After beating that kid with the stage dad from hell by 12 million votes with 97.5 million votes cast in the "American Idol" final, David Cook has surely secured his place as McCain's long-awaited running mate, right?
Belly up to the Arizona barbecue...
I’ve had Kuwait’s back ever since
I was 15 years old. Bad boy Saddam Hussein had just invaded Iraq’s
tiny, oil-rich neighbor, and before too long the Gulf War was on.
Promptly, my high school campus turned into an emirate lovefest: We
scribbled “Free Kuwait!” (and, er, “Saddam Sucks!”) on our book covers
and binders, and some enterprising students even printed buttons for
our backpacks. Since expanding my horizons past the point of
rudimentary 10th-grade knapsack foreign-policy advocacy, I’ve still
always supported the decision to liberate Kuwait. Now if only Kuwait
would liberate itself.
Read my column about last weekend’s disappointing parliamentary vote in the wee Gulf nation…
Or at least that’s how I sound in this interview I gave for a profile in Nielson Business Media: “To be in this business, you have to just love the news to the point where you don’t mind working weekends, holidays, nights, overtime; and you don’t mind dropping everything when a story happens. … You have to be the person who will do the editorial equivalent of walking to school three miles in the snow barefoot. You have to put the news and the newsroom first.”
Incidentally, I didn’t remember too much what I’d said in the interview because I’d just come off of working many many days straight and spoke with the reporter while still in PJs (which lends immense credence to my weekly gig at Pajamas Media) and fuzzy socks, bleary eyed and wondering how much Diet Coke it would take to arrive at a semiconscious state…
Former WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko is running for mayor of Kiev, and the May 25 vote is swiftly approaching! I recently got a one-on-one interview with the boxer from the campaign trail, and wrote about it in my Los Angeles Daily News column. I have a feeling GOP-V readers will find him to be much more than a pugilist — having grown up in the Soviet Union, he’s committed to bringing real democracy sans corruption to the Ukraine, and his model is the West: “I see the life standards in the U.S. and what we have to bring here to Ukraine People want to be part of the modern world. It’s one point to speak, another point to be.”
Or for a snapshot of Klitschko’s quotes and a poll on his chances for victory, click on over to my *NEW* (shameless plug alert!) World News site at About.com.
Why is it when President Bush mentions appeasement everyone, particularly Democrats, automatically think of Obama? Shouldn’t that be the real story?
Yes, "American Idol's" little dred-head made a mockery of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" this week, but he forgot the words to "Mr. Tambourine Man." That floored me. OK, so I was offended enough to hear him massacre the great Bob Dylan, but Castro claimed to be such a folk junkie. I'm glad he was sent packing tonight.
If you can bear to watch it, the link is here. Sacrilege!!
Yesterday
I finally scored an interview -- via phone, direct from the Ukraine --
with former WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko, who's running
for mayor of Kiev. The vote is coming up on May 25, and Klitschko is
attempting to knock out (well, theoretically -- but he does have a
higher knockout percentage than any other heavyweight champ!) incumbent
Leonid Chernovetsky.
So stay tuned for my column on this matchup, where Klitschko -- who holds a Ph.D., incidentally -- confesses that politics is much more difficult than boxing. He also uses his upbringing in a Soviet state to craft his vision of how the Ukraine really needs to embrace true democracy and knock out corruption.
Oh, wait, Putin is still, for all intents and purposes, ruler supreme of Russia... Never mind!
As Israel nears her 60th birthday,
this is major food for thought: Hamas airs a “documentary” showing that
Jews supposedly plotted the Holocaust to weed out the weak and gain
international sympathy. They release it just a couple of weeks before
the day when the world remembered the victims of the Holocaust. The
media largely ignores this outrage, because Hamas represents the
“persecuted” Palestinians. I write about the lessons we need to learn
from this — with the insight of my pal Valerie Harper, who took her
amazing Golda Meir character to the big screen recently — in my Los Angeles Daily News column this week:
“Sadly, as we marked this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, ‘never again’ seems further from reach than ever. Jews continue to be targeted, be it in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, or the repeated desecration of Jewish graves in Berlin. Holocaust denial has became accepted as legitimate thought in some circles and has become a foreign-policy talking point in the regimes of others.And when I, a gentile columnist, have written about the outrage of Holocaust denial, I’ve received far too many letters defending the deniers.
‘Jews don’t care about anybody but the Jews,’ wrote one Canadian reader. ‘…Only a fool would trust a Jew to play fair with gentiles. … They’re laughing at you for falling for their lies. Don’t be such a sap.’
Hamas is doing its best to stoke that disbelief in the true nature of the Holocaust, while fanning the flames of hatred for the Jewish people.
On April 18, Al-Aqsa TV - which brought Palestinian kiddies Farfour the martyr mouse and Assoud, the Bugs Bunny rip-off who vowed to ‘eat’ the Jews - aired an ‘educational’ program that accused Jews of perpetuating the Holocaust to weed out the weak among their ranks and simultaneously gain international sympathy.
This, of course, walks a fine line with Hamas’ contention that the Holocaust never happened…”
And if you want to be even more depressed, read the reader comments, which include this from a woman in Redondo Beach:
“Holocaust ‘denial’ is a misnomer. Nobody denies the Holocaust. Some people have noticed irregularities with some aspects of the official holocaust story and have raised questions. For example, why haven’t the mass graves at the death camps been opened up to estimate the number of victims and see what we can find out about who they are or how they died? Why hasn’t anybody demanded information about a relative they believe was murdered in one of the death camps? How exactly did the gas chambers work and how did they dispose of all the bodies?
All reasonable questions but instead of answers, you get called a bigot and anti-semite for asking them. For that reason, people will continue questioning the holocaust. It’s not bigotry that leads people to holocaust revision, it’s simply curiosity.”
To which one reader responded:
“Christina, I could not agree with you more. It’s not bigotry to find the truth. The real bigots here are the stiff-neck mutated counterfeit jews that reasons with their own vile vehement that spews forth without intelligences, along with their brain dead following..”
Feeling truly ill yet? There was a positive comment over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to lift one’s spirits:
“I’m surprised the PI let Bridget Johnson’s opinion on here.
The popular opinion on the far left is that the Jewish people and Israel are the root cause of all violence, poverty and hate in the Arab world. Without Jews, none of it would exist.
I’m sure they would have felt sorry for them as they were being cooked early in the late 30s, had they been around to see it, but now that they have recovered, prospered and are white and wealthy, they are a target.
Hamas could fry babies, and they do in a sense, and they would be the noble ones to the far left, because they aren’t wealthy.
Keep the faith Bridget and if your letters smell of lattes and incense, save yourself some grief and throw them away.”
Can one love L.A. any more???
Read about my Monday night at the Academy screening here at Pajamas Media. The tidbits offered by Tarantino and company afterward were, as I write, juicier than a Big Kahuna Burger!!
The spinmiesters on Obama spiritual mentor Reverend Wright are now saying the good Reverend is not a bad guy; he was simply taken out of context. The problem is that when you look at the context of what he says, it’s actually worse. Wright spews many more anti-American and racially divisive comments than have been widely reported. Obama himself has written some racially divisive comments that may garner more scrutiny when he becomes the official democrat nominee.
Wright is not doing Obama any favors by trying to repair the damage by downplaying the comments. Minimizing the seriousness of such comments didn’t work for David Duke, Ron Paul, or Don Imus and most people are painfully aware of the double standard Obama and his supporters employ. Obama supporters have already tried to unfairly paint opponents as racists by claiming the use of "code words". Obama does not go out of his way to denounce such racially divisive innuendo which devastates his claim to be a racial healer. Wright's attempts to spin his comments only serve to highlight Obama's hypocrisy.
Jimmy: Hows about you quit firing rockets into Israel for a few days?
Hamas: Pound sand peanut picker.
Jimmy: What about a prisoner exchange?
Hamas: Bite me you toothy tool.
Jimmy: Would you at least recognize an Israeli’s right to exist?
Hamas: Sure. When they are all dead.
Jimmy announces to the world: Hamas is ready for peace!
Hamas announces to the world: Carter is an irrelevant idiot that does not know what he is talking about!
Obama opines after finishing his waffles: The meeting was a "bad idea".
Condi breaks in: Yeah, I said it was a bad idea BEFORE he went.
Result: Carter gets Isreal and Hamas to agree on one thing; Cater is a tool.
NBC is finally going to quit stroking itself with its feel good "Going Green" campaign. It’s just another one of those campaigns that try to make you feel like driving your car is akin to clubbing baby seals. What I really enjoyed about NBCs campaign is the commercials. The first Going Green commercial I saw was followed by a BMW commercial advertising a Beemer with enough horsepower to break the sound barrier if you stomped on the accelerator hard enough.
If NBC or any other greenie wants anyone to take them seriously they need to take the lead. If they want people to sacrifice, they need to start. So here are some suggestions NBC can use to show they really care about the planet. NBC can start by taking no ads for gas or diesel vehicles, bottled water, oil companies, etc. Oh yeah, don’t advertise anything from parent company GE until all their appliances run on solar power. Give up a little green NBC and you might convince me you are truly serious about saving the planet. Otherwise, leave me and my turbo diesel seal clubber alone.
So which calamities should Hillary Clinton use in her next commercial, now that she's won Pennsylvania? Some suggestions:
Here are my columns I've been too busy/burned out/crazy to post lately:
And over at my About Journalism site, I did blog on Putin's alleged monkey business with a Russian gymnast (sorry, Reaps, I had blogged on this elsewhere but hadn't linked from GOP-V).
Change is good
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