September 2007 Archives

Paris Hilton has caught up on a few months of partying after her harrowing jail experience, and is ready to do good for humanity as promised. So she's going to Rwanda. "There’s so much need in that area and I feel like if I go, it will bring more attention to what people can do to help," she told E! online.

Right... because we just realized that Rwanda has problems and need Paris, who probably envisions sweet children waiting to flock to her side like in a Sally Struthers commercial, to tell us that. Paris, who probably thinks the Hutus cut a hit single with Justin Timberlake, and Tutsi is the hottest jeans designer since 7 For All Mankind. I'm not so sure this photo op -- expect Paris in the Banana Republic chic, safari cliche khakis and white shirt -- is good for people who have already suffered enough. Paris should take a cue from "South Park" and send a fat check to get her free Teiko sports watch -- or she should volunteer as a peacekeeper in Darfur.

Tony strikes again. This time it’s the firing of Gloria Jeff. Jeff is the well-respected African-American transportation planner and administrator that Tony lured out here from Michigan with much fanfare (and of course the obligatory trademark Tony centered press conference) and promised that she’d be the answer to L.A.’s nightmare, sometimes called road gridlock. Such a promise, of course, could not be kept, especially since Tony has not put forth an aggressive, comprehensive plan to tackle the city’s traffic horror.

That takes quiet, patient, hard work to secure funding and the cooperation of other cities, and regional planning and transportation agencies to put a plan into play and make it work. So what does Tony do. As always, he engages in the eternal hunt for scapegoats and Jeff was the unfortunate prey. But Tony did get one thing right. Los Angeles’s monumental traffic and transportation problems are due to the failure of one person. But that person is not named Jeff. The name is Tony. Jeff deserved better.

An excerpt from an address delivered by Hasan Rahimpur Azghadi of the Iranian Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution, which aired on Iranian TV -- the land of no homosexuals, as Ahmadinejad told us earlier this week -- on Sept. 3:

"[The Westerners] have transgressed all moral boundaries... The husband and wife are no longer satisfied with one another, and they begin having relations with other men and women. After a while, they start thinking that since they have already experienced this, it is time to try homosexuality. Then, they think this is old-fashioned, and they turn to animals. These things happen in the West. After a while, when they get bored with this, they turn to small children. ... They have now begun turning to objects. There are big factories that produce artificial genitals, and they sell them in stores. A sex shop is a store that sells sex toys."

Er, it sounds like he's speaking from, um, experience...

The march toward autocratic rule in Venezuela continues, with Hugo Chavez crafting new textbooks that teach Marxism and glorify his Bolivarian revolution. And if private schools do not use the government texts, they'll be shut down:

"Last year Chavez' Minister of Education, Aristobulo Isturiz, laid the groundwork for the new 'Bolivarian' education program to be imposed in Venezuela when he announced: 'Teachers should be the first soldiers of the revolution ... No Director of a public school shall have his, her job validated unless an evaluation is made, so that we are certain that they know what is the type of republic we want.'

Having already consolidated control over Venezuela's public schools and universities, including bringing in Cuban indoctrination experts to consult and injecting Marxism into the curriculum even in the medical schools, Chavez is now assaulting the last bastion of academic independence, the private secondary schools to which business and intellectual leaders send their kids. Objecting that the private schools teach 'capitalism' and 'consumerism,' Chavez has declared that if these schools do not allow inspectors to keep them compliant with the socialist agenda of the 'new Bolivarian educational system,' the schools will be shut down.

Zulay Campos of the Bolivarian State Academic Commission, which will carry out inspections to make sure that private schools comply with the government's curriculum stated: 'We must train socially minded people to help the community, and that's why the revolution's socialist program is being implemented ... If they attack us because we're indoctrinating, well yes, we're doing it, because those capitalist ideas that our young people have — and that have done so much damage to our people — must be eliminated.'"

It's so nice that all of our American actors and activists who've gone to worship at the Temple of Hugo support the thought police.

Also -- quite amusing considering the above photo -- Hugo has blamed the U.S. for big boobs:

"The president went on to discuss what he considers to be the brainwashing of the capitalist world and criticized the major media and mainstream movie industry that penetrate other nations and cultures with the values and ideas of the United States. He criticized, for example, the increasing popularity of breast implants among young women and blamed it on young women's desire 'to be like Barbie.'"

Yeah -- don't tell me Hugo doesn't have a presidential stable of Barbies.

I really appreciate a would-be candidate who steps back, looks at reality, realizes he has a snowball's chance in Barstow of winning, and decides not to run.

"Just last week, (Newt) Gingrich said he had given himself a deadline of Oct. 21 to raise $30 million in pledges for a possible White House bid, acknowledging the task was difficult but not impossible.

He abruptly dropped the idea Saturday, apparently unwilling to give up the chairmanship of American Solutions, the political arm of a Gingrich's lucrative empire as an author, pundit and consultant.

American Solutions, a tax-exempt committee he started last October, has paid for Gingrich's travel and has a pollster and fundraiser on staff. The outfit has raised more than $3 million, mostly from two benefactors who each gave $1 million: Sheldon Adelson, chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., and North Carolina real estate developer Fred Godley."

There was probably the little voice in his head, too, that said, "People aren't getting that excited about my pre-exploratory talk-show appearances..." It isn't that Gingrich is not a smart or capable guy, it's just that his name is attached to too much, well, history.

Punctuation matters. The comma is a small thing, and the rules for its use are both confusing and inconsistent. And yet, they can do so much to clarify a thought and enhance communication.

Being a newspaper junkie, when I travel I always buy and closely read the local papers. So, while I was enjoying my morning coffee on the deck overlooking the blue/gray Pacific this morning, my eyes came to a sudden stop upon reading: “An appeals court blocked a supervised visit between a woman convicted of killing her husband and their children.” This quote was attributed to (or blamed on) the Associated Press. I wonder if it was just ripped from the web (no more teletypes, I fear) or did someone edit it?

In plain un-punctuated language, she had been convicted of murdering both her husband and their children. Visits, whether supervised or not, seem problematic. However, since I also read The Daily News, I know that she “only” killed her husband and is, after five grueling months in custody, free, seeking visitation with, and ultimately custody of, their children.

Newspapers, if they are to survive, cannot be mere clipping services and aggregators. They need real people with understanding of facts, content, context and even grammar. I am confident our own skilled editor would have rendered the grammatically ambiguous sentence as: An appeals court blocked a supervised visit between a woman, convicted of killing her husband, and their children.” The sentence, even with commas, doesn’t make perfect sense and should be re-written. However, it makes more sense than her sentence of five months for blasting her sleeping hubby with a shotgun.

So I was stopped on Santa Monica Boulevard, under the 405 overpass, waiting to turn south onto the freeway, at about 11 p.m. the other night. Also stopped under the overpass, stopped and waiting the next lane over in the opposite direction, was a California Highway Patrol car. I looked over and realized that the chippies were driving with their headlights off. So I tooted the horn, rolled down the window and pointed at their headlights, saying "Your lights are off." The officer driving looked quite embarrassed, flicked on the lights and muttered "thanks" as his partner began ripping on him.

Driving without lights -- something you might expect from the LAPD, but not our beloved chippies!

Chris is right that medical marijuana is a Trojan horse to get pot legalized. And Chris is also right that marijuana should be legalized. Liberals and libertarians can meet on the freedom to do to your own body what you wish. As in prohibition, it is the illegality that drives the further crime and makes virtually every young person both a law-breaker and dis-respecter of law. If pot is illegal only criminals will have pot. So why make normal people criminals?

I have to admit that I have tried pot. I haven’t had it in 27 years and before that rather singular occasion, I had not had it in the previous 10 years. It is clearly not my drug of choice. (That would be Chateaux Haut Brion 1966, if you were thinking of a gift)

The Trojan Horse technique, as cynical as it may be, should not counter the good arguments for de-criminalizing pot. On the contrary, the strange and non-objective criteria for getting a medical marijuana prescription, argue for eliminating the unconstitutionally vague conditions for an Rx.

Yes, some cases are easy (if you believe in the efficacy of marijuana to combat the effects of chemo and stimulate the appetite. I believe that the munchies are a scientific fact). Chemo patients should be allowed. Also glaucoma sufferers. However when we get into the real but unverifiable chronic pain of fibromyalgia, back or other soft-tissue injuries, we have problems. So let’s eliminate the problems by eliminating the vague criteria and elaborate rationales.

Let’s take the criminals and sleaze out of the equation and let’s add tax revenue. We could probably balance California’s budget by legalizing pot. It is cited as our largest cash crop. And being cash, it is not taxed. We spend fortunes in policing pot, prosecuting pot-heads and dealers and then warehousing them in prisons where they become hardened criminals—at great cost, both social and monetary, to all of us.

Let’s end the hypocrisy on all sides of this issue. As I write this, I am sitting in beautiful Encinitas California, in a house overlooking the sea. Between my window and the sea, I can see a sign on a store on PCH. It reads: Hydroponic Products. Gee, why do we suppose they’re in business? Seems to be an open secret, not even, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” We live in willful denial of reality—and it is expensive.

For the record, I have always been a supporter of legalizing medicinal marijuana, and I've got the columns to prove it. For that matter, I still support legalizing medicinal marijuana today. But honesty compels me to admit that, on a key point, the opponents were right.

Back in the early days of this debate, critics said that legalizing medical marijuana was just a back-door attempt at legalizing pot wholesale. I rejected this argument out of hand, on the logic that there's a big difference between helping the sick feel better and helping high-school stoners dope up, There's no reason, I believed, to conclude that the former would in any way lead to the latter.

I was wrong.

One need only look at the proliferation of ostensibly "medical" pot shops in L.A. to realize that what we have here is the rampant distribution of a recreational drug under a bogus medical pretext. We would have to have a veritable epidemic of cancer, glaucoma and various other ailments to possibly justify what's going on here as a medical issue.

Then there are stories like this one, which appears in today's San Jose Mercury News:

After a two-year investigation, federal agents busted an Oakland-based marijuana candy maker this week, seizing hundreds of marijuana-laced products and nearly 460 marijuana plants....

The searches of five locations turned up ... hundreds of marijuana-laced products, including chocolate candy bars in multiple flavors, cookies, ice cream, peanut butter, jelly, barbecue sauce, chocolate syrup, flavored energy drinks, granola bars, moon pies, brownies, chocolate-covered pretzels and "Rice Krispy" treats....

Tainted Inc. ... supplied cannabis clubs in the Bay Area; Seattle; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Amsterdam, Netherlands, as well as being connected to multiple cannabis clubs operating in the Los Angeles area, authorities say.

What the Merc candidly calls "cannabis clubs," we here is SoCal euphemistically call "medical marijuana dispensaries." Sure, that's why they're dressing the "medicine" up as candy bars. (Ironically, one of the best arguments for medical marijuana is that nauseous chemotherapy patients need to smoke pot to settle their stomachs -- and can't simply take THC pills -- because they are unable to keep down what they swallow. Somehow this problem doesn't seem to be affecting all those mr.Greenbud eaters.)

Now, I don't object to the idea of outright marijuana legalization. Proponents make a good case when they say the costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits. But if pot is going to be legalized, then it should be done honestly, and not by exploitively using cancer patients as a Trojan Horse.

As for medicinal marijuana, it seems that the experiment of states' trying this on their own has failed. Maybe the answer is to get Washington to take the lead (I can dream), and let the stuff be sold, with a prescription, as a medicine and only in licensed pharmacies.

L.A. Times columnist Rosa Brooks has an odd take on the Columbia-Ahmadinejad story:

Ahmadinejad was playing to global public opinion, and though he lost some PR points for incoherence and general bizarreness of message ("In Iran, we don't have homosexuals"), he gained some for coming off as a bit more mature than his prissy, infantile host. ("In Iran, when you invite a guest, you respect them," Ahmadinejad observed dryly.)

Bollinger, meanwhile, was playing to a different audience. After taking a beating for giving Ahmadinejad a forum, he was eager to show the media, alumni, concerned Jewish organizations and a raft of bellicose neoconservative pundits that he was no terrorist-loving appeaser of Holocaust deniers.

In a narrow sense, both Ahmadinejad and Bollinger achieved their goals. Ahmadinejad showed that he could be dignified in the face of crass American bullies..... And Bollinger showed that he can be a crass American bully, which, in our current political climate, is what passes for "courage."

So far I have no serious disagreement. As I noted a few days ago, it was poor form for Bollinger to invite Ahmadinejad into his house only to spit on him. But according to Brooks, this would have been OK if Bollinger had only chosen to mistreat a different president:

(I)f Bollinger had invited President Bush to Columbia and made those same unvarnished remarks to him, and Bush had toughed it out and struggled to answer half a dozen unfiltered, critical questions from an audience not made up of his handpicked supporters . . . . Well, that ... would have been free speech at its best.

So if you're rude to Iran's genocidal tyrant, you are "prissy, infantile" and "a crass American bully." But if you're rude to the president of the United States, well, that's "free speech at its best."

Bush Derangement Syndrome strikes again.

It turns out that the San Francisco "leather" festival that's running the ad that mocks Jesus isn't just funded by Miller beer. The city of San Fran is kicking in taxpayer money, too. Natch.

And to think, when the City of Los Angeles got involved with a fund-raiser at Hooters, people went ballistic.

I must admit that I find myself strangely fascinated with Christie Prody, O.J. Simpson's girlfriend of the last 10 years. The AP has a profile on her today, telling the story of how this small-town Minnesota girl moved to L.A. at age 20, and found herself enchanted by the alleged double-murderer during his Trial of the Century. So she started hanging out around his house, and although we don't know exactly what happened next, we do know they've been together for a decade now. She's 32; he's 60.

But it hasn't been all roses. There have been domestic-violence calls on both sides. And, of course, O.J. now finds himself in the middle of his 28 million-count indictment on armed robbery/kidnapping/fishing without a license, etc. Still, through thick and thin, Christie -- an attractive young woman who surely could find herself a more, um, stable partner -- sticks by her man. Why?

I think this is why I find Prody, who's close to my own age, so fascinating -- because she is willfully doing something that, to the earth's other 6 billion inhabitants, seems so plainly insane, possibly suicidal. I'd love to know how she rationalizes her choice to cast her lot with the likes of O.J. I imagine a conversation with her going something like this:

Me: Why would you date a double-murderer? Aren't you concerned that he might one day do to you what he did to Nicole?

Prody: He was acquitted! He's innocent!

Me: Fine, even if we give him a pass on the murders, don't you remember the 911 tape? The guy's a wife-batterer, is that really someone you want to spend your life with?

Prody: He's a changed man.

Me: OK, people can change their ways, I can accept that. But, just two years ago, you accused O.J. of -- let me quote from the AP here -- "coming uninvited into (your) home, erasing messages on (your) answering machine, taking pages out of an address book and also taking a letter." Didn't that incident -- or any of the other spats requiring police intervention -- make you think that maybe he hadn't changed so much after all?

Prody: What can I say? Love is strange.

Me: Indeed.

The AP notes that in her high-school yearbook, Prody wrote that she plans to "get my Ph.D. in psychiatry." I suspect it would take a Ph.D. in psychiatry to figure her out.

I thought this pic of the president of Comoros was funny enough (if you remember the movie "The Golden Child," he has the same face as the Nepalese soldier at the airport), but then I read that he's like the Sit 'N' Sleep president of the island nation as well. He owns mattress factories, but also lives above a store called The House of Mattresses. Comoros: Mattress Kingdom!

Ban Ki-moon mugging and shaking hands with the Myanmar foreign minister, while inviting him over to sign his guest book, at the very moment the Burmese people are being mowed down in cold blood by the junta, as soldiers are raiding monasteries and beating up monks. Sorry, but I wouldn't be able to stomach any photo op or happy meet and greet with that brutal regime.

OK, I realize that some might argue that Mr. No-Spin jumped a long time ago, but I just can't enough of the lead for Bill O'Reilly's new column (which will appear in Sunday's Daily News):

Whenever I start feeling sorry for myself over personal attacks by my far-left media opponents, and those have been known to happen, I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Come on, Bill, Blessed Teresa? Don't you think you're more like Job, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Christ all wrapped into one? Come on, man, let's show a little humility.

That said, I do think O'Reilly is getting a bum deal in this phony brouhaha over his supposedly racist comments. Earl has offered a rather tepid defense below, but too tepid, IMO. Earl's position boils down to: Bill's probably not more racist than a lot of other people, when truly, I don't think his comments were racist at all.

If you hear them in context -- and I heard the whole conversation on the radio this morning -- O'Reilly is not saying that he's surprised that black people were behaving civilly at the restaurant and concert he went to. What he did say was that he thought a lot of other white people -- those whose only experience of African Americans is what they see on the nightly news or MTV -- would be surprised. And that's essentially the same comment black civil-rights leaders have been making for years in their protests of the media's depiction of African Americans.

No wonder Juan Williams, who is black and was being interviewed by O'Reilly at the time of those comments, didn't object. Far from it, he agreed with him. Indeed, in response to CNN's over-hyped treatment of the story, Williams said, "It had nothing to do with racist ranting by anybody except these idiots at CNN."

Take a moment to see who's driving this story: It was spurred by Media Matters, a far-left outfit run by right-wing-hit-man-turned-left-wing-hitman David Brock. It's a smear on the part of a long-time smear artist. And CNN has made a big deal out of this because, well, CNN is a ratings-toxic network that routinely gets its snot kicked in by O'Reilly's Fox.

So O'Reilly is right when he says he's getting a raw deal. But that doesn't make him a Mother Teresa, not by a long shot.

I can't help but chuckle at this headline from the Washington Post: Iranian Leader Fails To Ease Tensions.

"Fails"? That would suggest there was some reasonable expectation that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would "ease tensions" with the world during his visit. And did anyone seriously believe that would happen? What was he going to say that could possibly make people feel better about the fact that his country is arming the murderers of our soldiers, or that it's acquiring nukes, or that it has zero regard for human rights? It's one thing to say the guy deserves a chance to say his piece (a right he denies to his own people), but did anyone really think that in saying his piece he would actually help to make ours a more peaceful or just world?

The answer to that question, believe it or not, is yes. Leave it to the good folks at the WaPo to actually find some goofball who held out hope that Ahmadinejad might be a peacemaker. And wouldn't you know, he was a college dean, at Columbia no less:

"(Ahmadinejad) had an opportunity to present himself to the American people in a way that would make conflict less likely. And I don't think he succeeded," said John H. Coatsworth, the Columbia University dean who moderated a speech."

There's an understatement!

I've got some other headlines for the WaPo:

O.J. fails to reconcile with ex-wife

Bush fails to woo crowd at MoveOn convention

Hilton fails to model safe-driving skills

Vick fails to show great compassion to animals.

In bathroom, Craig fails to disprove rumors about his sexuality

Spin Zone Bill haters are having another field day with Bill O’Reilly after his latest shoot from the lip seeming insult of blacks. At first glance O’Reilly’s quip on his radio show that he marveled that black diners at Harlem’s famed Sylvia’s restaurant were “respectful,” didn’t utter m’f s when they ordered, and acted, well, like white folks, in a suburban Italian restaurant, looked and sounded dumb and racist. O’Reilly haters trotted out a string of other O’Reilly borderline race tinged cracks and gaffes over the past years as proof that O’Reilly is at best racially insensitive and at worst an unreconstructed bigot.

Spin Bill is a jello soft target for dumping the racist tag on. But aside from his usual acerbic take-no-prisoners, let fly with the cracks style, the talk show host didn’t say anything that was earth shatteringly offensive. And he certainly didn’t say anything that many whites, non-blacks and a fair number of blacks don’t routinely whisper behind closed doors.

It’s easy and fun to razz O’Reilly as a loudmouthed racist, turn the tables and give him a dose of his own medicine. But dumping on O’Reilly for giving his honest personal reaction to the scene at Sylvia’s is disingenuous and self-serving. It simply puts O’Reilly on the hook while letting far too many others off of it.

As of Sept. 25, 2007, the Department of Defense has these figures for Americans slain in a war where the goal is acceptable levels of chaos.

U.S. Deaths Confirmed By The DoD -- 3800

Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation -- 1

Total -- 3801

In a decision that should surprise no one, the judge in the Phil Spector case has declared a mistrial, with the jury divided 10-2. We don't know yet how that split breaks down, but I'm guessing the 10 wanted to convict. After all, last time around the jury was split 7-5, and since then the jury instructions were modified so as to increase the likelihood of conviction. It seems highly unlikely that jurors who thought "guilty" then would have switched to "not guilty" in the meantime. More likely, the new instructions helped to peal away a few holdouts, but not the remaining two.

And that's one more than it takes to keep a killer out of prison.

We'll see if the prosecutor has the stomach to fight this again, but I suspect that, sooner or later, Phil will be joining Robert Blake and O.J. out on the links.

We've had our fill of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But there's more on the front of tyrannical rulers! Hugo Chavez -- meeting with Kevin Spacey, the latest dingleheaded actor to worship at the Temple of Hugo -- may have ditched the U.N. General Assembly this week, but his minions took out a full-page ad in the New York Times today calling for Americans to throw our democratic notions by the wayside and embrace solidarity with Chavez's Bolivarian revolution.

There's a good reason why -- after all, Chavez is, according to his own humble estimation, like Russell Crowe in "Gladiator" (though significantly less attractive in a skirt):

"'Gladiator' - What a movie! I saw it three times," the president tells an Associated Press reporter traveling with him in a Toyota 4Runner, along with his daughter and a state governor. "It's confronting the empire, and confronting evil. ... And you end up relating to that gladiator."

Did Hugo miss what happened to the wicked, megalomaniac head of state in that movie?

This T-shirt, now on sale at Wal-Marts everywhere, has created a stir among anti-domestic-violence groups for making light of stalking, which is anything but funny to its victims. And that's a fair complaint: One demerit to Wal-Mart for poor taste. (It's not the first time.)

But what's really surprising here is that Wal-Mart thinks there is a market for shirts like these at all. It's probably right -- the company didn't make its billions by misreading the wants of American consumers. But who in their right mind wears a shirt like this? Does one really think proclaiming "I'M A STALKER" is a great way to make friends, win respect, succeed in the workplace, or attract romantic interests?

Maybe anti-domestic-violence groups should be applauding Wal-Mart for selling these Tees. They probably keep the rest of us safer by allowing the wackos to self-identify.

This Clarence Page column in the Chicago Tribune makes a sane point about the frenzy over visit from Iranian president:

Isn't it ironic? Some of the same people who opposed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University on Monday usually criticize political correctness that suppresses free speech. Everybody wants to censor something sometime.

Ahmadinejad knows. His regime censors people much of the time.

Like the protesters, I disagree with Ahmadinejad, but that's precisely why I want him to be heard. Nothing discredits his credibility more than the sound of his own baloney.

Hallelujah. What's great about America _ and the freedom we're trying to preserve-- is that allows the free an open exchange of ideas, no matter how icky or bizarre. We can and should invite fanatical leaders to our universities, let them rant and rave and make their own worst case against themselves. And absolutely our universities should invite all kinds of people with differing views to challenge and address growing minds. If you start suppressing that free exchange then you get, well, present day Iran.

Now for fun read this hysterical bit of agitprop from Fox News.

For military families who have lost loved ones in Iraq, watching Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak to students at Columbia University showed just how disconnected certain factions of American society have become to the sacrifices of their sons, daughters, parents and spouses .

In case you didn't figure it out, "certain factions" are the godless, baby-killing, tree-hugging, welfare-mom-loving, war-hating, Mexican-loving bleeding heart liberals who are always pushing political correctness on the world (such as protesting world leaders and policies they think are bad or evil).

Miller Beer has pulled its logo -- but apparently not its money -- from the San Francisco S&M fair ad mocking Christ's last-supper.

Well, if Mayor Villaraigosa's clusters -- oops, they're now called "families" -- of schools fail, it won't be for lack of money. Today real-estate developers Richard and Melanie Lundquist are donating $50 million to the Partnership for Los Angles Schools, Antonio's nonprofit organization that will run two high schools and the middle and elementary schools that feed into them. This is the biggest donation yet in Antonio's prodigious effort to raise money for his schools, which has included contributions from numerous other heavy hitters.

And as long as the money is spent on pencils and paper, great, right? But let's not forget that Villaraigosa has staked his political future on the success of these schools. If the schools succeed, so will Villaraigosa's future political ambitions. In a way, then, these donations are somewhat like campaign contributions to the mayor himself -- albeit contributions that aren't regulated under existing campaign-finance law.

Now, it's possible that when real-estate developers give the mayor of Los Angeles (and possible future governor of California) a huge chunk of money that will boost his political prospects, they're expecting nothing in return.

Possible ... but doubtful.

Warren Jeffs, self-annointed prophet and grand pooh-bah of polygamist sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was found guilty today on two counts of rape as an accomplice for forcing a 14-year-old girl to wed and have sex with her 19-year-old cousin.

Predictably, Jeffs claimed he was being persecuted because of his religion. Well, there are a lot of religions with odd beliefs or customs around the world. But as politically correct and tolerant as we are in our views of religion, it's important to know the difference between a religion and a destructive cult. One easy definition by former Moonie Steve Hassan, who now runs the Freedom of Mind Center to help people get out of cults:

"A destructive cult is a pyramid-shaped authoritarian regime with a person or group of people that have dictatorial control. It uses deception in recruiting new members (e.g. people are NOT told up front what the group is, what the group actually believes and what will be expected of them if they become members). It also uses mind control techniques to keep people dependent and obedient. ... Benign cult groups are any group of people who have a set of beliefs and rituals that are non-mainstream. As long as people are freely able to choose to join with full disclosure of the group's doctrine and practices and can choose to disaffiliate without fear or harassment, then it doesn't fall under the behavioral/ psychological destructive cult category."

Simply put, when you hurt other people you cease to be entitled to use a defense of "religious persecution" when called to answer for your crimes. The turning point in this case was the brave young woman who spoke up about her abuse. Hopefully this case will put on notice those cult figures who continue to deceive, buy influence, force or coerce their members into marrying, etc. And hopefully everyone will see that destructive cults didn't die with the 1970s.

If this poster were mocking Mohammad ...

... it would be an international incident. Muslim clerics would be issuing fatwas. Western leaders would be offering countless apologies. The media would be obsessively reporting every detail with a suitable air of shock and disgust.

But organizers of San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair -- "the world's largest leather event" -- have instead smartly chosen to mock Christ, depicting the Last Supper as some sort of kinky gay-sadomasochist fete complete with sex toys. And so press coverage -- and thus protest -- have been all but nonexistent. A Google News search finds only two news stories, one from a conservative news site, another from a Christian one. The MSM is seemingly not interested. Neither, apparently, are San Francisco city officials, or Miller beer, which is sponsoring the event.

Maybe the folks at Miller need to hear about this. Let's drop them a note.

* UPDATE: Miller Beer has pulled its logo -- but apparently not its money -- from the fair ad.

Stumbled upon this tale from a Microsoft programmer about the perils of Minesweeper -- that classic time-waster in which players must use their smarts to clear a pixilated field of landmines.

Well, turns out there were some political issues with Minesweeper. For starters, in some parts of the world, where the threat of stepping on a landmine is more than just an abstraction, this game doesn't seem so cute. (Although one would think that since the purpose of the game is removing mines, that would mitigate the offense somewhat, but apparently not enough.)

So, in designing the next version of Windows, Microsoft programmers decided to include an option in which users could hunt for flowers instead of mines. The programmer writes:

We added a preference that allows users to change it from looking for mines in a minefield to looking for flowers in a flower field. Now, personally I am not a fan of using flowers here - I mean, you WANT to find flowers, right? - but this was an established alternative in the market and none of the other ideas we had (dog poo? penguins?) could pass the legal/geopolitcs/trademark/etc. hurdles.

Sounds like a simple, even if hokey, fix, right? Wrong. It gets more complicated:

Once that was figured out, the next step is trying to determine the correct default setting. After much discussion,we decided that the default should be based on locale. So if you install in North America you get the mines, but in a mine-sensitive area the default would be the flowers....

This is when another issue arises: it turns out that the help for the game, as well as the game summary, all talks about mines, uncovering mines, and not blowing up. The technical writers are quickly engaged to figure out what the text should say.

Testing revealed another issue: If we default to flowers, does it really make sense to call the program "Minesweeper" and have a giant mine for an icon?

Oh yeah, there's that. There's also this:

There was also concern that if we changed the name, it might generate support calls from people who are asking where minesweeper went....

Just when these their way through the system, another issue arose. It turns out that some countries were taking this even more seriously than we had initially considered. Merely changing the default was not sufficient - they didn't even want to have the *option* to switch to mines! ... so we suggested that if mines were completely unacceptable than those countries should probably just remove minesweeper all together. So the various legal and geopolitics and localization people went off to discuss that one - whether it would be acceptabled, and if so which countries should pull it.

Who new PC could be so problematic for PCs?

Given that Mirthala Salinas has been known to date political hot shots, and in light of her, um, redeployment to the Inland Empire, this lucky fellow to the right could be the broadcaster's next great amour. His name, fittingly enough, is Ronald O. Loveridge, and he is the mayor of Riverside. According to that city's website, he has been married 43 years to his devoted wife, Marsha. (Step aside, Marsh, there's a new gal in town!)

Of course, Mirthala doesn't need to look for a new boyfriend, even though she'll be so many miles away from her current flame, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. After all, Antonio wouldn't stray from her, would he?

Mirthala's different, right?

This is love.

He'll be faithful this time. Right, Antonio?

Um ... Antonio?

Oh, never mind. Mayor Loveridge, meet Mirthala!

I ask this -- and answer it -- in my column today, after Al-Jazeera asked me to analyze the Petraeus brouhaha and beyond for an Arabic-speaking audience. These audiences have a pretty long attention span, so you can go into an issue deeper than just offering a few quick sound bites. Some of my thoughts:

"But all in all, my answer is simple, something that people around the world can relate to: It's all about the votes. It's about being 14 months out from the next presidential election.

And unfortunately, the welfare of Iraqis, the prevention of genocide and the ominous interference of Iran are not going to be key topics of concern among those flinging volleys.

It's about the Democratic Party capitalizing on dissatisfaction with the war, and the Republican Party trying to steal some thunder from the Dems' issue du jour when debating measured troop cutbacks. It's not just about Sen. Hillary Clinton accusing Petraeus of a 'willing suspension of disbelief,' but Clinton making the accusation as would-be supporters of the White House hopeful watch their televisions at home."

Honestly, what's been ringing in my head lately, though, is something Osama bin Laden said back around when the War on Terror officially began:

"In the end, the audience may be wondering about Americans' will to fight, and I would confess that, given the discourse lately, I've had similar fears, especially when reflecting upon the unified war effort of my grandparents' generation.

The network could then replay an October 2001 interview with Al-Jazeera in which bin Laden said, 'We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. ... There was a huge aura over America - the United States - that terrified people even before they entered combat. ... America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing. ... America left faster than anyone expected. ... We pray to God to give us his support and to make America ever more reluctant.'

Viewers on Arab-language TV might remember that interview, and nowadays wonder if the terror leader was being prophetic."

Read the whole thing!

Well, that didn't take long. Less than a week after the mayor of Simi Valley proposed billing a church because a bunch of would-be immigration vigilantes staged a protest outside of it, the city has reconsidered. "The city has decided to hold off on billing a local church almost $40,000 for costs to police an anti-immigration protest," today's Daily News reports (sorry, no link available).

Sounds like the worst of all worlds for Simi: All the bad publicity, and none of the money. Moral of the story: Politicians should think twice before setting off on ridiculous symbolic gestures.