Year: 2006

UPDATE: Darn.

Al Lewis died Friday. He was 83 years old.

Best known for his role as Grandpa in television’s “The Munsters,” Lewis died after a long illness, a local radio station said on Saturday.

A movie Web site listed his age as 95, but there have been reports that he was 83.

Lewis was born in Brooklyn and was raised by his mother, an immigrant sweatshop worker in the Brownsville district of that borough.

At least 73 people are dead as the result of a stampede at a stadium in Manilla. Hundreds of people showed up hoping to get into a popular television game show offering cash and prizes.

Vice President Noli de Castro had put the death toll at 79, with other estimates even higher. But Health Secretary Francisco Duque told Reuters there had been some double-counting of victims, adding that 353 people were injured.

Most of the dead were elderly women, crushed against a closed steel gate at the bottom of a slope or trampled underfoot. One child was killed, hospital officials said.

Some witnesses said chaos erupted when someone shouted “bomb” but others reported a railing collapsed as people were being let into the stadium, causing guards to panic and slam shut the gate on the surging crowd.

“My mother came here hoping to win a prize,” said one man in his 20s, holding her dead hand and sobbing.

Some tickets for the first anniversary celebration of the game show “Wowowee,” which picks contestants at random from the audience, were given out earlier in the week.

But thousands of fans, many of them poor, camped out for days for a chance at the usual jackpot of 1 million pesos ($19,230) and special prizes of a car and a house with land.

The thought of winning gave them hope of ending their poverty. Instead, they end up paying the ultimate price.

The Danish Embassy in Syria has been set on fire by Muhammad cartoon protesters.

Rage against caricatures of Islam’s revered prophet poured out across the Muslim world Saturday, with aggrieved believers calling for executions, storming European buildings and setting European flags afire.

Thousands of outraged Syrian demonstrators stormed the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus, setting fire to both buildings.

Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators at the Norwegian Embassy after the Danish building was burned.

But the protesters broke through police barriers and set fire to the second building, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” which is Arabic for “God is great!”

Gateway Pundit is covering the outrage, and the absurdities.

MORE: Controversy spreads throughout the Muslim world | Cartoonists fear for their lives |

Wimps.

Following last-minute cries of protest from Muslim leaders last week, a Public Broadcasting Service affiliate in Dallas canceled the premiere of a documentary on the roots of Islamic terrorism.

“The Roots of War: The Road to Peace” was scheduled to air on KERA-TV on Sunday, January 29, but the premiere was postponed by the station’s managers after a local Muslim group alleged that the program contains inaccuracies and anti-Muslim bias. The documentary’s producers, Niki and Dennis McCuistion, have defended their work; they have refused to make changes.

Think this has something to do with the Muhammad cartoon caper? Of course it does.

American Jewish community leaders drew a connection between the two controversies, even though Muslim leaders in Texas voiced their protests in terms that were described as respectful by the Dallas station and by the producers.

“There’s a real danger in this,” American Jewish Congress general counsel Marc Stern said in an interview with the Forward. “Whatever the legalities, you take all this together, and you have the Muslim world saying, ‘You can’t criticize us.’ It’s one thing for them to say, ‘You can’t come to Saudi Arabia and criticize us,’ but to say, ‘You can’t criticize us in Denmark, and you can’t criticize us in the United States’ — even the excess and extremism in some parts of the Muslim world — that’s a rather glum and ominous state of affairs.”

The general idea of political correctness drives me insane, but the hypersensitive reaction in America by the MSM, and even the US State Department, is just too much.

What do we have to fear? Someone getting their feelings hurt? War? We’re already at war with radical militant islamists with absolutely no attitude of tolerance whatsoever. Why this sudden recoil?

The reason is fear, and so far, it’s inexplicable.

Of 1,300 people aboard, 180 escape on lifeboats, and so far, only 203 survivors. In 2006, it seems unfathomable that a disaster of this magnitude could occur.

An Egyptian ferry carrying about 1,300 people sank in the Red Sea early Friday during bad weather, and rescue ships and helicopters pulled dozens of survivors and bodies from the water. Some 180 escaped on lifeboats, an official said.

Most of the passengers were Egyptian workers returning from their jobs in Saudi Arabia. At least four Saudi and four Egyptian ships were involved in the search effort, arriving about 10 hours after the 35- year-old ferry was believed to have sank.

 

The boat disappeared from radar screens around 5 PM EST on Thursday. Some are blaming weather conditions, while others speculate that some kind of emergency occurred on board, perhaps a fire, and that it incapacitated the ship before there was time to evacuate its passengers. 

 

That’s the premise behind a game on the web that kids can play for free. Terrorists break into the White House, then by setting off bombs, they blast their way into the Oval Office. At that moment, George W. Bush pulls out a machine gun and goes on a killing rampage. If you’re good enough, you might make it to the level that includes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And yes, Condi gets into the action too by blasting away with two handheld machine pistols.

And that game rating? It’s useless. No matter your age, if you click ‘Play’, you’re old enough to shoot.

Don’t get me wrong, games like this are kinda fun to play, but given the subject matter, I’m wondering what message this sends to kids who can’t distinguish fact from fiction. The idea of terrorists busting into the Oval Office to try and kill the president is not funny. Just as a game about a suicide bomber blowing themselves up while riding a city bus wouldn’t be funny. Yet, here we have a scene which teeters on the edge of reality and trivializes what otherwise would be an extremely traumatic event for Americans. In its most basic terms, ‘Bush Shoot-Out’ is an assassination attempt on the President of the United States, yet because it’s cartoon-ish and somehow fits a caricature of Bush the ‘cowboy’, it’s kid entertainment. 

What’s next? A game where Jesus Christ pulls an Uzi and fires away at the Roman soldiers who attempt to capture him in the Garden of Gethsemane?

I’m not calling for a boycott of Miniclip.com or anything like that, after all, as parents, it’s up to us to use common sense and allow or disallow things like this in the home. But, there are a lot of ignorant, inattentive parents in the world. Want proof? Guess how many times this game has been played? According to the web page, at least 100 million times. That’s a lot of bullets fired at the president.

And that’s nothing to laugh about.

I haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the controversy over the allegedly blasphemous cartoon drawings featuring the prophet Mohammed. The heat behind the story has increased each day this week, and now it appears (to some) that we’re on the brink of a world crisis over the drama. Protests, condemnation, the firing of newspaper personnel, and now the storming of the EU office by Palestinian gunmen – quite an amazing turn of events!

I’ve seen the cartoons. In my opinion, people have created caricatures of Jesus Christ which are far and away more offensive than these.

Michelle Malkin has great coverage, and Gateway Pundit provides background into how the whole thing started. To see the controversial cartoons for yourself, head over to FrontPage magazine.

Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, has been chosen House majority leader, according to CNN.  Boehner defeated Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, 122-109, after lagging behind his rival in a first, inconclusive ballot.

More…

U.S. Rep. John Boehner of Ohio upset a former deputy to indicted Texan Tom DeLay on Thursday to become majority leader of the scandal-rocked U.S. House of Representatives.

Rep. Roy Blunt had appeared to be the front-runner, based on a long list of public commitments, but Boehner, who campaigned on a vow to seek to renew the party’s “spirit and vision,” defeated Blunt and Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona in a secret election by fellow Republicans.

Boehner had 122 votes to Blunt’s 109. Shadegg dropped out after a first ballot loss.

Boehner’s election represented a shake-up in the House leadership, as Republicans effectively gave a vote of no-confidence to Blunt, the acting majority leader and a close ally of DeLay.

But Blunt will remain in the House Republican leadership, holding onto his job as majority whip, the person responsible for making sure Republican-backed bills pass the House.

Blunt became acting majority leader in September after DeLay was forced under House Republican rules to step down when he was indicted in Texas on campaign-related felony charges.

In January, DeLay, under pressure from members, announced he would not seek to reclaim the job after lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close associate, pleaded guilty in a mushrooming influence-peddling investigation that threatens the Republicans hold on Congress.

AP

The pollsters are going to keep polling this until they can find the right combination of questions which will elicit a positive response toward Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president in 2008. Up until now though, everyone is saying the same thing.

She can’t win.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is in strong shape for re-election in New York this year, but most voters in her adopted state think it is unlikely the former first lady could win the 2008 presidential race, a state-wide poll reported. And,.. “because of who she is,” would be treated more harshly than other candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign.

If someone can identify the photographer who took that picture, I’d like to meet the person and shake his hand.