Randi Rhodes is a raving idiot

On the way home today I switched the radio over to the local Air America station, and heard some woman ranting about how terrible it was for President Bush to use the term "Islamofascists." I think the term President Bush used was actually "Islamic fascists," not "Islamofascists," but that's beside the point.

The woman had two points, both of them asinine:

1) Referring to terrorists by their religion, Islam, is a slur against all Muslims.
Wrong, of course. An elementary school student could explain the simple logic that the statement that some followers of Islam are fascists does not imply anything about all followers of Islam.


2) These terrorists shouldn't be called "Islamic fascists" because Hitler wasn't called a "Christian fascist."
Calling Hitler a "Christian fascist" would have been misleading. Of all the beliefs, lusts, and dementias that drove Hitler, Christianity wasn't in the top 10. Islamic fascists, on the other hand, are driven by their fanatical religious beliefs. They kill "infidels," they want to impose fascist Islamic Shariah law, and their faith tells them they'll get 72 virgins as a reward for their murderous acts. You'd have to be pretty stupid not to see the difference.

When I got home I looked up the radio schedule to find out who this idiot was. It's Randi Rhodes, supposedly one of Air America's top draws.

Liberals against copyrights

Free love. Free health care. Free Mumia. Everything should be free, man.

Free newspaper columns, too. The man is trying to keep you down and dumb if he doesn't let you read everything for free. That's the premise behind Common Dreams, a liberal content-stealing site that republishes columns without compensating the newspaper or the author. They hide behind a twisted and exceedingly broad interpretation of the "Fair Use" exemption in copyright law.

The problem? When people rip off their columns, newspapers are not generating ad revenue from their own web sites. That makes it hard to pay the people who write the columns in the first place. Liberal San Francisco Chronicle columnist Harley Sorensen was terminated in 2005, and his editor blamed the theft of his columns by sites like Common Dreams.

Now the same thing is happening to the New York Times. Its TimesSelect program hides the opinions of its columnists behind a subscription-only wall. While this obviously greatly limits the reach and influence of the columnists, it does raise a little bit of revenue for the Times (yes, a few people actually pay to read that stuff). But that won't work if sites like this republish NY Times columns in their entirety. Why pay for Times Select when you can just do an online search for your columnist?

Hear no evil

Still think the New York Times and the Democrats were right to expose and oppose monitoring SWIFT transfers and phone calls to and from overseas terrorists?

See no evil

Hmmm... terrorists carrying on individual, harmless-looking, bomb components, then gathering to assemble them in the plane's bathroom....

Still think Annie Jacobsen didn't witness a dry run two years ago?

An inconvenient hypocrite

Al Gore, while telling everyone else to change their lifestyle to save the environment, doesn't seem to want to change his own lifestyle. He:

* Flies in private jets
* Owns three large, energy-intensive houses
* Doesn't elect to take wind-powered electricity which is offered to him by his local utility
* Gets paid to allow a zinc mine that pollutes local rivers to be operated on his property
* Owns (or has owned) large amounts of oil company stock

Bonus point not mentioned in the article: he's not a vegetarian. Meat production is a huge contributer to greenhouse gases, both because of methane emitted by livestock and because of trees being cleared for grazing land.

I'm sure Gore will make some changes after being publicly exposed as a hypocrite. Switching to wind power is an obvious and easy one. And I've heard he may have already cut back on private jets after being exposed. But the point is, why didn't he look at the log in his own eye before criticizing the splinter in everyone else's? It's elitist arrogance. It's a trait shared by many limousine liberals, who criticize families for owning SUVs but burn much more fuel in their private jets than an SUV could ever burn.

Surrender-monkeys want Israel to surrender

Condoleezza Rice tried to do the nice thing by including the irrelevant French in cease-fire negotiations for Lebanon. For a while, it looked like they might agree to a reasonable proposal. But that was before France received orders from its Arab masters: Israel must pull out before Hezbollah is disarmed and before peacekeepers can move in.

Walberg wins!

Congratulations to the Club for Growth on its victory in supporting challenger Tim Walberg over pork-loving, pro-eminent-domain-abuse, incumbent Congressman Joe Schwarz.