Sadly, No!

*update at the bottom*

And Jim Kouri, a board certified grade A moron. Michelle “Two-Face” Malkin quotes Jim Kouri writing:

The Brady organization is out-and-out lying about the new Florida law. First of all, the law addresses use of deadly force in the home not in the streets. The statute allows citizens to use physical deadly force against a person who enters their premises and is a threat to their safety.

Malkin’s intro reads:

Jim Kouri of the National Association of Chiefs of Police explains how the Brady Campaign is lying to British tourists about the Sunshine State’s so-called “Shoot First” statute[.]

Well, we’d say we had expected better of Michelle, but frankly that would be a lie. So we won’t.

But we’ll note a few things: even the “Castle Doctrine,” which applies to self-defense in the home, has been greatly extended over the years:

The ?castle doctrine? has been extended by Florida courts to include employees in their places of
employment while lawfully engaged in their occupations. See Redondo v. State, 380 So.2d 1107
(Fla. 3d DCA 1980); State v. Smith, 376 So.2d 261 (Fla. 3d DCA 1979). [PDF]

The most interesting part, of course, is the text of the law itself:

declaring that a person has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force if the person is in a place where he or she has a right to be and the force is necessary to prevent death, great bodily harm, or the commission of a forcible felony [PDF]

Or this:

A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

It can’t be easy being a wingnut.

PS: Kouri’s original op-ed has been pulled by the websites we found that had posted it. (MichNews being Malkin’s source.) Thanks to Google, here is a copy.

* Michelle has updated her post, having been alerted to the fact that Jim Kouri is full of shit. She quotes a long email that ends with:

Sorry I got so wordy, but I’d really like to see the reporting on this issue be a lot more accurate than it has been. [Emphasis added.]

Michelle’s reply?

Same here.

This is the same woman who posted the Kouri article without spending 5 seconds checking it, and linked to a L.A. Times piece which explained why Kouri could not be right. Same here, Michelle? You first, you lazy cunt.

Malkin links originally from World O’Crap, which we failed to acknowledge first time around. Shame on us! May we be shunned by the blogging community!

Apparently, some bioweapon sensors went off during the big DC antiwar protest — and a week later, the CDC has finally gotten it together to mention it. If anyone who was there feels like they have a cold, they’re supposed to see a doctor — otherwise, possible khhhk! (fatal finger across throat).

Francisella tularensis

No, we’re not kidding. Yes, it’s quite strange to us, as well, that there was a known bioagent detected at the Mall, and nobody said anything until after the standard incubation period of the organism in question.

[Update just posted here. I’ve been wary of linking to the WashPost lately because of their online edition’s new blogs-who-link-to-this-story feature — which apparently sends flocks of Post readers crashing through people’s windows and leaving comments like, “Blogs are funny — they’re the new thing!” And truly, we already (as of midnight tonight) have Charles of LGF nice and hopping mad, and linking to us even though he knows he oughtn’t to. So it might be interesting tomorrow; we’ll see.]

So yes, fatal disease. It’s hard to know whether to be alarmed, because the Post is doing its customary softshoe of quoting official sources saying that everything is all normal, like it normally is. And when things go haywire, you pretty much have to figure it out yourself, because your first clue in the Post is liable to be a retrospective piece sub-headlined, “How Things Went So Haywire Without Anyone Noticing.” Anyway, was anything else going on in DC that day? Oh yeah, this.

Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but there certainly seem to be a lot of coincidences involving disaster-preparedness exercises and, you know, unrelated incidents with planes flying into buildings and germ agents being released and all that sort of thing. It really gets tiresome after awhile. Some of those lovable nuts at the Daily Kos diary section were predicting some kind of government terror incident during the protests, based on the William Arkin ‘Granite Shadow’ column linked above, and damn it if events don’t keep failing to discourage such speculation. I’m not saying anything; I’m just talking here.

By the way, does anyone know how this case is progressing? (Rhetorical question, by the way.)

Although I think the terms “Orwellian” and “Fascist” are generally thrown around too loosely, this post by Assrocket unabashedly meets the criteria for both:

Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. George Casey, the top American commander in Iraq, gave a press conference at the Pentagon today. Compare this Associated Press report by Robert Burns, “U.S. Commander Doubts Iraq Troop Cutbacks,” with this story by Donna Miles of the American Forces Press Service: “Casey Cites Continued Progress in Iraq Despite Challenges.”

Were they in the same room? Presumably. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Burns’ only objective in being there was to look for ways to spin Casey’s comments to make them sound more negative than they really were, thereby giving American newspaper readers a false impression of what was said at the press conference.

Smart readers will note that the American Forces Press Service is essentially a propaganda arm of the United States Defense Department. Hindrocket is literally saying that Americans are better off getting their news straight from the government rather than a free, independent press.

You gotta admit, this makes life a lot less complicated. For instance, if you read MSM reports on Tibet, you’re probably under the impression that China has been brutally oppressing the Tibetan people for the last fifty-plus years. However, if you’d read reports about the situation in the Chinese People’s Daily, you’d know that “on May 23, 1951, the Central Government signed with Tibet’s local government a “17-Article Agreement” for the peaceful liberation of Tibet, which helped the region cast off imperialist fetters and laid a foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.”

Neat.

…working for the Government Accountability Office. Shrill is in the air:

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. […]

Lawyers from the accountability office, an independent nonpartisan arm of Congress, found that the administration systematically analyzed news articles to see if they carried the message, “The Bush administration/the G.O.P. is committed to education.”

The auditors declared: “We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds.”

The report also sharply criticized the Education Department for telling Ketchum Inc., a public relations company, to pay Mr. Williams for newspaper columns and television appearances praising Mr. Bush’s education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act.

Well, at least it’s a good thing we’ll be able to dismiss the findings of this report:

The investigation by the accountability office was requested by Senators Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats.

Kennedy is fat and drunk. And he killed a woman. Bullet dodged!

Looks like a certain someone is trying to hook up with a certain other someone:

“Hi, RETARDO, I’m Marie Jon’ and I have always loved you.” My heart melted. “Would you like to see my email bage?”

On Tom DeLay and Ronnie Earle, the Wall Street Journal writes:

The Majority Leader also deserves the presumption of innocence because of Mr. Earle’s guilty past. A liberal Democrat, he has a history of indicting political enemies, Democrat and Republican, on flimsy evidence that didn’t hold up in court.

[…] Without his [DeLay] prodding, the House would never have voted to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998. [Emphasis added, obliviousness to irony in original.]

Politically-motivated indictements of enemies that don’t hold up in court. Hmm, how did that impeachment thing turn out again?

Goddamn Red Sox. They can’t just lose. They have to put together an amazing comeback to keep my hopes up for one more night before blowing it this weekend against the Yankees.

I swear to God, guys, if you don’t make the playoffs, you will be hit with an kitten strike the likes of which man has never seen. Click below the fold for a preview of what awaits you should you fail.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Bill O’Reilly asked the following idiotic question: “[A]fter all the experts we’ve talked with, after all the research we’ve done, we still can’t find out who exactly sets the price of a gallon of gasoline. Which human being in America does that?”

Thankfully for Bill, NewsMax’s Phillip V. Brennan has an answer. A really, really stupid answer:

Who’s Really Behind Soaring Oil Prices?

Philip V. Brennan

When you stand at the gas pump and watch those numbers spin by so fast you can’t read them, keep in mind that the soaring price of gasoline is no accident ? it is the work of a new fifth column.

And who are these evil “fifth columnists” that keep gas prices so high? That’s right: environmentalists. Or more specifically, people who claim to care about the environment but are really Communists. Seriously.
Read the rest of this entry »

When did LGF step over the line from being a mean-tempered rightist site to being an actual, by-the-book, calling-Hannah-Arendt locus of everything that America fought to defeat in World War II?

Future historians will quarrel, but progress was made today, with this entry (plus comments) on the new Abu Ghraib release. It’s not the boldest of items there, but it’s telling in its own way: The fact that torture, rape, and murder are shown in the photos and videos being released simply whizzes by them like it’s nothing. Nope, the real issue is that releasing these images to the American public might give Muslims (who are supposedly on a 100% worldwide death rampage) a ‘propaganda victory,’ and that the ACLU, who fought for their release, is a subversive organization sneakily working toward a Muslim hegemony.

Try to parse that. The Worldwide Muslim Conspiracy is out to destroy us all, and if the Federal Government admits to what it’s really doing to ‘the Muslims,’ it’ll look bad to decent people, and also to an extra 100 + n percent of Muslims who aren’t yet on a worldwide death rampage. Therefore, the Government should hide evidence of murder, rape, and torture (from us) in order to… And the ACLU should face legal penalties for… But on the other hand, this stuff is okay? It makes your eyeballs hurt thinking about it.

Please sample the delicious comments all the way down the chute — and as usual, if you’d like to play a fun game, substitute JEWS and BOLSHEVIKS for anything having to do with Muslims or ‘liberals.’

You know, it was quite an emergency in Germany in the late ’30s, with the JEW-BOLSHEVIKS subverting and sabotaging things, and orchestrating wars, and sapping the vitality of the German state. Then in the ’40s, it was like, “We had no idea about the…you know, camps and all that.”

Wait, what’s that? I hear military music…

“Ha! mein friend! Akkording to ‘Godwin’s Law,’ you looze der Arkument if you kall people ‘Nassis!'”

Wait a minute. You Nazis have a lot of nerve, running around and being Nazis, and then complaining when people call you that!

“Hi, I’m Mike Godwin, inventor of Godwin’s Law, and I’m a First Amendment activist and former Staff Counsel of the EFF. Those guys up there are actually Nazis.”

Wow, interesting. What I want to know is how these smelly, Phish-listening hippies like Jonah and Chazmo went so wrong. [perhaps a Photoshop Solution should appear here later…]

[PS below the fold]
Read the rest of this entry »

Pastor Swank shows once again why he’s the undisputed champion of indecipherable punditry:

RONNIE ‘EARLE OF INJUSTICE’ VS. TOM DELAY
By J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Ronnie Earle is following through with high stakes and his persecuting persona intact for over years upon years ? too many.

Yeah, see what I mean? That made absolutely no sense. Let’s see if we can fix it up a bit by re-writing it as an E.E. Cummings poem:

ronnie earle
is following through with high
stakes and his perse
cuting
persona intact for years up
on years-
too many.

Slightly better.
Read the rest of this entry »