POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

I’m a Very Bad Person

At a Southern Illinois "Gathering of the Juggalos," Tila Tequila took the stage only to be driven off by rock and crap throwing concertgoers. For some reason, I find this amusing to picture. Who made the decision to book Ms. Tequila for this event?

Having said that, I'm glad that she wasn't badly hurt. Photos and more details, here, including a characterization of Juggalos having become "excessively violent" towards the talented star.

It's terribly wrong of me, I'm sure. (Ms. Tequila appears at about 7:20 into this promo video)

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Mark Knoller Editorializes on Ground Zero Mosque on Twitter [UPDATED]

@markknoller:

There is a distinction between saying Muslims have the right to build a mosque at a given location - without endorsing the wisdom of it.

What I want to know---and what I tweeted to him twice, asking for a statement---is whether the President or Knoller can name a single person who states that Muslims no right to try to establish a mosque where they like. I don't know of a single person who's advanced that argument.

There exists no "right" to build, however:

As a former member of a Church Board, I happen to have learned that what Obama claims is a right to build a place of worship on private property is, in practice, not really a right at all. Churches are subject to the authority of zoning officials and routinely face barriers that secular building projects do not.

The President should, and probably does know that where local governments are dominated by people with his Leftist point of view, churches are often denied what he claims is their right unless they have the resources and time to litigate in court. In fact, if the Muslims had to find another site their burden would be less than the burdens of hundreds of Christian churches all across the country.

Local zoning boards publish lists of land-use designations with the types of uses permitted within each designation “as a matter of right,” meaning no special action by the zoning board is required. For example, in a “Commercial” zone one may build a retail store as a matter of right, but not a factory. To use a property for an activity not on the list for that property’s zoning designation, one must first apply for a “variance” which can be granted or denied, for virtually any reason, at the discretion of the zoning board.

A study of over 200 municipalities by the Chicago law firm Mauck & Baker, found that more than half had no zone whatsoever where houses of worship could locate as a matter of right. Thus, worship is virtually the only activity that may not locate anywhere in those municipalities without first receiving permission from zoning officials, who operate with the power to deny permission for any reason or no reason.

They know this, or ought to, full well. They're tilting at straw men, just as Politico's Ben Smith did, this morning.

Hey, I'm so liberal that I think New Yorkers ought to be able to take as much salt as they want, wherever they want it. I'm just not going to say anything about the wisdom of it.

UPDATE: Ric Locke breaks it all down for us.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Send Me Your Conservative Road to Damascus Moments

As I've mentioned before, my own conversion was gradual: the longer I was in academia, the more revolted I became by the bizarre excesses and sententious excrescence that masqueraded as deep thought. Andrew Breitbart has recently reiterated that his conversion event was the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Kill Truck sends this:

I suppose I considered myself liberal, but I don't think I really ever was. I just fancied myself really independent and rebellious. On 9/11 I moved the dial on my office radio from the bluegrass station to the talk radio station... my mother's station of choice. A few days later regular programming resumed. It was Rush Limbaugh. He made sense. I shudder to think where I'd be if I hadn't dropped out of college and taken that crummy, real world job. HuffPo probably.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend at the time was having the same experience. One night he came home and said I've been listening to KPQ a lot...

So, please send in your own (vermontaigne-at-gmail-dot-com), and we'll compile them.

UPDATE: Annie Gottlieb (@amba):

Full disclosure: my conversion experience did not make me a full-fledged conservative. But it definitely made me not a liberal anymore.

In 1996 and 1997, I helped a conservative, Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, write a book. I had to inhabit and express his point of view. It started as a role-playing exercise, but I actually saw the world through conservative eyes, and it struck me that in many respects I was seeing it for the first time the way it really is.

via Sissy Willis, neo-neocon.

@Infid_al sends this:

My conversion from the liberal daughter of a peace activist to a conservative was sparked after happening upon the televised Ruby Ridge hearings. Learning the reasons a mom was shot to death while holding her child in her arms drove home the point that the gov't was not my friend and giving it more power was a bad idea.

Donald Douglas:

I was a lifelong Democrat who voted for Al Gore in 2000. The September 11, 2001, attacks struck me at a deep level, but perhaps surprisingly, it was the Iraq war that basically forced a radical reckoning for me in terms of my own ideals, ideology, and outlook toward my profession (teaching political science). I spoke in favor of the Bush administration on March 19th, at a campus "teach in" against the war, the day we started to topple Saddam. Thereafter, formerly friendly colleagues treated me as beneath the lowest of the low caste. A couple of feminist literally and prominently gave me wide berth in the hallways of my division. I became an "agent of the patriarchy." Soon, leftists professors launched a campus "progressives" club, and they allied with the neo-communist International ANSWER Coalition out of Los Angeles. Students were getting extra credit to attend rallies. The club bussed students downtown. I've periodically had confused students, non-activists, come to my office and ask why Israel was an "apartheid state." The sociology faculty showed pro-Palestinian movies and the halls were plastered with anti-Bush fliers bearing swastikas. It's become my cause as a blogger and conservative academic to fight the hatred and anti-intellectualism on campus and beyond. It's been a really life-changing experience these last seven years.

UPDATEx2: Thanks to Smitty for the TOM link.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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For a Sister, Who Mistakes My Kindness for Weakness

Sonnet 94:

They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Lecturer-in-Chief Backs Ground Zero Mosque

I'm gonna rock it with Obama at the Ramadan dinner get some poon tang tang real good!

If he ever decides to hold another press conference, perhaps someone can ask him what he the name Cordoba Project means, coming as it does from Imam Rauf, who tells the Arab press that his aim is to re-establish the perfect state attained by the Prophet at Medina. Perhaps also they can ask whether President Jefferson authorized the State Department to underwrite Catholic or Jewish fundraising missions abroad, three times. Please spare the victims' families the crocodile tears.

Related would be this video, also via Breitbart.tv from Yid with Lid, in which the DoJ tells the Civil Rights Commission that "The fact of the matter is, shut up! The guy used the word, 'bet!'"

UPDATE: Richard McEnroe weighs in.

Erick Erickson, too.

Also see Krauthammer's take via Joe's link in comments, and check out the DC Examiner.

American Thinker.

Best of all, Ric.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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The Flight Attendant Celebrity, Media Coverage, Narrative and Confusion

Steven Slater, now famous for his dramatic but fabulous exit from his job as a Jet Blue steward, turns out to have been married once, as his ex-wife was defending him on MSNBC, so perhaps he's not quite as fabulous as I'd supposed from getting a look at his MySpace page. I understand that the airlines have to be pretty tough about this kind of thing, particularly because their policies often make it necessary for people to sit in hot planes on the tarmac for hours and hours with no food and little water before taking off, or returning to the gate, so I imagine that he's going to have a hard time in court. Still, I'm rooting for him, despite the version of events offered by his detractors at the Wall Street Jounal.

Strangely enough, his lawyer says that Mr. Slater would like to return to stewarding in the future if at all possible.

When he was arrested at his home, reporters asked him why he was smiling. Pundits and talking heads felt that it was a bit inappropriate somehow.

Why a similar outcry wasn't raised when Rick James (who I honestly thought was dead) sat on and killed his granddaughter, then grinned for the cameras, I don't know.

I was reminded of this hilarious story, though, which we know must be true because it was reported in the New York Times:

It has been reported that an employee for Ansett Australia (Airlines), who happened to have the last name of Gay, got on a plane recently using the company’s ‘Free Flight’ offer for staff.

However, when Mr Gay tried to take his seat, he found it being occupied by a fare paying passenger. So, not to make a fuss, he simply chose another seat. Unknown to Mr Gay, another Ansett flight at the airport experienced mechanical problems.

The passengers of this flight were being re-routed to various other airplanes. A few were put on Mr Gay’s flight and anyone who was holding a ‘free’ ticket was being bumped.

Ansett officials, armed with a list of these ‘freebie’ ticket holders boarded the plane, as is the practise, to remove them in favour of fare paying passengers. Of course, our Mr Gay was not sitting in his assigned seat, as you may remember. So when the Ticket Agent approached the seat where Mr Gay was supposed to be sitting, she asked a startled customer “Are you Gay?”. The man, shyly nodded that he was, at which point she demanded: “Then you have to get off the plane.”.

Mr Gay, overhearing what the Agent had said, tried to clear up the situation: “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m Gay!”. This caused an angry third passenger to yell “Hell! I’m gay too!

They can’t kick us all off!”. Confusion reined [sic] as more and more passengers began yelling that Ansett had no right to remove gays from their flights. – New York Times

Another minor celebrity was born when it was revealed that whiteboard job quitter Jenny is in fact the adorable young actress Elyse Porterhouse, whose images stimulated Ace, despite the whiteboard's causing frontal appendages to be a matter for conjecture.

A much more serious hoax, though, was played on all of us by the news coverage regarding the Serial Stabber, whose activities (despite the various race-designations of his victims) were cast as likely a matter of white racism played out with a knife. The suspect, detained in Atlanta while boarding a flight for Israel on an expired Israeli passport, is one Elias Abuelazam, an Israeli citizen of Arab extraction, who was originally reported in this ABC piece as being a Christian. He managed to kill 5 people and wound an additional 15, up close and personal. Debbie Schlussel, who is not always the most reliable source, lays out the following points:

* He is Palestinian, and police depicted him as white, endangering American citizens in the process.
* He probably committed marriage fraud in an attempt to acquire US citizenship, though he never followed through.
* After his arrest, he was represented as an Israeli, though in any less notorious circumstances he would have been a Palestinian for news purposes.
* He was illegally employed at a store in Flint, MI.

To me, all of that seems likely. There is no correction indicated in the ABC piece.

It turns out, too, that Rauf, the head of the Cordoba Project, who's leading the charge for the construction of the Ground Zero mosque, is quite the Islamic moderate. Their website has deep sixed a photo of him with one of the bright lights of the Iranian Islamist movement. He's also been out explaining the importance of influencing governments to be shariah compliant to the Arab press, as part of the process of re-establishing Prophet at Medina-style government throughout the world. His fund-raising travels are being bankrolled by the State Department, and Governor Paterson has offered to find them government-owned accommodation elsewhere in Manhattan, further from Ground Zero. The left started crowing about the "Pentagon Mosque," and Tom Maguire destroyed the comparison here.

Somewhat less strange was the news of the Himalayan Viagra Murders, though I myself have never killed anybody over fungus. Also notable was the story of the young man who stumbled over the corpse of a woman and decided to have sex with it, before disposing of it in an ad hoc fashion in order to save the deceased's family the expenses of a burial. Given the incompetence of the suspect, it's unlikely she would have been memory holed as effectively as ABC's attribution of religious affiliation, though.

Confusion reigns.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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