Redemption

It's been a scary few weeks. Following the debacle that was the last meeting of MNFBBQ, the pressure was on me to bring the boys back from the brink. I've been wondering what I could do to return our storied organization back to glory. After many sleepless nights (don't listen to Mrs. Zwicker with that garbage about me being out like a light), an epiphany came to me in the form of a question-what would Brian Boitano do?

Brian Boitano would break out the big Roumanian hot dogs and grill despite the freezing temperatures and falling snow. Brian Boitano would make chili. Brian Boitano would serve pigs in blankets and curly fries. Brian Boitano would lock the dogs away in the guest bedroom, so they wouldn't steal the hot dog buns or bother the guests. Most paramount, Brian Boitano would not show anything resembling "Brokeback Mountain." Brian Boitano would instead show a film featuring roughly drawn cartoon characters and song and dance and dirty words and the first Oscar-nominated performance in MNFBBQ history. Oh, wait a minute, "Brokeback Mountain" got some nods. Forget that Oscar thing, not important. I wouldn't say that it was the greatest MNFBBQ ever. At the same time, our long national nightmare is over. In short, I feel super, thanks for asking. Of course, Gabi hosts next.

I should add that Gabi came to Casa Zwicker after everyone else had left and I had put away the food. He had valiantly tried to make it for at least part of the meeting by charging off the plane and racing, O.J.-like, without the killing of his ex-wife and a Jewish guy, through the airport to get here. Alas, it was not to be. Fortunately, Gabi accepted with grace the fact that his appearing at a host's house after the guests had left and the table was cleared would not count as attendance. Air, I hope you're taking notes.

Shameful

Scott W. Johnson (who writes for the excellent Power Line blog) has an article at the Weekly Standard's website on how Yasser Arafat literally got away with murder, of an American ambassador, with the State Department's knowledge. Through seven different presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the State Department had abundant evidence of the following:

Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake--and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House--Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, yet neither the State Department nor any other government agency made public its knowledge. Indeed, as recently as the summer of 2002, the State Department denied that such evidence existed. Across seven administrations, the State Department hewed to silence and denial.

After some exhaustive reporting, Johnson finishes, very aptly, with this:

Speaking in a 2003 interview from the perspective of an average citizen who was also a firsthand witness to a most significant piece of this tortured history, former NSA analyst Welsh may appropriately be given the last word, at least for the moment: "There are limits to which foreign policy issues should require a man to lower himself. Shaking the hand of a murderer of a U.S. ambassador is such a case. Any peace based upon that hand is a delusion."

Click here for the whole story.

Really Wrong Number

When I practiced criminal defense law, there were clients for whom I felt sympathy because their arrests stemmed not from good detective work but from bad luck or karma or whatever you want to call it. I certainly wasn't rooting for people to violate laws with impunity but it just sometimes seemed unfair when a good criminal was caught despite a certain level of professionalism, for lack of a better word.

One such criminal, albeit not a client of mine, who gets some sympathy from me this morning is Marvin Lamar McKiver. According to this story, McKiver, who lives in Bladen County, North Carolina, called someone to arrange a drug deal. Unbeknownst to McKiven, he dialed a wrong number. The person on the other end of the line was the local chief of police. Needless to say, McKiven is now in jail.

Via FARK.

How To Create Blog Traffic

Ken Levine, a baseball announcer who has also worked on various popular television shows over the years as a writer, director and producer, experimented with a unique way to bring traffic to his blog. Check it out here. As his Sitemeter page indicates, his experiment worked. Pretty cool.

Man Of The Year

After facing well deserved ridicule for naming You as Person of the Year, the Time Magazine editorial board can breathe easy for the next eleven months. The identity of the most important person in 2006 has become obvious. No man means more to society than David Rafner.

You may not know his name but you certainly know his accomplishment and how much it means to us all. Rafner, while working for Honeywell in 1985, developed the idea for the DVR, better known as TiVo. As a cousin of mine said two years ago, "There are two people in this world-those who have TiVo and those who should have TiVo."

Never has Rafner's technological brainchild been more valuable than today. After a riveting and literally explosive four-hour debut last week, "24" is back for more, tonight at 9:00. That happens to be the same time that the excellent "Heroes" returns from hiatus. Not being one given to hyperbole, I can honestly say that I cannot remember there ever being two such good shows opposing each other.

Tonight, unless he cancels on me once again, I will be learning with Noah Daddy at 8:00, which means I won't get home until a few minutes after 9:00. In the days of yore, pre-2005, that would mean that Mrs. Zwicker and I would have had to run two different video recorders in order to tape both shows. We would then have to wait until the shows ended to start watching them. Thanks to the great David Rafner though, that won't be necessary. We can start watching one and, by skipping commercials, finish one on time and then watch the other. The only question now is which to watch first.

Is He An Anti-Semite Yet?

I've refrained from posting anything about this story until now because I was skeptical of its veracity at first. The story has since whirled all day around the blogosphere, at least the part that won't ignore anti-Semitism from the left, and it looks like it's sadly true.

This morning, It Shines For All, the New York Sun newspaper's blog, reported that, in 1987, Jimmy Carter interceded on behalf of a Nazi SS guard whom the United States was about to deport. The deportee, Martin Bartesch, had admitted to the Justice Department that he had not only served in the SS Death Squad but had volunteered for duty. There was also documented corroboration that Bartesch murdered innocent Jews in the Mauthausen death camp.

After the deportation, Carter received a letter from Bartesch's family complaining about the inhumanity of the former Nazi having to leave his family and adopted country. Carter forwarded the letter to the Justice Department with his own handwritten note asking for "'special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons." The letter, with the Sun's logo imprinted well after the fact, is here:

The family had approached various members of Congress and other dignitaries asking for assistance. All refrained from helping once they learned from the Justice Department the reasons for Bartesch's deportation. Calls to the Carter Center for an explanation or denial have gone unanswered.

The mainstream media isn't giving this story much coverage yet, and I'm not holding my breath that they will, but this is a story that should not go unnoticed. Carter has shown once and again his disdain for the Jewish people. This most recent revelation is nearly twenty years old yet it speaks volumes about the person that Jimmy Carter is. He advocated for the freedom of an admitted Nazi killer, someone who willingly and actively participated in the Holocaust, merely because it would affect the murderer's family. Some might excuse Carter's intercession for Bartesch as stemming from naivete and sympathy. It doesn't wash. The letter to Carter very clearly indicated that Bartesch was on the "Nazi Watch List." Only a total and conscious disregard for the atrocity that was the Holocaust can explain Carter's failure to preform some due diligence before giving Bartesch's family priority over justice.

That's Master Fifth Grader To You

School children need to experience a day or two as slaves so they'll know that involuntary servitude is a bad thing. At least that was the idea four years ago, when a teacher in Clarksville, Tennessee, inserted a role playing exercise into her curriculum about the Civil War. According to this article, the teacher had half the students act as slaves for a day while the other half acted as masters. The teacher then switched every child's role the next day, thus assuring that every child enjoyed the full experience.

Alas, the project has come to an end, and not for reasons that you would suspect. The sensible assumption is that some parents complained about the trauma their children endured. What caused the project's demise though was one student who let the project go to her head and refused to do a math assignment, telling her black teacher that she was a "master." If only I knew when I was ten that could bring a halt to my schoolwork by invoking God's name and then burying another person in the desert.

Speaking For The Dead

Yesterday the nation observed Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Most people who "honored" King did so by using the day off work to run errands, shop, see a movie or whatnot. Others took the opportunity to pontificate on current political issues by not just guessing but instead confidently stating that, if he were still alive today, King would hold certain opinions, usually those that the speakers themselves have. It is downright arrogant as well as disrespectful.

For example, Congressman John Lewis of Georgia wrote at the Huffington Post that King would demand that we "bring our troops home. He would say that war is an obsolete, ineffective tool of our foreign policy." Hatemonger's Quarterly, a humorous, conservative blog offers the following retort:

Oh, how lame is this? It’s another example of that most common of MLK rhetorical tropes: If Dr. King Were Alive Today, He’d Think Exactly As I Do. Yes, yes, yes: Dr. King would oppose the Iraq War. He’d be upset about NSA wiretapping. He’d be angry at the National Rifle Association. Blah, blah, blah.

Can’t we all just say that we don’t know what Dr. King would think about the vicissitudes of modern politics? To be sure, he was admirably opposed to violent means to carry forward the noble cause of Civil Rights. But does this imply that Dr. King would oppose all state military actions under all circumstances? Tell us, Rep. Lewis: Would Dr. King oppose the use of force to stop the genocide in Darfur?

Why don’t you just admit you have no idea what Martin Luther King Jr. would say about ambiguous political questions. And stop using a great Civil Rights leader as a bludgeon for your ideology.

I'll take HQ's questions one step further. Does Rep. Lewis himself advocate the use of force to stop the genocide of Darfur? According to his own website, yes he does. One of the demands that Rep. Lewis made just last year regarding the ongoing Darfur atrocity is: "UN Peacekeepers – A Chapter 7 UN peacekeeping mission to assist the African Union Mission."

Someone should explain to Rep. Lewis that United Nations peacekeeping operations serve as enforcement of post-conflict agreements. Besides needing someone to use force to end the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Rep. Lewis might be surprised to learn that the "peacekeepers" use force in order to do their jobs.

Mohammed The Knife

Tomorrow, Mohammed Ghanem will be sentenced in the Wayne County Circuit Court, or Recorder's Court as we old-timers call it. Ghanem's crime, of which a jury of twelve infidels found him guilty, was carrying a concealed weapon. To be more specific, Metro Airport security arrested Ghanem for carrying a knife past security, in the carved-out section of an address book in his luggage. Also in the address book were handwritten notes about jihad actions that would be newsworthy. Oh, yeah, one more thing. Ghanem was about to board a flight for Yemen with a one-way ticket.

As any fair minded American, you must be assuming that Ghanem had an adequate explanation. Well, you assumed correctly. You see, Ghanem has absolutely no idea that the knife was there or who planted it. It makes perfect sense to me.

UPDATE (1/16/07): Ghanem received a sentence of one year in the Wayne County Jail with credit for 131 days in jail. A Michigan law allows an inmate with a sentence of one year or less to petition for a 25% reduction of his sentence. If the judge grants the request, Ghanem has another four months or so to serve. It's not certain whether Ghanem will face deportation.

My New Favorite Commercial

Noah Daddy and O's Fan know why.

Not Tropic Of Cancer?

Man pays library $171, 47-year late fee

Twisting By The Pool

Okay, we didn't do much twisting by the pool. It was more like sitting by the pool. The former is just the title of a Dire Straits song I like. A few items of note:

-A kid asked if he could pet my shark. Get your minds out of the gutter. I was holding a large, inflatable shark for Mrs. Zwicker's sister's boyfriend's son.

-At Shabbat lunch, the shark petter's father, Ron, and another guy approached each other right near our table and said how each looked familiar to the other. Ron asked the other guy where he lived. The other guy answered, "In the city." After an awkward pause, the other guy explained that he lived in Manhattan. Boy, what a doofus Ron is. He clearly doesn't realize that New York is The City, to the exclusion of all others.

-I used to think that nothing could be more lame than "Cherish" by Kool and the Gang. I was wrong. "Cherish" by some Mexican poolside bar band is even lamer.

-Even in Spanish, Austin Powers is still hilarious.

-Not being Christian, I find that Christmas songs and lights just seem wrong when it's 85 degrees.

-There was plenty of fish ceviche. As the AP's know well, the two words rhyme with each other.

-This past Monday night, I lamented missing MNFBBQ. I made a point to eat a hamburger while my compatriots were doing the same in Michigan. I decided to make a bold improvisation and use guacamole dip instead of ketchup. I highly recommend it. Little did I know that I was missing possibly the worst MNFBBQ meeting ever.