January 28, 2004 by s.z.

What is the Corner Like? A PARTICULARLY ARRESTING SIMILE (THOUGH NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN) [Peter Robinson ] From a reader who had joined the fray over Operation Barbarossa: "Only on the Corner can penguins falling over share space with whether it was the Luftwaffe or wet roads held that up the German invasion of Russia. It's kind of like being on a long car trip with some heavily stoned Rhodes Scholars." Posted at 05:32 PM Well, more like being on interminable bus ride with some heavily stoned  members of the Young Conservatives Club; a couple of wargamers who insist on telling you every step of how they won the Battle of Stalingrad; the overly chatty president of the school's "Saving Yourself for Jesus" group; that annoying guy who won't stop playing the harmonica; and Cosmo, "the 'it' dog of the American right." [Note: Make sure to keep this analogy out of the hands of children who might experience nightmares after reading this graphic portrayal of the torments of hell.] IMPORTANT UPDATE:  Be sure to read Sadly, No!'s amplification of this item, because it's the funniest thing I've read today (and I read "The Passion" today).  You can access it via the handy "trackback" feature below, or through the normal "Sadly, No! Enterprises" outlet near you. 10:43:37 PM

What Time Is It, Everybody?  It's TownHall Time! I wasted too much time on Ben Shapiro, so the rest of the TownHallers are going to get short shrift today.  Which is more shrift than they deserve!  Anyway, our meme for today is "Overseas sweatshops: as recommended by C. Montgomery Burns and Jesus." Thomas Sowell Exploiting foreign workers is not only economical, it's also moral, because it helps American firemen, teachers, and CEOs who own stock in SweatShop Inc. fund their retirements.  If the foreigners don't like the pay, they should just sell some organs. Those who vent their moral indignation over low pay for Third World workers employed by multinational companies ignore the plain fact that these workers' employers are usually supplying them with better opportunities than they had before, while those who are morally indignant on their behalf are providing them with nothing. Rebecca Hagelin Becky was too lazy to come up with her own column for this week, so she just copied a bunch of stuff Cal Thomas said on the Fox New Channel, which apparently gave him a show of his own.  It would be just like them. "Don't come crying to me if you're not motivated enough, or won't make the necessary sacrifices and investment to be successful and engage in risky personal behavior. That's your problem, not the government's."  Hey, I am making the investment to be successful and engage in risky personal behavior, but so far it's just not paying off the way Cal promised. Terence Jeffrey A swarthy guy who may be a Hizballah member was charged with helping terrorists, under that part of the Patriot Act which was declared unconstitutional.  But he avoided prosecution by escaping into Mexico.  Which is why we need more armed guards and electric fences along the border -- to keep people in the U.S. from fleeing into Mexico.  Because it's a big problem! Whatever the eventual outcome in this case, simple prudence demands that a question be asked of our political leaders: If they don't secure our borders against illegal immigration, how can they secure our country against Hizballah? Michelle Malkin John Kerry's wife is such a bitch!  She makes people pronounce her first name correctly!  She once yelled at some trick-or-treaters!  She's rage-filled, just like Howard Dean!  And she seems to think that her husband is boring.  So, we shouldn't vote for him. But it's clear she finds her husband's campaign an exasperating drain on her energies. Which, of course, begs the question: If his own uninspired wife can barely muster up a public showing of respect for candidate Kerry, why should voters? Walter E. Williams Overseas sweat shops are good and moral, and it's only greedy union organizers and selfish businesses fearing outsourcing who are in favor of international minimum wages.  Because nobody (with the possible exception of naive student or two) actually cares about poor people. If Nhep Chanda, who earns 75 cents a day toiling in nasty trash dumps, is offered a factory job at $2 a day, has she been made better off or worse off? Any reasonable person would conclude that she's better off. When one person makes another person an offer that makes that person better off, does it make sense to characterize it as exploitation?   Jonah Goldberg Bush didn't lie about Iraq's WMDs, he was deceived by the intelligence community!  And he's just too noble to blame them.  His reluctance to investigate this perceived intelligence failure has nothing to do with how the intel services could show the country that the White House disregarded their caveats, twisted what they said, ignored information which didn't accord with favored preconceptions, and commissioned its own studies when the VP's office didn't like what they were telling it. In the post-9/11 world, when the Iraq sanctions regime was falling apart, President Bush had two basic options: put his faith and trust in his own and his allies' intelligence agencies or in the promises of a truly warmongering madman who'd twice before pursued nuclear weapons and used other WMDs on his own people. Maybe Karl Rove doesn't think so, but I think that Bush made the winning, and right, choice.   Tony Blankley The Democratic candidates (except Lieberman) fail to realize that this is WWII all over again. Listening to all the aspiring commanders and chief (except for Joe Lieberman), I don't hear any campaign promises related to winning the war on terrorism. They make a few obligatory references to getting bin Laden rather than wasting our time with Saddam, and then they get on to their real campaign message, which is the conventional, peacetime Democratic argument to tax the rich and give the proceeds to their likely voters. I am tempted to respond to these candidates with the snappy WWII era retort to complainers: "Don't you know there's a war on?"   Debra Saunders Kerry voted to support Bush's invasion of Iraq, but now he opposes the way Bush is conducting the war.  However, he's got no cause to gripe, because if you look at the fine print in what Kerry authorized, it says "The President is allowed to spit in the faces of the UN member nations, have no reconstruction plan, and generally screw things up, and this agreement is binding even if there aren't any WMDs in Iraq."  Oh, and even though Kay says there weren't any WMDs in Iraq, he did say that terrorists passed through the country, and so we were RIGHT to kill a bunch of Iraqis. "The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country -- and no central control." Readers should not forget that it was what we didn't know that scared us.  Linda Chavez Linda goes through Uncle Milt's box o' junk, and finds it has stories to tell. I'm thankful that my Uncle Milt saved what others might have discarded. So, the next time some "old-timer" passes on in your family, spend time going through those old cardboard boxes buried in the closet. You may just find where you came from  Bill Murchison "The Bush marriage proposal, costing $1.5 billion over five years, aims at fostering healthy marriages among the poor."  However, fostering marriage should be the job of the churches, but they're too busy being secular to put the fear of hell into anybody.  So it's no wonder the gays want to get married!  It becomes hard to resist the idea of gay marriage when marriage, the institution, becomes just a convenient arrangement for two people who enjoy each other enough to share bed and board for a time. The churches themselves have helped society define marriage that way with their growing laxness about divorce and premarital relations. Scarlet "A"s for hussies, and jail time for fornicators.  It's the only answer. 7:34:46 AM

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No Child Left Behind Ben Shapiro (who has grown out of his sullen, moody phase, and so is back to using his 2002 photo), today brings us a column entitled O'Reilly vs. DNC: Who's Telling the Truth?  Next week his topic will be "Flat or Round: What Shape is the World?"  Anyway, young Ben, who is apparently bucking for the position of "Robin" to Bill O'Reilly's "Batman," reminds us of Bill's misguided "contest" to see who could sell more books in 2003, him or Hillary Clinton.  (Since Hillary presumably doesn't even know Bill exists, it was kind of like if I challenged Bulgaria, via this blog, to a contest to see who could eat the most Doritos -- with the prize being total moral supremacy!)  Ben then explains that, per Bill, Hillary has CHEATED in this contest in which she didn't know she was entered. BillO'Reilly has alleged that Clinton's book-sales numbers are inflated by bulk sales to the Democratic National Committee. On FoxNews.com, on Nov. 7, O'Reilly wrote: "Word is the DNC has purchased thousands of copies of Hillary Clinton's book." On his Web site, on Jan. 12, O'Reilly labeled "Hillary's sales" the "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." "Right now, after a little more than three months, 'Who's Looking Out For You?' has sold about 800,000 copies ... Senator Clinton's book, as far as we can determine (and information is hard to come by), has sold about 1.1 million copies. However, the Democratic National Committee has bought a ton of copies -- and it's giving them away in exchange for donations," O'Reilly wrote. [Note that Ben has provided you with a link so YOU can buy a copy of Bill's book, and thus defeat Hillary and Satan.  And keep track of the book sales figures presented here: Bill has sold 800,000 copies, and Hillary has apparently sold 1.1 million copies, but the DNC bought "thousands" of those copies, so they don't count.]  Okay, back to Ben, now explaining how Al Franken is also outselling Bill, and so, per Bill, must also be cheating.  On the "Today"show, Bill said that he had outsold "that guy" (Bill now uses clever pseudonyms like "that guy" when referring to Al, not wanting to give him any more publicity like he did with that lawsuit), and so people actually liked him best.  But ol' "Threat to Democracy" Matt Drudge posted Nielsen BookScan sales figures contradicting O'Reilly's "assertions."  And the war was on. O'Reilly fired back by quoting Nielsen vice president of sales and services Jim King, who said Nielsen had put Drudge on notice regarding his unlicensed use of BookScan numbers. O'Reilly wrote this on his Web site: "So let's sum it up, folks: The 'irrefutable source' that Drudge cited in bashing Bill ... is telling Drudge: 1) It's not irrefutable; 2) it undercounts book sales by as much as 35 percent; 3) don't publish the list on your site again." Thus, Bill tacitly admits that he lied, because even if BookScan isn't perfect, and even if Drudge did publish its stats without permission, and even it undercounts sales by as much as 35%, it does it accross the board, and so Al sold more books than Bill.  End of story. Okay, back to those figures I told you to remember.  Here's NewsMax (the online news service which rivals Fox News in its fairness and balance), trying to discredit a statement from Hillary's publisher claiming over 2 million book sales : Last week, however, Nielsen Bookscan numbers cited by the Drudge Report put Clinton's book sales at just over 1 million copies sold [1,084,520, to be exact] - less than half of what her publisher told the Daily News. Bookscan captures about 70 percent to 80 percent of total sales - tracking purchases at major outlets like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Costco, but missing other outlets like WalMart and airport bookstores.  So, Bill gets that 1.1 million sales figures for Hillary's book from the end-of-the-year BookScan report (that same report which he sneers at when Drudge used it to report BILL'S book sales).  Both he and NewsMax state that the figures probably capture only 65-80% of the actual sales, since they miss some outlets.  NewsMax allows that Hillary's book has probably sold about 1.5 million copies.  But did Bill use the same BookScan figures to come up with his report of 800,000 copies sold?  No!  Because the Drudge report which shows Hillary with 1.1 million sales (1,084,520, to be exact) shows Bill with 430,407 sales! So, without even hearing from the DNC, we know that Bill lied.  Ben could have figured this out himself, instead of bugging us about it, if only he had been part of the President's program to make sure kids learn to read and write, and add and subtract.  And if only he would make an effort to get his news from sources other than the O'Reilly Factor, his fellow TownHall pundits, and SpongeBob SquarePants. But let's delve further into Ben's column, so we can hear about his attempt to play investigative journalist and thus win his place as Bucky to Bill's Captain America: O'Reilly alleges that Franken's book sales are inflated because of bulk buys, especially bulk buys from the Democratic National Committee. According to O'Reilly, Tony Welch, DNC press secretary, refused to answer specific questions about the number of "smear books" the DNC has bought. [snip] I spoke with Welch by telephone on Sunday afternoon. He disputed O'Reilly's allegations about Hillary Clinton's "Living History" and denied that the DNC bought any copies of her book. Welch also said that the DNC had in fact made bulk buys of what O'Reilly terms "smear books" and confirmed that such practice is typical. He claims the bulk buys for each book were less than 1,500. So, we have a mystery.  Bill, who seems really credible to us, has said that the DNC bought "tons of copies" of Hillary's book.  Mr. Welch, whom we don't know at all, said they didn't buy any at all, but that they did buy copies of Lying Liars and some other "smear books."  Who to believe?   Either O'Reilly's information is unfounded and his claims regarding Hillary Clinton and Al Franken are incorrect, or the DNC is lying. Either way, someone isn't telling the truth. Who is it? Who is the liar?  Can YOU solve this mystery, boys and girls? Well, obviously the DNC DID give away copies of Hilary's book in exchange for donations.  It's right there on the infallible internet!  (I can't see any current mention of book giveaways, so maybe it was a limited-time offer).  And they presumably didn't shoplift those copies.  So, how did they get them?  Well, much as Richard Mellon Scaife buys crates of right-wing tomes and donates them to the Club 100, the homeless, the woodchipper, etc., some group or individual probably GAVE copies of Hillary's book the DNC.  [The stories about Scaife et. al.bulk buying books is presumably news to young Ben, since he doesn't mention it in his piece, even though he does include this quote from Bill:  "A political party jacking up book sales of dubious people is bad enough," O'Reilly wrote on Nov. 7 on the FoxNews Web site, "but using the publishing industry to advance political power is disgraceful."  Well, maybe Ben did know about it, but doesn't consider Ann Coulter to be "dubious," since she's welcome in his orthodox synagogue anytime, unless his Mom finds out.] Anyway, while the DNC was most likely totally truthful when they told young Ben that they didn't buy any copies of Hillary's book, it's also probable that somebody else did buy a bunch.  Does this mean that Bill was sorta telling the truth about something? No.  Because what Bill said was that the DNC has purchased "thousands of copies" and "a ton of copies" -- enough copies that, if you subtracted them Hillary's book sales, it would make HIM the winner in this contest to determine the fate of the western world.  Even if you do assume that the BookScan figures include bulk sales (which they probably don't, since any smart bulk purchaser would get them directly from the publisher), and we ignore the bulk sales of Bill's book to NewsMax and places like that, Bill is saying that the DNC bought (or, as we're postulating, were given)  400,000 copies of Hillary's book!  400,00!  That's almost as many books as Bill as sold in total at all of the outlets BookScan covers!  Does this seem even the tiniest bit credible?  Or does it sound like Bill should be on anti-psychotic medication for even suggesting it? So, Ben, figuring out who lied in this instance is easy, once you know the secrets of reading and math.  But I blame your schools and their bigotry of low expectations, just because you were a conservative. 5:30:00 AM