www.thornwalker.com/ditch/olson_13.htm

Freak show #13

By DOUGLAS OLSON

Judicial jackassery

• A federal judge and jury in Chicago recently ordered three U.S.-based Islamic charities and an alleged fundraiser for the Palestinian freedom-fighter group Hamas to pay $156 million to the parents of an "American" teenager killed in a terrorist incident in Israel eight years ago. According to a CNN report, Joyce Boim, the dead boy's mother, "sat in the courtroom reading from the Book of Psalms in Hebrew while awaiting the verdict."

• A New York-based international busybody group has filed a complaint in Germany against the U.S. government, on behalf of prisoners allegedly abused at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The suit was filed under a new German law that claims jurisdiction over "war crimes" anywhere in the world. Deutschland über alles!

• At press time, unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate Don Cravens was vowing to sue the Louisiana Democratic Party for circulating a "unity" ballot featuring the names of John Kerry and John Edwards and that of a rival candidate for the seventh district congressional seat. This, claims Cravens, who is black, violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — which he apparently interprets as guaranteeing his absolute right as an aggrieved Negro to sit in Congress. In another Louisiana district, the state Republican party actually endorsed Billy Tauzin III, son of the retiring incumbent, over other GOP candidates without incurring any legal challenges.

• The Washington Supreme Court has declared that the state's privacy law bars parents from listening in on the telephone conversations of their minor children. In the case at point, a woman's testimony helped convict her daughter's 17-year-old boyfriend of robbery after she overheard him discussing the crime. While our fearful masters at the federal, state, and local levels are eagerly prosecuting parents for "neglect" of their children, and holding them increasingly responsible for crimes and other acts committed by their offspring, they are also working overtime to remove the few tools parents still have to monitor their kids and enforce any kind of supervision and discipline.
 

You — out of the gene pool!

• Pregnant 35-year-old Melissa Williamson contacted the Roanoke (Va.) Times recently to express concern about the potential adverse effect on her fetus of jackhammers used in street construction near her home. The paper ran her story, along with a photo of the very expectant mother standing in front of the house — smoking a cigarette.

• The woefully misnamed Nelson Polite, a member of the Lancaster, Pa., City Council, has demanded that the owner of a baked-goods stand in the local city market remove a photo of George W. Bush because Polite and other Democrats are "offended" by it. After being told where to go, Polite said he would seek a city ordinance banning the posting of any "political" material — including pictures of the current president — on city property.

• Lawrence Trant, 57, is now serving 10 to 30 years in a New Hampshire prison after pleading guilty to attempted murder against two convicted sex offenders whose names he found posted on the Internet by the state. Trant insists that his actions — stabbing one and setting fire to a building where the other lived — are "morally justified."

• A recent Walter Williams column recounted the story of an elementary-school teacher who thought that Alaska was an island — because it is shown so often on U.S. maps as an inset and looks like an island in that format. The piece also quotes an English professor whose student drew two pictures in response to an assignment to write an essay. After receiving a failing grade because she had not done the assignment, the student replied, "But I don't know what an essay is."

• Kerri Dunn, the California psychology prof who vandalized her own car with "racist" and "anti-Semitic" slurs and then claimed it was a "hate crime," has been sentenced to a year in prison. The punishment is for filing a police report and two counts of insurance fraud — nothing at all for her "hate crime" of defaming innocent whites. It will be interesting to see how much "tolerance" this white fraud will receive in a state prison filled with violent black and Hispanic criminals.

• A 47-year-old Costa Rican man thought it would be funny to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and jump out into the street, carrying a rifle, to startle drivers in his neighborhood — until one of his victims shot him twice in the stomach. Unfortunately for Costa Rican posterity, he will live.
 

It's a free country???

• Loudoun County (Va.) police visited the home of an 11-year-old boy in December after a complaint was filed that the youngster had made "anti-American and violent" statements in school. In response to an assignment to write to U.S. Marines in Iraq, Yishai Asido — who holds dual citizenship through his Israeli father and American mother — had said, "I wish all Americans were dead and that American soldiers should die." The Gestapo grilled the mother on how she felt about 9/11 and the U.S. military, and whether she knew any foreigners who disagreed with American policies. (Are there any who don't?) They also wanted to know whether she had been teaching the boy "anti-American values," the mother told the Washington Post. "It felt like they were the thought police. If someone would have asked me five years ago if this was something my government would do, I would have said never." This woman has finally learned what Last Ditch readers have known all along.

• The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, by a unanimous 8-0 vote, that an attorney's unauthorized admission of his client's guilt during a murder trial did not deprive the defendant of his right to effective counsel. Lawyer Michael Corin claims he acted without his client's consent in the face of "overwhelming evidence" to "preserve his credibility" for the penalty phase of the trial, in which he hoped to help the accused — apparently scum in every sense of the word — to avoid the death penalty. (He failed. The jury took just three hours to agree on death.) How touching — and typical — that eight lawyers would find another lawyer's "credibility" more important than the right of a man on trial for his life to have a meaningful say in his own defense.
 

Good advice! And it works!

Canadian Anglican Bishop Michael Ingham has blasted his nation's supreme court for ruling that clergymen cannot be forced by the government to perform same-sex marriages. The decision did legalize homosexual marriage in Canada but carved out the aforesaid exemption for conscientious objectors. "It means that if you're a non-believer, you can't discriminate against gays and lesbians, but if you're a believer, you can," raged Ingham. "So if you want to discriminate against gay and lesbian people, join a religious organization." The strategy does work — one prominent and powerful group has used its religion to mask a virulent hatred of all others for nearly 6,000 years by its calendar.

December 20, 2004

© 2004 Douglas Olson. All rights reserved.
 
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