Author: Fuzzy Curmudgeon

If I hadn’t seen this on Fox this afternoon, I wouldn’t have even known about it. Fox has nothing on their website about it at all.
Apparently an Aeroflot 767 landed today at JFK at around 2PM EDT, and was met by FBI, Customs, and Port Authority police who boarded the plane looking for radioactive material.
Google News found articles here, here, and here. Nothing in US media at all, apparently. Wait, here’s one from WABC in New York. Searches at Fox, CNN, and PMSNBC came up negative.
Who’s trying to cover this up?

on the continuing media blackout of news from Iran.
He’s right. Faster, damn it.

This is a great read for anyone who has been suffering through national news coverage for the last couple of weeks (apropos of my rants yesterday). Further, Collins makes a trenchant point about relativity that I did not think to make:

The shrieking headlines on paper and screen tell another story, one of relativity. In the span of time in which the sniper has killed 10 people, what detectives call “traditional homicides” have killed 21 in the same metropolitan district. It is what the Washington Post calls “everyday violence”: car-jackings, knifings, drive-by shootings. Backpage stuff, even the robbery-killing of a man whose mother was killed in the crash of the American Airlines plane into the Pentagon. But “traditional homicides” are old hat. There’ve been 203 in the District of Columbia so far this year. No Chief Moose to decry their deaths. No interest in the caliber or the degree of difficulty of the shot.

Good stuff.

…hopefully with satellite tracking devices implanted in their butts, but maybe that idea’s too subtle for our intelligence people. Anyway, story over at Fox.

…that the Bondsmen didn’t have what it takes. Much as I grieve to root for an AL team, my money’s on the Angels.

Now let us dis the Democrats (Amen).
It occurred to me after I posted the note about the news media’s culpability for 9/11 and the nation’s lax attitude about national security that Democrats are equally to blame for it, and continue to be to blame for it now, by obfuscating the real issues that face the country and claiming that the President doesn’t care about the economy and domestic issues.
Frankly, it seems to me that by prosecuting a war against people who are determined to see us go down one way or the other, the President is extremely concerned about the economy and domestic issues … which won’t be issues at all if we don’t utterly defeat the terrorist threat. What kind of economy do they think we’re going to have if we let another 9/11 happen? Who will really care about homelessness and welfare and health insurance if, God forbid, a nuke pops in, say, Chicago? (Well, we’ll care, all right, but not in quite the same way. “Oh my God! The survivors are homeless and destitute and without health care! What can we do to help?” Quite a different kind of homelessness and destitution and health care crisis in my opinion.)
Anyone who votes Democratic in the next election is, on at least one level, an enemy of freedom. Democrats have proven that all they care about is power. They don’t care a whit about the things that are truly important to Americans; they just want to be in charge and lord it over the little people, whom they want to deprive of the ultimate means of defense against tyranny.
Republicans on the other hand just want everyone to get rich and be secure in their lives. Sounds good to me.

Our national news just sucks. Including FNC, although they at least aren’t slavishly devoted to liberal ideals like CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PMSNBC, et al., and they do have incredible news babes unlike the aforenamed.
Let’s review why this is (the suckage, that is). First, an inability to decide what is really of national import. (The Fox Car Chase Channel is how I often refer to FNC…one guess why. Who really gives a damn, other than people in the area affected, that some moron is leading cops on a high-speed chase down the freeway?) Second, the same inability to let go of a story as a dog has to let go of a favorite bone. Third, a complete parochial ignorance of anything international UNLESS it has specific ties or import to Americans.
The third reason is why we don’t hear about Bali, or about the financial mess in Japan that’s due to the fact that the government is unwilling to bite the bullet like we did in our savings and loan “crisis” and bail out the banks that are holding almost nothing but worthless paper. Or about what’s really going on in Russia these days, or in Canada, both places being countries where the citizenry don’t think like their governments and don’t really hate Americans like their governments do.
There is no real investigative reporting done today that is worthy of the name.
And that is perhaps the real shame. Because Americans don’t really know what is going on in the rest of the world. And it is directly the fault of our own news media — who are closing down international bureaus left and right in the name of saving money — that this is the case.
Why were Americans so shocked on 9/11? Not because the CIA or the FBI screwed the pooch, although it’s pretty clear they did. Rather, because our vaunted news media let us down and lulled us by 10 September 2001 into the same false sense of security that we had on 6 December 1941.
The infamy is that the news organizations have, ever since 9/11, scrambled to point fingers everywhere but at themselves. An informed public will not let its government go slack on national security. An uninformed public won’t even know national security is slack until a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 happens in their face.
The whole thing is a shandeh un a charpeh. (You could look it up.)

I would like to state for the record that I think it is a sin that American media have not given the kind of attention to the nightclub bombing in Bali that they have to other things (like this idiotic Washington Sniper chatter that shouldn’t be monopolizing national news services 24/7; it would be one thing if the local stations went 24/7 with it, but there are other things going on in the rest of the country — like elections coming up in only a couple of weeks — and in the rest of the world — like Iraq and like Bali). I am friendly with a number of Australians and I mourn with them for their losses. But I’d barely know that the bombing had occurred if I got all my news from TV or radio, or even from the newspapers.
I don’t think Americans per se are self-centered to the extent that they don’t care about terrorism unless it happens on our own shores. But I do think that the major American news media aren’t interested in overseas news unless Americans are directly involved. And I find that to be a crying shame, because it makes it look like Americans don’t care, when the fact of the matter is that American news media don’t care.
Australia is one of our best and most important allies. We do them no service by ignoring their pain. Bali was very much their own 9/11 and we ought to be just as horrified today as regards their loss as they were the day the towers went down, the Pentagon burned, and Flight 93 smoldered in a farmer’s field.

Here’s my take on North Korea. Warning: Contains strong language. (Oh, wait, that would be normal for this blog.)
It’s time to walk up to the little fucker who ruins [sic] that place and be very firm with him. Our envoy should say, approximately (but clearly),
“Set one of those nukes off, boy, and I mean anywhere in the world, even on your own soil just to prove you’re a big man, and your country will very quickly resemble a big glass parking lot. And if you don’t start dismantling them immediately, with full disclosure and 100% inspection, it may end up resembling said parking lot anyway.”
And we should tell our friends the Chinese that if they think we’re bluffing the DPRKs about this, they should encourage their butt boys up there to set off a nuke somewhere.
I’m minded of a story from my teen years, when my father used some fairly rough language with his father in regard to letting his 14 dogs have the run of his house trailer when Grampa could hardly breathe from emphysema (coal smoke from the railroad, not cigs) to start with. I said, “Dad, why do you cuss at Grampa so much?” He thought about that for a few moments and said, “Because sometimes that’s the only language he understands.”
Well, strength and power is the only language these jackoff dictators understand. A 20 megaton fireworks show over Baghdad would be a great starter. Then maybe the world would take us seriously.
(I know, I know…we fight our wars more in sorrow than in anger. But a little anger is a good thing from time to time. And it would sure feel good to see that mushroom cloud climb over Saddam’s crispy butt.)

Noted via Best of the Web:

An Arvada [Colorado] man filed suit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of Colorado’s voter registration law after he missed the deadline for registering and learned he is ineligible to vote Nov. 5.

Gee, who would possibly think this was a major problem? Oh, wait:

Proponents of Amendment 30, which would allow residents to register and vote on election day, paid James Annibella’s $150 filing fee in U.S. District Court in Denver on Thursday.

With all of the chances you get to register, what with motor-voter and all, how did this moron possibly miss the deadline?

“I am denied my right to vote because of some snafu in the law,” Annibella said Thursday outside the court during a news conference by Yes On 30.

No, you aren’t, sir. You are denied your right to vote because of a snafu in your idiotic life called “I don’t have a clue”.

“I couldn’t believe it. It’s very frustrating.”

I’m sure it is quite frustrating to be a moron, but the law is the law.

Annibella became ineligible to vote after he moved a year ago from Denver to Arvada and failed to register under his new address before the deadline, which is 29 days before the election.
Residents can still register if they swear they did not know of the deadline, said civil rights lawyer David Lane, who donated his services to file the suit.
Annibella said he knew of the deadline but has been working 12 hours a day as a financial consultant and didn’t have time to register.

Good God, man! When you pick up the change of address forms at the post office, they have a mail-in change of registration form right in the package! (I know…I’ve used it!) How much time could that possibly take you? In the privacy of your own home, even, and I think it’s postage-paid.
What we have here is a failure of civic virtue. If you wanted to vote, you should have registered like everyone else.

Lane said Colorado’s registration law violates Annibella’s constitutional rights.

No, but his suit violates mine.

Dave Minshall, spokesman for Yes On 30, said 40 percent of people move between elections, and many, like Annibella, are not eligible to vote because they fail to register under their new address.

My heart bleeds. My wife didn’t get to vote in our primary in May because she’d never changed her registration (even after living here for nearly two years). She accepted the responsibility and sent in a registration change, and now she’ll be able to vote next month.

“It’s unfair to keep some voters from voting because they didn’t change their address by an outdated deadline,” Minshall said.

What’s outdated about it? It gives the election officials time to make sure that they have proper records at the polls on election day.

Six states that offer election-day registration have seen an increase in voter turnouts, he said.

And how much increase in vote fraud goes along with that?

Davidson and dozens of county clerks across the state oppose election-day registration because they say it would be costly to implement and invite voter fraud.

Well, duh. I’m not concerned about the cost as much as I am about the fraud aspect.
This suit needs to be dismissed out of hand, and with extreme predjudice. Frankly it smells like a big fat Democratic setup.