The Coulter Comment

With regard to Ann Coulter's comments at CPAC... I'm going to follow Vodkapundit's lead and quote Jonah Goldberg...

But, even though I think Media Matters is something of a joke, that doesn't mean the point isn't valid. I don't think Ann does anybody but herself any good when she jokes about killing presidents, Supreme Court justices or uses terms like raghead. I don't think she should do it and I don't think conservatives should applaud it. I'm all for shattering the stereotype that conservatives can't tell a joke, but that doesn't mean any joke is worth making just because it gets a laugh (indeed, some jokes shouldn't be made for fear that they will generate a laugh).

There are plenty of occassions on which Ann is truly funny, and within this set there are numerous occassions when her biting humor contains an essential truth that needs to be discussed. Here, any truth she seeks to bring forth is obscured by the stupidity of the terms she chose to use. With that being said, Jonah's right on more point -- she's not going to be cowed by anyone, including her fellow conservatives.

Do You Believe In... Cartoon Rabbits?

By the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't say anything about this story. Al Michaels gets traded... for a cartoon rabbit? Funky story, to say the least...

In the rich tradition of goofy sports trades, eminent sportscaster Al Michaels has been traded for a rabbit. Not even a real rabbit -- a cartoon rabbit.

The Walt Disney Co., owner of ESPN and ABC, said Thursday it dealt the veteran ABC broadcaster to NBC Universal for rights to highlights from a broad range of NBC Sports coverage, promotions for ESPN's "Monday Night Football" -- and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Michaels, an announcer for ABC's "Monday Night Football" for 20 years, had asked to be released from his Disney contract after disagreeing with network producers about the direction the broadcast would take when it moves to ESPN in September, ESPN officials said in a conference call Wednesday.

"Oswald" is a 1927 cartoon series of 26 episodes created by Walt Disney and distributed by Universal, which owned all rights to the character, Disney said in a statement. The loss of Oswald prompted the Disney empire founder to create Mickey Mouse, the company said.

I wonder how this negotiation went between Disney and NBC Universal. I also wonder if this will create issues between Mickey and Disney when Mickey's contract comes up for renewal. And maybe the WB is considering trading the rights to Bugs Bunny for CBS' CSI franchise.

Seriously, I'm wondering what Disney wants to do with the rabbit. And what other cartoon characters are languishing in corporate vaults out there, waiting to be traded for sportscasters?

McCain and 2008

For all of my good friends who thirst for a John McCain Presidency, this looks like good news...

In an early February poll, New Hampshire voters showed a clear early preference for Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the 2008 presidential primary.

According to American Research Group, which surveyed 600 likely voters in each party’s primary, 32 percent of the state’s Democrats favored Clinton, with 9 percent backing former vice presidential nominee John Edwards.

Nine other candidates received some support. Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. John Kerry were at 7 percent and Al Gore at 5 percent. Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Russ Feingold, Bill Richardson and Mark Warner were all at 2 percent or less. Just under a third of the voters said they were undecided.

McCain easily outdistanced other potential GOP candidates, with 41%. No one else reached double digits, with Mitt Romney at 9 percent, Newt Gingrich at 8 percent, George Pataki 5 percent and Bill Frist 3 percent. No other names topped 1 percent.

(hat tip: Ankle Biting Pundits) One key note is that McCain should be in the lead in New Hampshire, which gave him a boost in 2000 as well, due to the fact that he's easily the best known candidate in the GOP field. And the fact that Mitt Romney is running in second comes primarily from the fact that he's from next door Massachusetts.

But McCain is clearly courting GOP support from the Bush base, as the Washington Post notes here. The question is whether the conservative base within the GOP will support him the primaries.

Some will, partly because McCain's steady support of the war and Bush's judicial nominees has given him new currency with conservatives, which is bolstered by his consistent and continued willingness to attack Congressional pork. The fact that's he's reaching out to key conservatives, including the Religious Right, makes one wonder if some of the cachet McCain has as an "independent" moderate -- the politician who doesn't act like other politician -- will suddenly disappear.

In fact, I'm also curious to see how the press ends up covering McCain in 2008 if he becomes the nominee. In the past, the press has fawned over McCain as an alternative to Bush. I wonder if this will still be true if he's running against Hillary, or if we'll suddenly see mainstream media stories that attack McCain. Too soon to tell.

Let's Do Dinner Another Night, Honey

A heads-up to the Lord of Truth, the Priest of Parliament Lights, and all my other friends in and around Philadelphia: dinner Tuesday night might not show up on time...

Illegal immigrants in the Philadelphia labor force - described by one Center City restaurateur as the "dirty little secret" of his industry - want to make themselves seen, heard and missed on Valentine's Day.

Local activists have urged undocumented workers throughout the region, particularly Mexicans who staff the city's restaurants, to strike on Tuesday, one of the biggest dining days of the year.

Organizers say the work stoppage, by a population typically on tiptoe, is to demonstrate the economic contribution of undocumented "shadow workers" and to protest a bill in Congress that would make illegal immigration a felony punishable by prison time.

"The call is to the employers, to make them realize they have a stake, and that they need to weigh in," said Ricardo Diaz, the independent organizer who sparked the effort.

Advocates for illegal immigrants around the country have toyed with the idea of a real-world staging of A Day Without a Mexican, a 2004 feature film about the impact on California when its Latino residents disappear.

Tuesday's effort, billed as A Day Without an Immigrant, would be the first such strike by illegal immigrants anywhere in the United States, according to advocates.
Valentine's Day is the second-most-popular day of the year for dining out, according to the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association. A number of restaurateurs in Center City, who asked not to be identified because they employ illegal immigrants, said they would be crippled by a strike.

"It would be a terrible hardship for us," the owner of a Fitler Square bistro said. "I don't know how we would be able to function."

The restaurateur said that a "Dear Employer" form letter, prepared by organizers to help workers explain their absence on Feb. 14, was faxed to him this week. It asked for his support in defeating the Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act drafted by Reps. James Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) and Peter King (R., N.Y.) and passed by the House of Representatives in December. The Senate is to discuss immigration next month.

(hat tip: The Confederate Yankee at Redstate) Let me get this straight. This is supposed to help the cause of people who want to help illegal immigrants get legal status? Piss off the employers and aggravate the general public? Okay, maybe some derelict boyfriends will be able to use this as an excuse to skip taking their women to dinner (yes, AC, I'm thinking of you), but that's not exactly the political base that will help defeat enforcement efforts.

What's more, the actual letter, which can be found at Redstate, essentially says the following: We're breaking the soft immigration laws America refuses to enforce, and really hate the idea that the penalties and enforcement might get tougher. We're going to strike to blackmail you into fighting Congressional efforts to strengthen enforcement. Please forgive us and help us continue to break the law, so that you can continue to exploit us as a cheap labor source.

I can think of one way to respond if I were a restaurant owner -- if you skip work, you're fired. It looks like some of the owners are taking this stance. Then again, maybe we need to find out why they're hiring illegal immigrants when it's against the law.

The Esteemed Senator From Oklahoma

Oklahoma's Tom Coburn is fast becoming one of my favorite U.S. Senators ever. Since I consider most of the people in that august body to be pompous blowhards, this is a true compliment. Check out George Will's column about Coburn...

Coburn is the most dangerous creature that can come to the Senate, someone simply uninterested in being popular. When House Speaker Dennis Hastert defends earmarks -- spending dictated by individual legislators for specific projects -- by saying that a member of Congress knows best where a stoplight ought to be placed, Coburn, in an act of lese-majeste, responds: Members of Congress are the least qualified to make such judgments.

...Coburn came to the nation's attention last October when he proposed taking the $223 million earmarked for Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere" and using it to repair a New Orleans bridge destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Because this threat to Alaska also threatened Congress's code of comity -- mutual respect for everyone's parochial interests -- his proposal lost by 67 votes. But rather than do the decent thing -- apologize, tug his forelock and slink away chastened -- he refused to stop talking about it, made it an embarrassment to the Senate and catalyzed revulsion against spending that is both promiscuous and parochial.

..."Quite time-consuming" was Coburn and John McCain's laconic description, in a letter to colleagues, of their threat to bring the Senate to a virtual standstill with challenges to earmarks. In 1999, while in the House, Coburn offered 115 anti-pork amendments to an agriculture bill -- in effect a filibuster in a chamber that does not allow filibusters. Collaborating with Coburn makes McCain, the Senate's dropout from anger management school, look saccharine.

When Coburn disparaged an earmark for Seattle -- $500,000 for a sculpture garden -- Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) was scandalized: "We are not going to watch the senator pick out one project and make it into a whipping boy." She invoked the code of comity: "I hope we do not go down the road deciding we know better than home state senators about the merits of the projects they bring to us." And she warned of Armageddon: "I tell my colleagues, if we start cutting funding for individual projects, your project may be next." But Coburn, who does not do earmarks, thinks Armageddon sounds like fun.

He was among the 73 Republican freshmen elected to the House in 1994. A fervent believer in term limits, he said he would leave after three terms, and did. He says he will serve at most one more Senate term. Of the 535 House and Senate seats, he says, "There's 200,000 -- 300,000 -- people can do these jobs." How many? "Millions," he revises.

"I'm not liked very well," he says serenely, "but I'm like the gopher that's going to keep on digging until someone spears me or traps me. I'm going to keep on digging the tunnel under spending." Because, he says, large deficits reverse the American tradition of making sacrifices for the benefit of rising generations: "I'm an American long before I'm a Republican, and I'm a granddad before I'm either one of them."

Anyone who's this committed to cutting spending and the size of government will become a serious threat to the Washington establishment, which is another reason to like the Senator. Even better, you have to appreciate a guy who thinks that being a Congressman or Senator isn't a particularly difficult job. Coburn's short editorial in the Wall Street Journal this week also demonstrated that he's willing to deliver the message against higher spending all by his lonesome, and do it with an economy of language rare for a politican...

I am convinced that forcing hundreds or, if necessary, thousands of votes to strike individual earmarks is the only way to produce meaningful results for American taxpayers. Bringing the Senate to a standstill for as long as it takes would be a small price to pay for shutting down what Jack Abramoff described as Congress's "earmark favor factory." The battle against pork is crucial. Pork is the root cause of the unholy relationship between some members of Congress, lobbyists and donors. Inside Congress, the pork process is effectively a black market economy: Thousands of instances exist where appropriations are leveraged for fundraising dollars or political capital. It is delusional to claim Congress can redeem its relationship with K Street without eliminating earmarks. The problem is not lobbyists. The problem is us.

Those who argue that fighting pork distracts members from the more costly challenge of entitlement reform don't understand human nature. Earmarks are a gateway drug on the road to the spending addiction. One day an otherwise frugal member votes for pork, the next day he or she votes for a bloated spending bill or entitlement expansion: A "no" vote might cut off their access to earmarks.

Keep up the good work, Senator.

More From Iran

Not to channel Pat Robertson here, but the world would be a much better place if an anvil fell from about 2000 feet onto the head of the President of Iran...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that the Palestinians and "other nations" will eventually remove Israel from the region.

Addressing a mass demonstration in Tehran - one of many organized throughout Iran to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution - he once again questioned the Holocaust "fairy tale".

"We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them," Ahmadinejad said in a ceremony marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution.

"Do the removal of Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations," the ultra-conservative president said. He once again called the Holocaust a "fairy tale" and said Europeans have become hostages of "Zionists" in Israel.

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) Let's be very clear -- this guy is exceedingly dangerous, and the world must stand together to keep him from his goals. Appeasing him and his fellow readical Islamists is not an option.

The Simpsons Quote of the Week

An old favorite.... and now weekly feature...

In an effort to get Homer interested in boxing, Moe shows off his storeroom, filled with trophies and pictures from Moe's days as a prizefighter. Homer is stunned to see a picture of Moe with a very well-known boxing promoter...

Homer: "Hey, you know Luciuss Sweet?! He's one of the biggest names in boxing! He's exactly as rich and famous as Don King, and he looks just like him, too!"

Moe: "Yeah, Luciuss was my manager. Back when I was known as Kid Gorgeous, everybody wanted a piece of me. But somehow, I just never made it to the big-time."

Homer: "Why not?"

Moe: "Because I got knocked out forty times in a row... that, plus politics. You know, it's all politics."

Homer: (mutters) "Lousy Democrats."

Blame Bugs and Daffy

Scott Ott at Scrappleface hits the jackpot again...

A spokesman for the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), producers of Sesame Street, today said that global riots in response to Danish editorial cartoons connecting the prophet Mohammad with terrorism have nothing to do with the teachings of Islam, but are the “natural legacy of a generation raised on violent cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner.”

“If you expose children, even peaceful Muslim children, to thousands of hours of Looney Tunes, you produce a generation of desensitized brutes,” according to the unnamed CTW spokesman. “They can’t comprehend the real impact of their violent acts, because animated victims of firebombings, gunshots and beheadings always immediately appear, clean and unharmed, in the next scene. The rioters are innocent victims of exported American cartoon culture.”

The best part is, the article provides a better rationale for the Middle Eastern stupidity than the rioters have.