Some people got upset because they lost their jobs

Travelgate was of course the nefarious work of the VRWC but today's AG scandal just bores me no end, I DON'T CARE, watching the news these days is like prison boredom. Most of the msm are now owned or run by corporations and so it's all the same product. The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, for example, reports uncritically on anything coming out of that formidable monolith known as the cancer industry. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer is the most objective, nonbiased mainstream organ of the press out there today precisely because PBS is not beholden to corporations, it is run by the public so to speak although for some reason you get alot of queen stuff on this channel at which time I surf on over to the Home Shopping Network.

The more modern a society becomes the more laws we pass. We like to feel nurtured and protected by the State especially women which is why they vote so heavily Democratic as compared to men. There's nothing like getting that ripe government teat overflowing with milk and honey. Laws are commonly passed of which we have no knowledge and what would be our views on burgeoning legislation are not always solicited. Congress has to relevant at all times in every nook and corner of our lives. We'll never get back what we lost, that original vision of the Founding Fathers of minimal government, our loss.

Secular Humanism - man is a god

A god, given thirty years starting when President Nixon declared an all-out war on cancer, would have cured it by now. This is not to put down all those sincere scientists diligently working for a cure but to make the case that secular humanism, or what Bill O'Reilly calls the secular-progressive movement, exalts and celebrates man but does not acknowledge his limitations (and also by extension his propensity for evil). This is brought to mind by the recent news that the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has a return of her breast cancer and now White House spokesman Tony Snow also has a return of the very cancer he had thought he beat a few years ago.

It's time to turn the page on the chemo and the radiation. I've known a few people who've had cancer and passed away and it seems that once they go for the conventional "treatment" it's pretty much a death sentence, the pattern is always the same, they have hope of improvement but in a few weeks time at best they are gone. Now a more conspiratorial-minded person might see this all as a subtle form of euthanasia but as for myself I open up the question - in such cases does the original cancer kill the patient or is it the "therapy"? This is why I don't give any money to the various cancer societies, I feel that one day chemo/radiation will be seen in the same light that electro-shock therapy is today, an attempt to do good because we really don't have all the answers and are desperate but barbaric nonetheless.

We now know that we all have genes in our bodies that can cause cancer to develop, such genes are called proto-oncogenes. Science is looking for the triggers but one theory goes that once a person wants to die the body breaks down. It's like the brain is a computer and sends out a program for everything to self-destruct. Perhaps this is a more holistic and philosophical approach but it doesn't bode well for the secular-progressives that the last dread disease we were really able to do something about was polio.

Man is a wonder in many ways but I'm with the Rev. Pat Robertson on this one, I can't worship such a creature and the movement based on it. We need something outside of ourselves and that something is usually called God. Man has an apparently limitless supply of opportunities for letting you down.

Broward County ME Joshua Perper's Sylvia Browne moment

Though she died of a drug cocktail of no less than nine (!) different prescription drugs including chloral hydrate and methadone the coroner assures us that foul play was not involved in the tragic Anna Nicole Smith case, not only that it wasn't even suicide which end a reasonable person might draw. Seminole tribal Police Chief Charlie Tiger seconds the motion and says no cause for concern here (would twenty prescription drugs in a person's system be the barest minimum for concern?). In the wake of the controversial Schiavo case it is now the politically correct thing to do to go out of our way not to demonize people even if this means we should ask far more questions than we do or even that justice has to take a back seat to sensitivities. To this day we don't really know with any metaphysical certitude what caused Terri to collapse on that fateful morning of Feb. 25, 1990 and likewise we cannot state with any metaphysical certitude, as Broward County ME Joshua Perper has done, that Anna Nicole's death at such a young age was purely an accident. Is our legal and justice system no longer intellectually curious anymore? Is enabling a person's drug dependency no longer a crime? Is it just easier these days to let the dead rest with their secrets? WHY must I rely on sources like the National Enquirer for really vital new information in the case?

What of Howard K. Stern?

The prisons are full of innocent people

I've never gotten greed. I mean I can understand lust but greed is well over my head, if I had 1/20 or even 1/30 of the salary of ex-Tyco chief Dennis Koslowski in his prime I'd be more than happy, you wouldn't hear a peep from me for the rest of my life, I might even be in a charitable mood and charter a few private jets and get the people subjugated under Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe the hell out of there (hey W is he on your list of foreign leaders to be overthrown? didn't think so). You can be warm-blooded but help the poor but greed just feeds on itself and devours your soul and it is not for nothing that the Good Book says the love of money is the root of all evil (I'd like to say simply money but people keep correcting me) and I'd rather go before the Lord in the end as poor as I am. But there was Mr. Koslowski in prison garb chatting with Morley Safer last night on "60 Minutes" (Morley still remembers what he was doing the day Honest Abe was shot). Now an innocent person wrongly sent to prison would be more angry and indignant about the whole affair but Kos just rather blithely said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "yeah, you know, I was railroaded." He said the timing of his trial for grand larceny was bad what with the other big corporate scandals in the news at the time, the Enron boys and Worldcom. He pretty much chalked it up to here he was, a big fat corporate pig CEO being judged by a group of average people, you know, how could there be any other outcome?

Our prisons are teeming with innocent people, it's a national scandal.

The age of voter romanticism

With his interesting multi-ethnic makeup he's Tiger Woods with a better personality but in a far more rational world a one-term Democratic Senator from Illinois would never be taken seriously as a presidential contender. What the rational pragmatists don't understand though is that when you're in love with somebody nobody else will do ("if I can't have you I don't want nobody baby, if I can't have you..."). To be sure this is in large measure the same romantic spirit that drives Rudy's supporters but in his case he is at least far more competent and capable. Barack Obama is too young and inexperienced to handle the world right now in its present state but that's besides the point. He gives you that magical feeling that McCain and Edwards are incapable of. The Goracle (to use a John Podhoretz phrase) might be a movie star now but he couldn't inspire lust in a woman going through a twenty year dry spell (and we're to believe he and Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story)?. Now Barack working in a Giuliani administration, the two of them together, now that's dreamy.

The MSM on the couch

It is a major theme of this blog that everything can be psychoanalyzed and so let's dispense with the myth that we have an objective press in this country (the media professor Marvin Kalb's position), there is no such beast whether we are talking about FOX News or CNN which makes Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' recent refusal to participate in a FOX debate all the more hilarious. It would be far more honest and easier to swallow if shows like "Dateline" and "Primetime Live" preceded their broadcasts with this disclaimer - "what you are about to see is an opinion piece where facts and various 'experts' were selectively marshalled to make the case."

The msm are:

(1) Secular - religious stories important to other people are not even a blip on the msm radar screen. Interested in the life of St. Padre Pio? then go to EWTN, you niche people you.

(2) Feminist - this goes a long way towards explaining why so much of the msm are anti-porn but also pro-abortion, it's a Gloria Steinem thing. It also may help explain the media's heavy emphasis on crime stories of late especially as it affects women (men getting raped in prison ain't no big thing). In real life people may be lovesick and obsessed but in media land there is no such thing as the harmless stalker. In fact there is nothing but CRIME on CBS nowadays, real and imagined.

(3) Question authority at all turns, especially when it comes to matters of race - as in the tragic Sean Bell case which a Queens NY grand jury is now considering. On Nov. 25 of last year the 23 year old Bell, an unarmed black man, and his two friends, also black, also apparently unarmed, were shot by 5 NYPD detectives outside the Kalua strip club in Jamaica Queens. Bell, who was to be married later that day, was killed and his two friends were wounded but survived. With the notable exception of the more right-wing New York Post nobody in the NYC mainstream press bothered explaining how Bell allegedly attempting to drive over a cop who identified himself may have precipitated the whole thing. Now there is talk if the jury doesn't hand up the "right" verdict the fit will hit the shan.

Geraldo Rivera, more honest than most, when asked why he became a journalist famously said "to make the world a better place." Anyone else want to confess?

Newt dipped his toe in the lake

and it felt good but for those chilly currents swirling around Giuliani, wade slowly Newt, tuck your tummy in and splash some on your shoulders and then take your dive. The writing is on the wall, Rudy is not resonating with social conservatives, and whether Newt Gingrich's mea culpa the other day on the Rev. James Dobson's radio show was a result of

political calculation or moral epiphany (to use a George Will phrase)

he did what Rudy never did, admit to personal weakness and say, yes, adultery is technically wrong. While leading the charge for Clinton's impeachment then House Speaker Gingrich was cheating on his second wife with a woman who became his third (talk about a Giuliani parallel!) As one analyst said last night this probably won't bother Christian conservatives who are used to forgiving people anyway so long as Newt espouses a political philosophy that is close enough to theirs (I don't think it'll be a problema). You have to have a pair of brass balls (I'm talking about Giuliani here) if you're a Republican your whole life and say things like you'd pay for your daughter's abortion and then, years down the road, expect to get the wholehearted support of your base. Your political compass is in the Bermuda Triangle. Newt is smarter than that, without getting into the abortion quagmire he can simply repeat what he's always said, that Roe was a judicial abomination, a gross usurpation of the principles of federalism and leave it at that. Makes the cut in my book.

I'd vote for the guy.