"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
. . . I didn’t do a post about Elizabeth Edwards dying of cancer last week. Or maybe you didn’t notice. Famous people die every day, and I seldom comment for good or ill.
Donald Douglas commented on Elizabeth Edwards’s death — and generated 133 comments, including a lot of the “hurry up and die you awful right-wing scum” variety, plus a lot of Rule 4 hate-links.
Did I mention it’s Holiday Traffic Suckage Season?
TOP NEWS
UK Police Search Bedfordshire Property In Connection With Swedish Blast
No explosives found, no arrests so far
Foes Face Up To Passage Of Tax Rate Bill
“It’s quite possible the tax cut extension will be passed, but … a lot of Democrats will vote against this,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
Trustee To Continue With Suits Against Marc Madoff
Son of imprisoned Ponzi schemer hung himself Saturday
POLITICS
Bloomberg Says Democratic Base Should “Suck It Up” On Tax Deal
“Leadership is about doing the possible, not sitting around and waiting for the perfect.”
Time Up For Michael Steele At The RNC?
Has asked RNC members to join him on Monday conference call; many expect him to resign
Advocates Schedule Press Conference To Pressure Scott Brown On DREAM Act
Boehner Announces Cuts To House Committee Budgets; Move Will Save $30 Million
Evan Bayh Rules Out 2012 Governor Bid
Fracking Gas Drilling Veto Somehow Pleases Greens, Drillers Simultaneously
THE ECONOMY, STUPID
PRC Pledges Inflation Control Is Primary Priority
A&P Grocery Chain Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, Will Restructure
Anonymous Hacks Gawker Out Of Spite
Now Playing In A Sky Near You: Geminid Meteor Shower
SPORTS
Finally, A Game Worth Watching In Detroit
Giants v. Vikings game relocated to Detroit after the Metrodome roof collapses
Coach Frazier Shoots Down Favre Rumors
Patriots Dash Through Snow, Throttle Bears
Packers Lose Rogers, Maybe More In Detroit
Sputtering Jets Put Playoff Sport At Risk
Nyets Give Lakers All They Can Handle But Fall Short
Penguins Extend Winning Streak Against Sabres
FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Richie/Madden Wedding Draws Family, Friends And An Elephant
Pretty traditional wedding, for certain values of traditional
Miley Cyrus Not Dazed By Bong Controversy
Presenting Wills & Kate’s Official Engagement Photo
Joanna Garcia, Yankees OF Nick Swisher Tie The Knot
“The Tourist”: Box Office Failure?
Carrie Fisher: Everyone Knows John Travolta Is Gay
“Black Swan”/”Showgirls” Trailer Mashup (Video, NSFW)
FOREIGNERS
New Japanese Defense Plan Emphasizes Threat From PRC
Globe & Mail: Obama’s Gamble In Afghanistan Paying Off
Climate Deal In Cancun Does Little But Prepare For Next Year’s Talks
Palin Urges More U.S. Assistance To Haiti
BLOGS & STUFF
Just One Minute: Ishmael Reed – Obama’s Problem Is That He’s Trying To Lead A Bunch Of Racist White People
Meryl Yourish: Who Spiked Thomas Friedman’s Coffee?
Jammie Wearing Fool: Palin’s A Quitter, Says Woman Who Quit EPA After Just Two Years
Weasel Zippers: Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Calls GOP “A Bunch Of Gangsters”
Protein Wisdom: More Multicultural Nonsense
— compiled by Wombat-socho
Warning: this post contains vast quantities of cheesecake, some of it not entirely safe for work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
We Stand Divided was late last week with this comparison of Tammy Banovac dealing with the TSA today and her Playboy days as Tammy Brewer, Plus, bonus New Yorker cartoon!
Soylent Green offers a triple-dip of Summer Altice, an entrancing selection of corsets with Irina Shayk inside them, a return to last week’s Cancun action, and (on a related topic) Shelly Goodair, barely wearing something trimmed in fur. Yum. 🙂
Yankee Phil contemplates the ailing Queen of Soul and also draws our attention to K-mart’s shapely new spokeswoman.
Left Coast Rebel wishes to apprise us of an International Pole Dancing competition and a rather confusing anecdote about Kelly Ripa and crutches. Not content with this, he offers a Russian girl in the snow.
Troglopundit reminds us of the virtues to be found in drinking milk. Take, for example, Lauren Conrad. For the ladies, a reminder that Kelsey Grammer and Danny Bonaduce are no longer on the market.
Meanwhile, at The Camp of the Saints, Karla James and Valory Irene serve as worthy bookends to Bob’s own Rule 5 collection.
Boom3 was in a classic mode last week, and so offers us a Ginger Rogers interlude.
Finally, from Dustbury come Mandy Moore, Sara Bareilles, Bo Derek, and a trio of cable news babes.
That’s it for this week, and thanks to all who contributed. Want to join the crowd? Send in your Rule 5 submissions to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox, so they don’t get lost among the flagged comments and other, considerably less entertaining mail.
A suicide bomber who died in a terrorist bomb attack which rocked Stockholm city centre, is believed to be a graduate from a British university.
A Facebook page thought to belong to the 29-year-old indicated that he studied sports therapy at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton. He graduated in 2004.
The man, named locally as Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, had also posted numerous videos relating to the Iraq war, the war in Chechnya and the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The Iraqi-born bomber first set his car on fire and then walked 200 metres before the explosives, believed to be in a backpack strapped to his body, detonated.
Just minutes before, he had sent out an email to the police and a news agency warning of deadly reprisals for having Swedish soldiers in Afghanistan.
Lutherans: The Danger Among Us!
UPDATE: More info on this Lutheran radical:
His favourite pages on Facebook included ‘Yawm al-Qiyaamah’, the Islamic ‘Day of Ressurection’. The page’s signature image features London’s Tower Bridge being engulfed in flames and floods. Another favourite page was ‘Islamic Caliphate State’.
The man is also thought to have been active on Muslim contact sites, where he claimed to be looking for a second wife. In one message on the site Muslima.com, he says that he was born in Iraq and moved to Sweden in 1992. He said he had two daughters, one aged 3 and one under the age of 2. He said he wanted to marry again and that his first wife had agreed to this.
Polygamy, global totalitarian theocracy, terrorism — you obviously see why, whenever TSA is screening airline passengers, they make sure to pay special attention to Lutherans with names like “Sven Olsen.”
Also, Anna Kournikova.
Because she could snap any minute, y’know . . .
UPDATE II: I got this video from Ed Morrissey, who lives in Minnesota, home of many dangerous Lutherans:
Sometimes not even written directions can save you from your own stupidity, especially at 0100. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, your FMJRA.
Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest
Keith Olbermann Punk-Smacks Obama in the Best ‘Special Comment’ EVAH!
Unintentional Hilarity: Feminists Ask If Julian Assange Committed ‘Rape-Rape’
Bristol Palin, Margaret Cho, Kathy Griffin and the Politics of Sexual Destruction
More MSNBC Awesomeness: Obama Gets Pimp-Slapped by Rachel Maddow
President Obama Abandons White House After Bill Clinton Says ‘Please Go’
Helen Thomas: Blood on Her Hands
Rule 5 Sunday – Cancun Edition
Allen West: DADT Debate ‘Crazy’
Everything You Need to Know
About ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’ . . .
Barrett Brown’s Lawyer Sends Me an Email Threatening ‘Legal Proceedings’
‘A Communicational Schematic That Is Superior to Anything Else in Existence’
Ruh-Roh: Bernanke Says Unemployment Won’t Be Back to ‘Normal’ for Five Years
The Angry Left Turns Against Obama
Julian Assange Arrested in London
‘I Feel As If I’m in a Surreal Swedish Movie Being Threatened by Bizarre Trolls’
Julian Assange, Prince of Trolls
Eight House Republicans Who Deserve a One-Way Ticket to Nuevo Laredo
OUTRAGE: Wisconsin Strip Club Denies Equal Rights to Nude Lap Dances
Awesome Awesomeness Update: MSNBC Host Rips Into Democrat Alan Grayson
Olbermann: ‘My God, You’re a Buffoon’
You’ll Never Forgive Me for This
BREAKING: Tax Deal Falling Apart?
Reader E-Mail: ‘I Live in Reality’
Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin Prevents Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’
Does Sarah Palin Need a Tutor? Would Richard Wolffe Volunteer for the Job?
In E-Mail, Democracy for America Claims Credit for Bernie Sanders Filibuster
Conservative ‘Character Flaw’ Diagnosed by Neurological Scientist Janeane Garofalo
VIDEO: Herman Cain Tells Cavuto He Is ‘Prayerfully Considering’ 2012 Campaign
What’s Wrong With the Republican Party in Two Words: Mark McKinnon
Why, yes, of course, it’s Frank Rich! And that’s exactly how he construes the situation whereby an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art — “a survey of same-sex themes in American portraiture,” as Rich describes it — was subjected to “censorship” because one work was removed from the exhibit.
Anyone offended by a video that showed “a scene of ants crawling on a crucifix” as a metaphor for AIDS — for this is what David Wojnarowicz’s video showed — is obviously an intolerant bigot. And wherever bigotry rears its ugly head, Frank Rich will courageously Speak Truth to Power. Or at least write 1,536 words to power, which we will merely sample here:
“[A] Roman Catholic conflicted by a religion that demonized his sexuality . . . a ruthless disease that had provoked indifference and cruelty rather than compassion . . . even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. . . . It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. . . . the hate speech of persistent bullies . . . most of the recent and well-publicized suicides by gay teens have occurred in Republican Congressional districts . . . America’s signature cultural institution can be so easily bullied by bigots.”
All of this, you understand, because one video was removed from an exhibit. The controversy was provoked by Penny Starr’s Nov. 29 article at CNSNews.com with this headline:
Say what you will about homophobic bigotry, but CNSNews.com editors sure know how to write an attention-getting headline, don’t they?
That article prompted William Donohue of the Catholic League to send suicide-bombers to maim and murder innocent women and children ask Catholics to call the museum and complain.
That’s it, you see? All Donohue did was to issue a press release, which was quoted by the New York Post, and a lot of Catholics called to complain that the National Gallery — which receives 55 percent of its budget in taxpayer funding from Congress — was engaged in a government-sponsored attack on Christianity.
Agree or disagree with Donohue’s religion, say what you will about the gallery curator’s taste in art, this story was in essence a repeat of that timeless journalistic classic, “Your Taxpayer Dollars at Work.” The federal government spends so much money on so many different things that some of it is bound to be deeply offensive to somebody. The Catholics offended by ant-covered Jesus were no different in this regard from air travelers offended by TSA-groped crotches or peaceniks offended by army-invaded Iraq.
In the mixed-up mind of Frank Rich, however, those offended by the Smithsonian exhibit were jumbled together with those who “demonized . . . sexuality,” who exhibited “indifference and cruelty,” and who are thereby complicit in both teen suicide and opposition to civil rights.
So here is Frank Rich, ostentatiously congratulating himself on his heroic opposition to symbolic hysteria, while simultaneously engaged in . . . symbolic hysteria.
One of these days, perhaps in New York City or Washington, D.C., some young Muslim will succeed in doing what yesterday’s Stockholm bomber failed to do, and then maybe Frank Rich will expend 1,536 words warning against religious extremists far more dangerous than American Catholics who complain about art exhibits.
But nowhere in that 1,536-word column will Frank Rich admit that he is a complete fool.
Truth to Power, baby.
(Via Memeorandum.)
Having previously warned about the worldwide menace of radical Lutheranism, I was scarcely surprised by the latest headlines from Sweden:
STOCKHOLM — One man was killed and two other people were injured when two explosions hit the heart of Stockholm’s city-center shopping district on Saturday evening, the police in the Swedish capital said. The country’s foreign minister called the blasts a terrorist attack, and an e-mail to news organizations minutes before the blasts seemed to link them to anger over anti-Islamic cartoons and the war in Afghanistan. . . .
An editor at the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, Dan Skeppe, said the agency had received an e-mail minutes before the blasts; it was also addressed to Sweden’s security police, and included a sound recording addressed to “Sweden and the Swedish people.” Mr. Skeppe said the recording cited Swedish “silence” over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad drawn by the artist Lars Vilks, criticized Sweden’s 500-soldier military contingent in northern Afghanistan and threatened attacks on Swedes.
“Now, your children — daughters and sisters — will die like our brothers and sisters and children die,” it continued. “Our actions will speak for themselves. As long as you do not end your war against Islam and the insult against the prophet and your stupid support for that pig Vilks.”
Wait . . . what’s this stuff about Aghanistan and Muhammad and Islam? Let’s check in with Michael Moynihan at Reason:
The bomber cited the Swedish military’s involvement with NATO in Afghanistan and “threatened” those serving there. According to Expressen, the letter also urges Muslims to fight back against “Islamophobia” in Sweden, presumably by murdering Swedes, and calls on “all mujahadin in Sweden and across Europe” to rise up.
What? No Lutherans? How can Moynihan ignore the Clear and Present Danger to the American Way of Life posed by Lutheran fundamentalism?
UPDATE: Stockholm Bomber ID’d as Sven Olsen Taimour Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly