10 Questions With Thomas Sowell - Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views)

John Hawkins scores another coup.

Just asking...

I'm not a Howard Dean fan. But is it possible that too much is being made of his "scream"?

Interested in a crafts blog?

That's Sasha Castel's latest project. She's looking for contributors here.

Look! It's Genevieve!

What? - you haven't heard of Genevieve? Genevieve Gorder? She's the star of Swiffer commercials, and if she were any more hyper and perky I'd shoot a tranquilizer dart at the TV screen.

Looky here - she's a celeb with Trading Spaces on The Learning Channel. They even offer a bio:

Minneapolis born, but internationally trained designer Genevieve Gorder, made her way to Trading Spaces after many years of schooling, travel and hard work.

"I originally thought that I was going to become an ambassador (giggle), it wasn't until my second year at Lewis & Clark College that I realized I was supposed to be a designer. It just found me, I just knew. It's like when people tell you about how they met their spouse for the first time, and within minutes "they just knew", it was like that for me with design. Maybe that's why I'm in no rush to get married (giggle again). Within months, I was living in Manhattan, working as a designer at MTV and finishing my education at the School of Visual Arts ... I think this was all by the ripe old age of 20......Genevieve currently resides in Manhattan. When not working on the show, she works through her own studio double-g. You can find her work just about anywhere, from a bottle of Tanqueray 10, a line of blue jeans set to launch in the fall, to the shelves of Barney's where you'll find a line of her illustrated greeting cards. When she's not working (which is rare), you're most likely to find her at an airport, off on her next adventure.

I won't comment on her style (I'm esthetically challenged - can't you tell?) other than to note that the person she most wants to meet is the late Antonio Gaudi - the architect whose name has been understandably but incorrectly associated with the word "gaudy".

I guess what struck me about all this is the way she is shown on the Swiffer commercials, as someone we all must have heard of. Sheesh, near as I can tell she doesn't even have a blog. Maybe this appearance on NWA will boost her career, eh?

Clinton associate busted for possession of grenades and plastic explosives

Well, that's not the way the NYT put it - here's their lead:

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23 — The private Hollywood investigator and central figure in a federal wiretapping investigation, Anthony Pellicano, was sentenced on Friday to 30 months in prison on an unrelated weapons charge.

More about Pellicano here.

Ernie Davis: The Greatest Pro Running Back Who Never Was

Right here.

Dancing Hillary!

Those thick calves had to be good for something, as seen here.

Stolen from Best of the Web Today.

Joseph Cirincione

How'd I miss this when it was first posted? Shark notes, as Steven Den Beste tersely puts it, the same expert who now says we didn't need to invade Iraq because it didn't have any WMDs warned that we could not invade because Iraq had WMDs and would use them.

Yahoo! News - Halliburton Tells Pentagon Workers Took Kickbacks to Award Projects in Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Halliburton Co. (NYSE:HAL - News) has told the Pentagon (news - web sites) that two employees took kickbacks valued at up to $6 million in return for awarding a Kuwaiti-based company with lucrative work supplying U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites), Friday's Wall Street Journal reported.Yahoo links rot fast, so check it out. Meanwhile I'll see if I can find it from another generally accessible source. Or you can just grab a WSJ.

Or read the lefty blogs - I'm sure it'll be at the top of the agenda there, except possibly for the Cheney/Scalia thing.

CNN.com - Rehnquist questioned on Cheney-Scalia trip - Jan. 22, 2004

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two leading Democratic senators asked Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Thursday about the propriety of a hunting trip Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took with Vice President Dick Cheney while Cheney has a case pending before the high court.

In a letter to Rehnquist, Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut asked the chief justice to tell them what "canons, procedures and rules" are in place to determine when justices should recuse themselves from cases.

It takes a thief?

An organization called Ware Enterprises and Investments, Inc. runs the "Dreamkeeper Program". It offers 10% a month interest for the first 10 months and 5% thereafter.

That's nice if you can get it. Can you?

Barry Minkow doesn't think so. He ought to know - he has spent years in prison for his adventures with ZZZZ Best. Now out of prison and with a soul retread, he's a pastor in San Diego and runs a "Fraud Discovery Institute".

Is he on to something?

On July 31, the NFL says it also sent out an alert to its 32 teams warning of possible "misrepresentation" involving the company and providing generic information on pyramid fraud schemes. The League also let its teams know that the firm is not registered with investment regulatory authorities and that both Ware brothers have criminal records in Florida, although those records are unrelated to finance or investment. Citing privacy concerns, the NFLwould not identify players who have invested in the Dreamkeeper Program or the teams to which they belong.

We'll see what happens. No one is saying that Ware Enterprises is doing anything wrong. But they are promising the kind of return that ought to raise eyebrows, and screwing financially unsophisticated celebrities out of their money is a longstanding tradition.

Taverns for Tots

"I have just heard in the news that--as of today--Toledo bars have found a loophole in our smoking ban. As you all probably know, a few months ago a ban on all smoking in bars and restaurants in the Toledo area was passed, unless it was for a charitable event. So now the bars have started a not-for-profit corporation that charges people a buck to smoke in the bar, it than goes to their corporation: Taverns For Tots. This shows once again that you can try to beat down business with socialism, but it will fight back to the bitter end. The city of Toledo's lawyers are looking into the legality of this plan, and will no doubt file a lawsuit. I’m interested in seeing if this is, in fact, legal."

By Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy.

So you think you have problems?

Do not follow this link. It's just nasty.

The real Patriot Act

From the WSJ. Excerpt:

The Justice Department says the Patriot Act has played "a key part"--sometimes the "leading role"--in a number of successful anti-terror operations. As for civil-liberties abuse, a useful measure of just how profoundly threatening the law is should be Section 223, the Patriot Act provision under which citizens can seek monetary damages if they are mistreated. To date, the number of lawsuits is zero.

Let the bidding begin

You know, I almost blogged about it a few days ago when Carole Moseley-Braun dropped out of the race and then backed Howard Dean. There was Dean with money and allegedly no black support, and a black woman who presumably is dropping out for lack of money - they were made for each other. How long before they hooked up?

Not very, as it happens. The Corner on National Review Online quotes a Chicago Sun-Times article as follows:

"We are going to help her with the debt," [Dean adviser Jon] Haber told me. The debt tab could be in the neighborhood of some $300,000 and Dean's camp will help Braun raise the money to pay it off. Braun will campaign for Dean three days of the week, with the Dean campaign picking up her travel expenses. Braun will become a Dean campaign consultant and will be paid about $20,000. Up to three of Braun's staffers, including [Patricia] Ireland, will be hired by the Dean campaign.

If Moseley-Braun is worth that much, how much do you suppose Al Sharpton can sell out for?

SOTU

If you read many blogs it would be hard to miss that the State of the Union address happened last night. Convinced that it was in good hands, I went to Sam's and crashed early.

I wasn't disappointed. For one, here's Edward Boyd's take, which expresses some disappointment but still reminds us of why Bush is far better than anything the Dems have to offer.

Vodkapundit was good for 33+ posts starting here and going up. Tacitus blogged it live too, starting here.

Tom Daschle's Trent Lott Moment?

Via HobbsOnline.

Come on, Josh Marshall, make something of this.

The George W. Bush Conspiracy Generator

Much of the lefty blogosphere has just become redundant.

From Buttafly via the Corner.

Wanna publish your own book?

Quoth Andy Kessler: "You can write an op-ed today that runs tomorrow, set up a Web site that sells toys in a day or two, get a million signatures and recall a governor in a couple of months. But for some reason, it takes two years to get a book published."

But he survived, and today the book is on Amazon here.

Women who regret their abortions to speak in Washington DC on Jan 22.

Details here.

Can't make it? Then there's this, this, this, and much more.

Links stolen from After abortion

Special obstruction forces

Here is a very interesting article about "Nine reasons why we never sent our Special Operations Forces after Al Qaeda before 9/11".

Stolen from Instapundit.

Triumph of the obvious

See if you can follow this logic: Sex causes reproduction. Therefore abstaining from sex will prevent reproduction.

No, it's no trick - it really is this simple. And they've figured it out in Uganda, as noted here.

Cold!

Streakers' getaway car stolen. Perhaps the weather did what the law cannot to take these guys out of the gene pool.

How corrupt is France?

From David Frum's Diary on National Review Online

Effective feminism

Betty Friedan? Gloria Steinem? Kate Michelmann? Forget those pretenders - while they bitched and moaned, other women were actually doing things. Here's a realfeminist, and here are many more.

"...one of the great con jobs of all time"

Here's a great column by Jay Bryant.

Carol Moseley Braun, who ended her presidential campaign this week, is frequently and accurately described as the only African-American woman ever to serve in the United States Senate.

But, assiduous newsreader though I am, I have never seen her identified by the following descriptor, which in addition to being equally accurate is vastly more remarkable:

Carol Moseley Braun is the only African-American Democrat ever to serve in the United States Senate.

Isn't that really astonishing? A political party that for the past seventy years has claimed the allegiance of as many as ninety per cent of the black voters of this country has elected precisely one of them to the Senate. And the only way Moseley Braun won was by challenging and defeating the Illinois Democratic Party's anointed and endorsed candidate – incumbent Senator Alan J. Dixon in 1992.I paused in mid column just now and did some rough math, which suggests that somewhere between a quarter and a third of all Democrats are African-Americans. So if we applied the concept of affirmative action quotas to the Democratic Senate membership, there should be approximately twelve black Democratic Senators in the current Congress. But in fact, there are none. There weren't any in the last Congress either, or the one before that. Except for Moseley Braun's single six-year term, there have never been any black Democratic Senators.

There have been three black Republican Senators: Hiram Revels, Blanche Kelso Bruce and Edward Brooke.

Oh, Democrats will let African-Americans serve in the House of Representatives, but only after carefully carving out black-majority, which is to say segregated, districts for them. Well, you can't expect white Democrats to vote for one of them, can you?

So the Democratic Party's policy, throughout the modern, post-World War II era has been to create separate-but-equal congressional districts. Keep blacks in the ghetto – the urban plantation. The handful of African-American Republican members of Congress, by contrast, have come from suburban and rural areas, where they have been, often enthusiastically, supported by Republican voters. Moreover, whenever the Republican Party has attempted to run black candidates in black areas, they lose overwhelmingly, and this pattern holds for other offices, too.

White Republicans have no problem whatsoever voting for black Republicans, when they can find one to vote for. Black Democrats won't vote for a black Republican. White Democrats won't vote for a black Democrat. Which is the racist party?

There's much more worth reading (gimme a break while I nod toward "fair use"). Then comes the climax:

The massahs were Democrats. The whip-toting overseers were Democrats. The Klansmen were Democrats. The filibusterers of the Civil Rights bills in the 1960's were Democrats. The liberals whose welfare-state policies destroyed families in post- Great Society inner cities were Democrats. That such a party gets to claim the allegiance of so many African-American voters is one of the great con jobs of all time.

With "friends" like the Democrats, who needs racists?

Casey Kasem leaves American Top 40

Oh admit it, you listened to it once in a while. I first tuned into it in the early 70's, and for a while I didn't miss it. I still tuned into it once in a while if I happened to be listening to the radio on Sundays, but then pop music changed. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with getting older...

The whole time the DJ was Casey Kasem. He finally retired.

But you'll still hear him - he has always been the voice of Shaggy for "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"