Front page Archive Why Arlen? Arlen is the TV home of "King of the Hill." It's a small conservative town that is threatened with ruination on a regular basis by twig boys, enviro wackos, diversity nuts, "PC" police and other ivory tower liberals. I like to think of Arlen as a metaphor for this here great nation of ours.

Thursday, January 23, 2003 Posted 1:42 PM by Hank BEING LIBERAL: THE NEW GET OUT JAIL FREE? The press has been reporting that former U.N. Weapons inspector Scott Ritter, on two separate occasions, attempted to entice teenaged girls over the internet to meet with him for sexual purposes. The second time Ritter was arrested, but the charges were later dropped (under circumstances that are slightly suspicious). Apparently, this news about Ritter has some of the liberal crowd up in arms. You would think they’d be up in arms over the idea of this man trying to proposition an underage girl. After all, when it comes to child abuse, the left usually takes has a hard-line stance against the accused abuser. They are always saying (more or less correctly) that "Children should be seen and heard ... and believed." In fact, one liberal company, Northern Sun Merchandising: Products for Progressives, sells t-shirts with that slogan as a “feminist statement.” Given their usual position, you would think that, as good liberals, the peaceniks would be calling for Ritter’s scalp (or other body part). But they aren’t. Instead they are up in arms over what they perceive as an “attempt to discredit” Ritter. Ritter, you see, is not just any former weapons inspector. He is a vocal critic of President Bush, and a vocal apologist for Saddam Hussein. As a result, once the allegations surfaced, the leftists, rather than attack a suspected child abuser, rallied around him as a victim of that “vast right wing conspiracy” that haunts their imaginations. For example, the Auburn (NY) Citizen reports that: Ken Mochel, one of the founders of the Cayuga Council for Peace...said the charges against Ritter reminded him of the Vietnam era. There is a constant attempt to discredit anyone standing up to the government, he said. **** Florence Smith, part of the Greens organizing committee that invited Ritter to speak in Auburn, remained skeptical....It seems doubtful that he would go into the public spotlight if this was in his background, she said. This demonstrates just how far in denial the left is. Haven’t these people heard of accused celebrity child porn traffickers R. Kelly, Pee Wee Herman and Pete Townsend? How about accused statutory rapist (and famous film director) Roman Polanski? None of these individuals let what they were/are accused of prevent them from entering (or remaining in) the public spotlight. Why would Ritter? Furthermore, this is not the only thing in Ritter’s past that discredits him. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, “Mr. Ritter has taken $400,000 from Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman with ties to Saddam.” All of this points up, once again, just how hypocritical the left is. Normally, to the left, even a whiff of sexually inappropriate behavior toward a woman is enough to make a man a criminal (remember Clarence Thomas). Sexually inappropriate behavior towards an underage female ought to be enough to get a man shot. But, just like sexual harrasser Bill Clinton (and half the Kennedy family), whenever the alleged perpetrator is anti-Republican, or anti-American, they get a pass. “It’s just about sex,” the left claims, “what’s the big deal?” Similarly, the left normally considers any sort of financial tie to a subject to be a complete disqualification when it comes to that subject. For example, they constantly claim that President Bush’s and Vice President Cheney’s pasts as businessmen discredit them on nearly every subject. However, when the person is against the Bush administration, a financial incentive to be against Bush, like Ritter has, means nothing. It’s almost like, to the left, Anti-Americanism or Anti-Republicanism, is the new teflon. It deflects any and all criticism. Given this, maybe the attorneys for Kelly, Townsend, etc., should adopt a new legal strategy. Rather than address the charges of child porn, they should simply have their clients chant “no blood for oil,” and “Bush is the Real Terrorist.” In the eyes of the left, at least, that would apparently be enough to make charges of child sexual abuse vanish completely. Friday, January 17, 2003 Posted 5:52 AM by Hank BRIEF ONE: MORE ON THE LIBRARY This is good. Today's Ithaca Journal has a letter about the Tompkins County Library funding issue (see last week). According to the letter, volunteers were willing to help, so that the library could remain open. However, the union wouldn't allow it. Remember that, the next time some union person tells you that they are for the little guy. Unions give a lot of money to the democratic party. If Republicans were smart they'd use this to shut down unions: "Unions keep kids illiterate. Stamp out unions. Do it for the Children." Wednesday, January 15, 2003 Posted 7:09 PM by Hank YOU SAY YOU WANT AN E-VOLUTION... There are two growing trends in Ithaca, New York, that might, at first, seem unrelated. However, I'm wondering if there isn't a common connection. The first is that Ithaca seems to be getting a lot of muggings lately. Yep, you heard me. The most enlighted city in America, home to Cornell University, is experiencing an apparent increase in violent crime that seems, per capita, to be nearly as bad as what you would get in New York City or Los Angeles. In the last month alone, there were two muggings and an incident where “a 16-year-old boy...pulled out a box cutter and held it to [a] girl's neck.” According to the Ithaca Journal, “Ithaca police are investigating ...but said they do not believe there is cause for alarm.” Of course not. This being liberal, nonjudgemental Ithaca, “alarm” would probably be interpreted as “disapproval.” And we can’t have disapproval, can we? But I digress. The other problem is that Ithaca is becoming overrun with deer. And not just any deer. These deer are violent “urban deer.” As the Ithaca Journal noted: "Deer herds are causing wrecks, wrecking crops and ...doubling every two to three years in areas where there's ample food and few predators." So, in other words, if you’re unfortunate enough to live in Ithaca (or, as some conservatives call it, “the City of Evil”), you seem to have a pretty good chance of either being robbed at gunpoint or attacked by Bambi’s “gangsta” cousin. Why do you suppose that is? I have a theory. Ithaca, as we know, is ultra-liberal. Quite possibly, the most liberal/pacifist/hippie, city in America. And, if there’s one thing liberal pacifist hippies hate and fear (other than four more years of a Bush presidency), it’s guns. And if we all know Ithaca is full of anti-gun types, why wouldn’t the criminals know it? And, therefore, commit their crimes in a place where there is very little chance of an intended victim shooting back? And wouldn’t the deer at least figure out (on some instinctual level) that no one there is shooting at them? So, to recap: the liberals of Ithaca, being opposed to guns, are being preyed upon by predators, in the form of armed criminals. At the same time, the animals that they themselves should be preying upon, the deer, are instead also preying on the liberals. The leftists are getting it coming and going (and not in that whole sexually permissive way they wanted, either). You know, I just had a thought. Maybe this is natural selection in action. Maybe we are seeing the beginning of liberal extinction in the most natural of liberal habitats (a small college town). Maybe...just maybe... liberals will go the way of the dodo bird. No pun intended. Friday, January 10, 2003 Posted 5:46 AM by Hank KEEPING LIBRARY USERS IN THE DARK Today, I was reading the Ithaca Journal’s articles about the problems with the Tompkins County Budget and the library. And I have to say I wasn’t at all that sympathetic when I read about the poor library workers and their need to cut hours if they didn’t get more money. Some of my lack of sympathy was overfamiliarity with the tactic. Whenever government workers see their budget cut (or not raised), the horror stories begin. The exact horror story depends on which bureaucracy is telling the tale. Social workers threaten us with dead kids. Teachers threaten us with illiteracy. And librarians threaten us with closure (and ultimately, I think, dead illiterate kids). Another reason for my lack of sympathy was perspective from my own life. Having been born and raised (and still living) in one of the small towns that dot upstate New York, I had never even lived in a community with a full-time library until I went to college (and if any Tompkins County librarians are reading this—yes, despite the lack of full-time library hours in my home town I WAS able to get into college…and graduate). But those weren’t the only reasons I didn’t feel too bad for the library folks. My other reason was the day and time I read about them. It was January 10. It was nineteen degrees out. It was snowing outside. In short, it was pretty much the type of dark, cold, short, day, you expect for much of the year in Upstate New York. So, you might ask, what does this have to do with my lack of sympathy for the library staff in their quest for additional funding? I’ll tell you what. Tompkins County is in upstate New York. At least half the time, it is cold and dark. Even in the summer it rains a lot. And, despite being in cold, dark, upstate New York, the “educated idiots” of Ithaca, in order to make a political statement, spent $500,000.00 to put solar panels on the library. What kind of moe-ron spends this kind of money for solar panels on a public building in this area and think they would recoup the cost in any way, shape or form? They might better have spent the money to have extra hours in perpetuity…or to buy a herd of hamster and a really big wheel if they wanted something energy inefficient. But what do I know? I didn’t have the benefit of seven day a week library service growing up. Therefore, I’m probably just not “enlightened” enough to realize that making a political statement about solar energy is more important work for a library than allowing folks to read books. Thursday, January 02, 2003 Posted 6:19 AM by Hank AIRING A GRIEVANCE According to CNN, our multi-millionaire Attorney General, Elliot Spitzer, has decided to join (or lead) a group of nine states that have sued the Bush administration this week "over its decision to relax clean-air rules to help coal-fired power plants and other industrial facilities avoid costly pollution controls." Spitzer defended the decision to join the lawsuit at a press conference, accusing the President of an "assault on the Clean Air Act" that will lead to what CNN described as " more acid rain, smog and respiratory ailments like asthma." I have a couple of problems with this. The first is on the basis of policy. From what I've read in places that understand science and economics a little better than CNN (which I admit is a mighty broad catagory), the change in policy was actually designed to make air cleaner. Here's why: Under the old rules, almost any change to an existing facility meant the entire facility had to be completely modernized, even if the proposed change would have decreased pollution on its own. The cost to completely modernize is, of course, huge. Therefore, as a columnist in the Wall St. Journal noted, "even small upgrades [were] so expensive that it became cheaper to leave less efficient plants in operation, even when small and relatively inexpensive improvements could ...decrease the pollution of that plant." Under the new, Bush, rules, however, the changes can be made, and air quality improved, more cheaply. As a result, business is rewarded, not punished, for running cleaner facilities. Sounds great, right? Apparently not to an Attorney General who may be running for Governor in four years. My second problem with this is one of, for lack of a better term, "customer service." Spitzer is, as noted above, the New York State Attorney General. According to his own website, he is "the People's Lawyer" and "defends and protects the people of New York." In other words, he is our attorney. He's your attorney. He's my attorney. We are his clients. And, I'll tell you what: this client never told him to go and spend my tax money on this lawsuit. When did this lawyer, when did any lawyer, get the right to go around suing people in the name of his or her "clients" without the clients' giving permission? In fact, according to the rules of Attorney Ethics, "the lawyer should always remember that the decision whether to forego legally available objectives or methods...is ultimately for the client and not for the lawyer." In other words, when deciding whether to sue somebody it's our decision, not "our" lawyer's. So what should we do? Should wait to the next election to fire our attorney? Or should we sue Spitzer ourselves for breach of ethics? Here's another idea: Spitzer's a lawyer. Lawyers like laws. Let's pass another one. Let's pass a law that says "our" lawyer can't sue anybody without the express authorization of his clients, in the form of a resolution of the state legislature. Both parties ought to agree to this, since you never know when "the other side" will be in office as Attorney General. And if any future lawsuit "our" lawyer wants to bring is all that fired-up important to the people, then I am sure the legislature would be happy to give "our" lawyer the go-ahead to sue. In fact, Spitzer himself ought to be in favor of this. How can "the People's Lawyer" be against something that gives "the People" more say in how he does his job? Unless, of course, "the People's Lawyer" is less interested in the people, and more interested in political grandstanding. Home