope that the plea bargain also includes him rolling over on the other members of the Army of God who helped hide him duing his eight year long run from the law.

WTF?

Hat tip to Vulture's Row.

I'm guessing that the teachers and administrators were away on their union-mandated break when this was happening.

---

Witnesses: Teen assaulted on videotape

April 12, 2005

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A 16-year-old disabled girl was punched and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in a high school auditorium as dozens of students watched, according to witnesses.

Authorities are investigating and no charges have been filed in the alleged attack last month at Mifflin High School. Four boys suspected of involvement were sent home and have not returned to class.

Also, the principal, Regina Crenshaw, was suspended and will be fired for not calling police, school officials said. And three assistant principals were suspended and will be reassigned to other schools. Crenshaw had no comment Tuesday.

The girl was forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, according to statements from school officials, obtained by The Columbus Dispatch. Part of the alleged assault was videotaped by a student who had a camera for a school project.

School officials found the girl bleeding from the mouth. An assistant principal cautioned the girl's father against calling 911 to avoid media attention, the statements said. The girl's father called police.

Her father said the girl is developmentally disabled. A special education teacher said the teen has a severe speech impediment.

---

Tolerance from the Left

Forced Outing Watch

A quick look at my sidebar will show that I have just signed on to the Forced Outing Watch Blogroll. This is done in support of those who have been systematically and unfairly assailed by the individual shown in the sidebar image. I would like to encourage people to take action against this blatant hypocrisy perpetrated by the Left.

Also, in light of an incident that took place earlier today, I want to make sure that everyone understands my position. We here at Darth Apathy - myself and the co-contributors of this blog - do not in any way condone doing anything illegal in the pursuit of this action. Keep it clean, safe and legal, folks.

Thanks.

Update

It seems that the "anonymous" coward poster in my comments section is none other than Mike Rogers, the culprit behind the hypocritical outings himself.

An act of kindness

From the International Herald Tribune.

---

Here is a family story of Pope John Paul II, an intimate tale of his humanity.

During the summer of 1942, two women in Krakow, Poland, were denounced as Jews, taken to the city's prison, held there for a few months and then sent to the Belzec extermination camp, where, in October, they were killed in primitive Nazi gas chambers by carbon monoxide from diesel engines.

Their names were Frimeta Gelband and Salomea Zierer; they were sisters. As it happens, Frimeta was my wife's grandmother. Salomea, known as "Salla," had two daughters, one of whom survived the war and one of whom did not.

The elder of these daughters was Edith Zierer. In January 1945, at 13, she emerged from a Nazi labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland, a waif on the verge of death. Separated from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the Germans, she could scarcely walk.

But walk she did, to a train station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved slowly, the wind cut through her. When the cold became too much to bear, she got off the train at a village called Jendzejuw. In a corner of the station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.

Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, "very good looking," as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to the girl to be a priest. "Why are you here?" he asked. "What are you doing?"

Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.

The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again, the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese.

They talked about the advancing Soviet army. Edith said she believed her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.

"Try to stand," the man said. Edith tried - and failed. The man carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak, and set about making a small fire.

His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla.

Although she took him for a priest, he was still a seminarian who would not be ordained until the following year. Another 33 years would pass before he would become Pope John Paul II and embark on a papacy that would help break the religion of communism and so transform the world.

I do not know what moved this young seminarian to save the life of a lost Jewish girl. I do know that his was an act of humanity made as the two great dehumanizing forces of the 20th century, the twin totalitarianisms of fascism and communism, bore down on his nation, Poland.

Here were two people alone in a ravaged land, a 24-year-old Catholic and a 13-year-old Jew. The future pope had already lost his family - mother, father and brother. Edith, although she did not know it yet, had already lost her mother at Belzec, her father at Majdanek, and her little sister at Auschwitz. They could not have been more alone.

We are alone. All of us. The great opiates of the 20th century - communist and fascist ideology - promised to subsume the individual into the collective glory of a beckoning utopia, but they delivered only new and more terrible forms of suffering.

In his early, and very personal, observation and absorption of this suffering lie the roots of the late pope's core belief: the inalienable value and sanctity of each human life.

This belief carried Pope John Paul II to convictions that some found old-fashioned or rigid. But in an indulgent age of moral pliancy, why seek to be indulged by the pope, of all people? He offered his truth with the same simplicity and directness he showed in proffering tea and bread and shelter from cold to an abandoned Jewish girl in 1945, when nobody was watching.

It was a truth based on the belief that, as he once put it, "a degradation, indeed a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human being" had lain at the root of the repetitive mass murder of the 20th century.

The power of that truth answered forever Stalin's contemptuous question - "How many divisions has the pope?" - as John Paul II, starting with his 1979 visit, undid Stalin's iron legacy in Poland and so opened the way for the unification of Europe a decade later.

This was not his achievement alone, by any means, but in an inalienable way it was his. I do not believe the strength that enabled him to do this and the strength that led him to save Edith Zierer differed in any fundamental way. Like his healing ecumenism, these acts required the courage born in a core certitude.
.
Edith fled from Karol Wojtyla when they arrived at Krakow in 1945. The family on the train - also Jews - had warned her that he might take her off to "the cloisters." She recalls him calling out "Edyta, Edyta," - the Polish form of her name - as she hid behind large containers of milk.

But hiding was not forgetting. She wrote his name in a diary, her savior, and when, in 1978, she read in a copy of Paris Match that he had become pope, she broke into tears. By then, Edith Zierer was in Haifa, Israel, where she now lives.

Successive letters to him went unanswered. But at last, in 1997, she received a letter from the Vatican in which the pope recalled their meeting. A year later, they met again at the Vatican.

Edith thanked the pope for saving her. He put one hand on her head, another hand in hers, and blessed her. As they parted, he said, "Come back, my child."

---

Hear hear!

Gayorbit expresses my belief on the outing of public figures with far more politeness than I would have.

QotD II

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend...."

-Farimir of Gondor - The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien

QotD

"And an illegal immigrant is not a "undocumented immigrant" any more than a rapist is an "undocumented boyfriend"."
-Emperor Darth Misha I, The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller

Well Said

Nicki over at The Liberty Zone takes President Bush to task for his opposition to citizens peacefully attempting to secure the Arizona border against the perpetual invasion by illegal aliens.

The Minuteman Project has already successfully stopped over 140 illegals from entering the US since its inception. It is estimated that 51% of all illegals enter the US through the Arizona border.

Play Ball!!!

Regular season play has started for the Astros. Will they be able to repeat last year's performance, or was that just a flash in the pan?

Only time will tell.

Oh, good grief

Hat tip to Gayorbit

This guy makes Jack Chick look sane.

The Pope has died

Ladies and Gentlemen of all faiths and religions, word has just come from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II has finally succumed to his lengthy illness. While I may have had many disagreements with him and the policies of his Office, I feel that he genuinely attempted to leave the world a better place than it was when he found it.

Today is a sad day for the entire world.

April Fools

This is probably in very poor taste, but given the false death anouncement regarding the Pope and considering what today is, I couldn't help but find this funny.

in edit: (2:24pm, 4/2/05) image taken down in respect of Pope John Paul II, who passed away today after a long illness.

Pope's condition worsens

Pope John Paul II's health, which has been unstable for some time, has gotten dramatially worse. Reports say that he's suffered heart failure in addition to the infection that he's been fighting over the last few days.

I wish him well, but I feel that the Catholic church will probably have a new guy wearing the funny hat by the end of next week.

Update

CNN and FOX are reporting that he's starting to experience the onset of multiple organ failure.

Update II

CNN and FOX were claiming that the Pope has died, but have since recanted that statement. Word from the Vatican is that the Pope's heart and brain are still functioning.

Liberal (In)Tolerance

Once again, Michelle Malkin has a lengthly list of the Left's ability to tolerate those with whom they have a disagreement. Of course, we already had an inkling of that given the amount of respect she herself gets from the Left.