Pope John Paul the Great

He's very old. He's very frail. He often speaks with a slur. But he still inspires men to do amazing things:

A fugitive Mafia boss facing 30 years in prison for murder surrendered Thursday, saying he was inspired by Pope John Paul II's historic speech to Italy's parliament, the suspect's lawyer said....

What other world figure today could do something like that?

(Thanks Amy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 10:20:37 PM
Categorized as Pope John Paul the Great & Religious.

VH1 Does It Again

More Murderers Get Free Nationwide Publicity

Bill O'Reilly notified his viewers the other day that VH1 is airing another "Music Behind Bars" featuring convicted murderers, this time from West Virginia:

.... A few weeks ago, VH-1 broadcast a program called "Music Behind Bars" that featured two convicted killers playing in a rock band. More 40,000 Americans e-mailed that network in protest of the program. And all the companies that sponsored it issued statements they had no idea of the show's content.

Now VH-1 has done the same thing again, featuring a concert with two more convicted murderers. And this time, we're going to hold the sponsors and the host accountable.

First the facts. In 1982, 18-year-old Lisa Mosbrook was stabbed to death by Tony Morrison, who was sentenced to life in prison in West Virginia. In 1995, 21-year-old Michael Hart was shot in the back by Jason Henthorne, also in West Virginia. Hart died. Henthorne was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Fast forward to this week, where VH-1 has this posted on its Web site. "Tony and Jason are two inmates serving life sentences for murder. Tony's R&B band Midnight Love and Jason's country band, Dakota, are among the 14 musical groups at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex in West Virginia. In this episode, the two men must get along and combine styles when the musical director asks them to collaborate and create a song for VH-1's upcoming concert." ....

There is some good news: O'Reilly has said several times that nearly all of the show's sponsors have "bailed". So, at least somebody is paying attention.

I would like to clarify something: O'Reilly takes a harder line on this than I would. I gather that he doesn't think inmates should be able to form and play in bands. I don't think I'd go that far: I just don't want them getting free nationwide publicity. That ought to be reserved, if for anybody, for people who have done some good with their lives, not for murderers.

On today's show, O'Reilly noted that a newspaper had come out editorially in defense of VH1. When he said it was The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was not surprised. And when he said that Michael McGough was the editorialist, I was not surprised again. Here, I think is the editorial in question.

Actually, I don't find it objectionable in every respect. But I do think the following paragraph is risible:

.... That request, which VH1 has refused, might be reasonable if television exposure were somehow ennobling. But the incarcerated head-bangers in "Music Behind Bars" are anything but glamorous. The prisoners' chief claim to fame is moral failure. An extended life behind bars is hardly the stuff to attract groupies or impressionable kids....

The editorialist himself answers the question of why these "head-bangers" ought not to be given free nationwide publicity: their chief claim to fame is moral failure. As to attracting "groupies" or "impressionable kids" — I'm sure the murderers featured on "Music Behind Bars" will get more groupies and "impress" more kids than they would have dared to dream.

McGough needs to get out more and spend some time away from his comrades at the PG.

P.S. From what I can tell, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is run by bobos.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 10:09:34 PM
Categorized as Media.

Re: Imagine What a Republican Landslide It Would Have Been

More on the South Dakota election.

From today's Wall Street Journal (LMRR):

.... We know, for example, that Mr. Thune was leading all during Election Night, until late Wednesday morning when results flowed in from Shannon County; suddenly he trailed by about 500 votes. Last minute landslide precincts are suspicious on their face, a legendary practice in places like Chicago.

But Michael New, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, has inspected the South Dakota Secretary of State's Web site to discover other striking facts: While Democrat Tim Johnson ran statewide about 12 percentage points behind what Mr. Daschle got in his 1998 Senate victory, in Shannon County Mr. Johnson ran about 12 percentage points ahead. He got 92% of the vote compared with Mr. Daschle's 80%. Nowhere else in the state did Mr. Johnson improve his vote share relative to Mr. Daschle....

Happy simply to have regained Senate control, Republicans are letting Mr. Thune walk away from an election challenge, much as John Ashcroft did in 2000. But the world should know that Democrats won at least two seats in highly suspicious, if not crooked, fashion. First they changed the election rules in New Jersey to throw Bob Torricelli over the side once he fell behind in the polls. And now we have Tim Johnson's miraculously large and last-minute Oglala Sioux turnout. And the Democrats still lost the Senate.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 09:50:51 PM
Categorized as Political.

Imagine What a Republican Landslide It Would Have Been

If vote fraud were impossible.

A reader directed me to this article by David Frum in The National Post (which is, by the way, a Canadian publication, if you didn't know).

.... With 838 of the state's 844 precincts reporting, Republican challenger John Thune led Democratic incumbent Tim Johnson by more than 1,000 votes. Then something odd happened.

Six precincts that normally report early delivered their results very late. And guess what? All six reported unprecedentedly massive votes for the Democratic candidate -- so huge, in fact, that they sufficed to counterbalance Thune's majority in the other 99.3% of the state.

The six late precincts were all located in one county, Shannon County, site of a large Indian reservation -- and also the site of many past allegations of voter fraud. In 1998, with Tom Daschle on the ballot, Shannon County reported 1,599 votes, 79% of them Democratic. This time, Shannon reported 3,118 votes, 92% of them Democratic. The Shannon County late surge pushed Johnson over the finish line. At 10:22 am, Tim Johnson was declared the winner by 527 votes out of 334,435 cast.

In other words: A fraud-prone Democratic-controlled county delayed reporting its results until the tally was complete everywhere else in the state, by which time it was clear that the Democratic candidate needed 1,000 more votes to win. The county then delivered almost 1,600 more ballots than in 1998, virtually every single one of them marked for the Democratic candidate. Curious, no?...

Nobody should prejudge any of these cases. But when sour-grapes Democrats try to explain away their defeat in 2002 by pointing to a Republican advantage in money and airtime, it's worth remembering that the Democrats went into this election with some special strengths of their own: control of many local jurisdictions where elections can still be won or lost the old-fashioned way -- in the dark, when nobody is looking.

A series of articles by Frum in the London Daily Telegraph is linked on the Front Page of The View.

P.S. Frum also has a "diary" (I guess he really, really doesn't like the word "blog") at NRO. Anybody who can write something like this is definitely worth reading:

Greenspan’s Report: Alan Greenspan is not a man of enthusiasm. But listen to or read his latest report on the U.S. economy, and it is hard to miss a note of awe. One year ago, the United States absorbed the most horrific attack on its own territory in its history: Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco earthquake all rolled into one. And yet, in the four quarters since the attack, the U.S. economy has posted an average growth rate of 3%.

There’s no comparing the characters of these two men, but on Greenspan’s evidence, Osama bin Laden managed to do less harm to the U.S. economy than President Jimmy Carter.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 11:38:54 AM
Categorized as Political.

"The Bleating of the Cushioned Classes"

By Norah Vincent.

In which one may find out what a "bobo" is. Or is that "dodo"? Or is there much of a difference?

A biting and insightful column (LRR) in today's Los Angeles Times:

.... An inverse relationship seems to exist between how good this country has been to certain people and the flimsiness of the pretexts on which they not only disparage but also betray it -- in spirit and careless words, if not in deeds.

The trifling outrage of the cushioned classes rings hollow when you consider that their rarified lives are predicated on many of the conservative policies they bewail most loudly. They consume -- often guzzle -- the same oil and gas that they demand we should never do anything environmentally or politically compromising to procure. They float as surely as the rest of us on an economy made viable by corporations to whose plundering interests (apparently) Republicans alone cater.

They relish the peace and quiet their McMansions afford but pooh-pooh the military spending and realpolitik that preserve them in a post-Sept. 11 world. Like spoiled Hamlets, they whine that "Denmark's a prison," yet never make good on their peevish threats to flee.

And why? Because, of course, their blather is just another form of decadence....

(Thanks Amy.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 10:57:29 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Metanoia

By Jim Kalb.

Do you stop by Metanoia every once in a while? You really should. It's an intelligent, well written weblog, like this bit from yesterday:

.... One of the things that always drew me to the Catholic Church was the crucifix over the altar. It seemed to me that if they put that there then they were a church that knew that absolutely horrible things happened, took them seriously, and thought they had a way to make sense of them. That made me feel they were on to something important that other people didn't know about. The notion of mass as a re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice that is at the center of spiritual life had the same effect on me. The Church tells us how to find God when it seems God is absent....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 11/14/02 10:13:38 AM
Categorized as Religious.