[posted by Justin Levine]
In case you missed the news, murdering douche bag O.J. Simpson gave an interview to a website this week in which he took calls from the public.
KFI’s John Ziegler called in to the show and got O.J. to offer a ringing endorsement of my broadcast employer just after he was rudely cut off by the show’s call screener. Apparently, the saintly Mr. Simpson thinks that KFI is a one-sided racist station. You can’t get a larger badge of honor than this one folks.
Behold –
O.J. on KFI [MP3]
You can hear John Ziegler’s response by listening to the podcast of his program [7pm hour of August 1, 2007. Note: It might not be uploaded to the KFI site until tomorrow, Aug. 2nd.]
[posted by Justin Levine]
[Posted by WLS]
His column today is an embarrassment for a guy who once enjoyed journalistic credentials.
Lets start with the Headline — I know he didn’t write it, but it matches perfectly with his theme:
“Stealing Healthcare from Babies”
Now, lets begin with his substance:
Congress is moving responsibly to remove a blot on the nation: the 8 million children without health insurance. It is doing so by expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, a state-federal partnership that the Republican Congress and President Clinton created in 1997 to cover kids in working-poor families.
You can read Brownstein’s entire column and not come across a critical fact raised by the opponents of the planned expansion of SCHIP — that more than half the “covered kids in working-poor families” are actually adults.
Let’s compare the “analysis” employed by Brownstein in his piece with another article on the subject from Robert Robb in the Arizona Republic today.
(more…)
[Posted by WLS]
and after reading Hugh Hewitt’s interview with John Burns, reading Obama’s speech, and laughing at Arianna Huffington’s (un)intentional double-entre about “blowing… off … General Petraeus” one sentence after analogizing his coming report to getting “sex advice from Jenna Jamison.” Is that a little projection on Ariana’s part? Who knew she was a sucker for a man in uniform. [I know, now I’ve gone an double-entre’ed her myself]
But, here’s my syllogism:
The leaders of the Dimocrat Party are determined as a matter of policy to withdraw troops from Iraq.
Bad news concerning military actions in Iraq makes the Dimocrat Party leadership’s goal more achievable.
Therefore, the Dimocrat Party leadership is gladdened by bad news concerning military actions in Iraq as it improves their chances of advancing their policy goal.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
[Posted by Jack Dunphy]
A long-festering problem within the Los Angeles Police Department is finally getting some attention. No, I’m not talking about corruption or racial profiling or any of the other evils that some like to imagine as being rampant within the department. The problem is with the portable radios officers carry, more specifically the alarming frequency with which they fail to work. This is just the latest example of how out of touch the LAPD’s higher-ups are with the cops on the street. The problems with the radios have been apparent for years to those of us who carry them every day, but for some reason the issue has suddenly found the attention of department brass, the police commission, and local news outlets. This week, we’ve seen stories in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, and on KABC television about the poor state of the portable radios officers carry in the field.
The city has simply been unwilling to spend the money to replace radios that have long outlasted their predicted service life, and the LAPD now finds itself in a “crisis” it should have seen coming for years. Rarely does a week go by that I don’t have to return a radio after finding it to be somehow defective. Ordinarily I discover these defects under innocuous circumstances, like when trying to make a routine broadcast only to discover I can’t be heard. But on more than one occasion I’ve had my radio fail during a foot pursuit, when I was unable to hear or transmit information that might save my own or another officer’s life.
I recall a news story from back in June in which police commissioner Anthony Pacheco said he was “personally embarrassed” by the results of one of the hundreds of paperwork audits the department is so fond of conducting these days. Would that Mr. Pacheco and his fellow commissioners be as embarrassed to send cops out in the field with safety equipment that doesn’t work.
Two examples:
1. A student steals two copies of the Koran and defaces them. He defecates on one of them. He is arrested by a Muslim detective. What would normally be a misdemeanor prosecution becomes two felonies under hate crime laws.
2. A student steals two copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics” and defaces them. On one of them he writes: “Scientology is a scam, and Scientologists are either crooks or dupes.” He is arrested by a Scientologist detective. What would normally be a misdemeanor prosecution becomes two felonies under hate crime laws.
The first example is, of course, based on reality. The second is based on a hypothetical designed by Eugene Volokh in this comment. (I added the part about the detective’s religion.)
How does a crime like this become a felony? What are the relevant statutes? Allahpundit and Eugene Volokh discuss.
More interestingly, are First Amendment values implicated by applying hate crime laws to an action like this? Eugene Volokh discusses here, with numerous difficult-to-distinguish hypotheticals.