The Thomas Chronicles

On the conservative blogs, it is commonplace for commenters and bloggers to denigrate homosexuals and say that much of the injustices done to homosexuals are greatly overblown and is, in reality, just part of a vast gay conspiracy to homosexualize society.

The more fundamentalist of bloggers and commenters tend to oppose gay rights and gay marriage on the grounds that it is unnatural, immoral and say, in so many words, that it is an abomination (some even overtly say this). They contend that they are the ones being victimized, not gays. Some fundamentalists even say that to prevent or challenge their outspoken bigotry is a denial of their religion, that they are the ones oppressed by society.

Well, this view doesn’t jive with what I’ve seen in my time and it certainly doesn’t jive with this video report.

The officer hit Johnson several times with the handcuffs wrapped around his knuckles. In the video, you can see the flash of the metal. The tape shows another officer holding Johnson’s shoulders as she tries to protect herself.

After taking several blows, Johnson stands up and swings back.

“I was afraid. I had had enough. Like I said, I thought the other officers that were witnessing this would at least try to stop him,” Johnson said. “I mean, he hit me so hard. Like the third time he hit me, it split my skull and I had blood coming out. So I jumped up,” Johnson said.

Watch the video on the side. Tell me this is okay.

This kind of thing is not an isolated event, and I’m not even talking about police brutality here. Stories like these in the gay community are legion…

To be fair though, there are also many, many conservative bloggers who do not denigrate homosexuals and see them as humans with a simple right to exist. And to them, I tip my hat.

It’s these kinds of things that make you remember just how strange and hostile the world can be. To think, the metal thieves in the UK used to be a joke to us Americans. Thieves made a lucrative living stealing people’s doorknobs, metal lawn chairs, and other unlikely metal objects and sold them to dealers who then melted them down to create other things. To those aware of that strange wave of crime sweeping the UK, I don’t think we would’ve thought it would come here…

Undercover Op Leads To Cell Phone-Triggered Bomb
Improvised Explosive Device Offered For Sale To Undercover Officers

SAN JOSE, Calif. — By NBC11’s Garvin Thomas

San Jose and Santa Clara police chiefs announced Wednesday the results of a massive sting operation in their cities. Operation Meltdown, as the joint effort was called, netted investigators hundreds of criminals, tons of stolen copper, dozens of stolen cars and weapons, and in one case, homemade bombs.

A Fremont man was arrested in October as part of Operation Meltdown. He is accused of trying to sell the officers improvised explosive devices capable of being denoted remotely by a cell phone. During a news conference at San Jose Police headquarters Wednesday morning, police showed a video, recorded by hidden camera, of the suspect demonstrating the technology to officers by detonating a bomb for them.

Operation Meltdown was begun in March 2007. Undercover officers from both departments opened a fake metal-recycling business in the city of Santa Clara called Jose Clara Co-Op.

Within days, San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis said, customers started showing up offering to sell what appeared to be stolen copper. Over the course of the next year, the undercover officers purchased 14 tons of copper with a street vale of almost $100,000. Soon after the officers began buying the copper, though, Davis said visitors to the recycling shop started offering to sell other stolen goods. The officers eventually purchached 40 stolen vehicles and 74 firearms, including 21 assault weapons.

You can read the rest of this article here.

Consider this:

We all knew it would come to this eventually, didn’t we?

According to a report by Reuters international news agency, department store Santas in Sydney, Australia, are being discouraged from saying “Ho-ho-ho” to children because, well, let’s just say it sets the wrong example for impressionable kids.

Any American kid who listens to rap music will recognize the word “Ho” immediately. It sprinkles from rappers’ mouths like snowflakes on Christmas morning.

Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “Ho” is decidedly un-Christmaslike. It’s become a slang term for a woman employed in the oldest profession of all.

At long last, Australian Santas are being asked to get their mind out of the down-under and stop assaulting children’s ears with irresponsible Ho-ho-ho-ing. They’ve been told to say “Ha-ha-ha,” instead.

This comes after a report from Great Britain, where Santas have been asked to slim down, since the jolly old elf’s morbid obesity sends another bad message to children. Never mind that a steady diet of reindeer meat is high in saturated fats. The jolly fat man will have to find a polar price club that specializes in veggies and yogurt, if he wants to spend time with kids.

And consider this account

Recently I went to do some Christmas shopping in the local stores. I don’t believe that I have ever been so insulted in all my life.

Only two stores had any mention of Christmas. All others were advertising the holiday season which is totally secondary to anyone who believes in the birth of Christ.

How about this one?

Here in Seattle, the phrase “Merry Christmas” has been largely expunged from public discourse. Haltingly and awkwardly, we wish each other happy holiday; we talk vaguely about a holiday season; we plan parties that by all appearances look like Christmas parties, but we never call them such. This despite every indication that Christmas, at least the consumerist trappings of it, is alive and well. Every Starbucks sign hawks a peppermint latte; the sound of Barbra Streisand belting out “Jingle Bells” can be heard all over town; whole city blocks are lit up like, well, like Christmas trees.

…

So it came as no small surprise when the very people who are supposed to be stormtroopers in the so-called war against Christmas — college professors — leapt to the defense of a North Seattle Community College staff member who was chided for referring to “Christmas cookies” in a recent e-mail message.

…

What finally tore our attention away from the crush and grind of late-quarter workload was the original sender’s apology message, sent to all staff and carrying the subject line, “Holiday Cookie Order Apology.” In the tone of someone clearly being asked to apologize for behavior for which there is no need to apologize, the sender lets us know that, in sending out her cookie order form, she had not been “trying to highlight, segregate, discriminate, or diminish any specific religion.”

Reading the news sometimes feels like walking through the Twilight Zone, minus Rod Serling’s sharp-voiced intro.

One question: How?

How does a man like this, holding his views, become elevated to such an august position in our government?

Like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, most of his views are contrary to the bulk of America, and still he holds one of the most powerful positions in our government as Senate Majority Leader.

Again, how?

(hat tip: Hot Air)

I am continually astonished that Libby was convicted at all for perjury and obstruction of justice. Libby was convicted of crimes that didn’t have anything to do with the prosecutor original charges. The fact that he was sentenced to two and a half years on top of this obscene miscarriage of justice just makes matters worse.

Everyone knows this is a political hanging.

The judge knew it when he sentenced Libby. The jury knew it when they convicted him. The prosecutor knew it from day one after his cursory question of Richard Armitage, the then Deputy Secretary of State. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell knew if after Armitage told him that he leaked Valerie Plame’s name, if “leak” is the appropriate word here— Valerie Plame was NOT a covert CIA agent according to the law. The news media sure as hell knew it since they were the ones stoking up the flames toward this lynching.

Now Libby is given an inmate number: 28301-016. Just another step toward the gallows.

Libby, who was convicted in March of lying and obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA operative’s identity, faces 2 1/2 years in prison.

The assignment of an inmate number by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons represents another step on the road to prison. Inmate numbers stay with prisoners even after their release.

Libby, however, is hoping that an appeals court will intervene and put the sentence on hold before he is ordered to surrender.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has not indicated how quickly it will rule. Lawyers in the case said Libby had not yet been assigned to a prison or given a date to surrender.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald opposes Libby’s bid to delay his prison term. He says Libby does not have a good chance of having his conviction overturned and should begin serving prison time immediately.

Libby’s friends have asked President Bush to step in and pardon him, a request that Bush has sidestepped while the legal case drags on.

Libby, 56, is the only person charged in the leak scandal, which erupted after CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity was revealed in a 2003 syndicated newspaper column. Libby was not the source for that leak and neither of the two Bush administration officials who provided the information were ever charged.

It almost feels like President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney threw him to the wolves for the sake of political expediency. I am sure they thought that the federal prosecutor could touch him since Libby didn’t do anything wrong.

But now that he’s been convicted and sentenced, I hope the President will now do the honorable thing and pardon a man who should never have been at the butt-end of this injustice.

For all our protestations of our undying love and devotion to our kids, it seems we’re corrupting them before they graduate from elementary school. We bombard them with the virtues of sex, drugs, derogatory rap and violence. We bath them in the indoctrinations of “might makes right”, “will to power”, “do what feels good”… all the variations of watered-down Marxism and Nietzsche.

Peggy Noonan wrote a perspicuous article back in April aptly titled, “We’re Scaring Our Kids to Death.” In it, she writes:

For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.

Click. Smug and menacing rappers.

Click. “This is Bauer. He’s got a nuke and he’s going to take out Los Angeles.”

Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. “Eat this.”

Click. “Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . .”

Click. Don Imus’s face.

Click. “Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . .”

Click. An antismoking campaign on local New York television. A man growls out how he felt when they found his cancer. He removes a bib and shows us the rough red hole in his throat. He holds a microphone to it to deliver his message.

Don’t smoke, he says.

This is what TV will be like in Purgatory.

She’s right. We’re inundating our kids virtually to the point where there would be zero possibility of them reaching their teenage years with their innocence intake. And you can forget adulthood.

Some would mount the argument that kids are going to be stricken with all the dregs of society anyway, and we can’t shield them forever. The faster a child understands the ways of the world the better.

What dark, cynical thinking!

Of course, children are going to grow into adults and will eventually deal with all troubles of living in the modern world. But this doesn’t mean we should hasten their worldly sophistication. Just because everybody will have to confront the madness around us at some point in time doesn’t mean we have to dip them into that cesspool all day, every day and every chance that we get.

Let children be children. Let them have their day in the sun.

The terrible world can wait. I assure you it ain’t going anywhere.

And now we are threatening to bring the legal system down on top their heads.

A disabled single mother from Beaverton has filed a federal lawsuit against the Recording Industry Association of America, claiming that she is the victim of abusive legal tactics, threats and illegal spying as part of an overzealous campaign to crack down on music pirating.

The recording industry sued Tanya J. Andersen, 44, in 2005, accusing her of violating copyright laws by illegally downloading music onto her computer. Andersen claims in a suit she filed last week in U.S. District Court in Oregon that the recording industry refused to drop its case after its own expert supported her claims of innocence.

Instead, industry officials threatened to interrogate Andersen’s 10-year-old daughter, Kylee, if she didn’t pay thousands of dollars. The intimidation included attempts to contact Kylee directly. A woman claiming to be Kylee’s grandmother called the girl’s former elementary school inquiring about her attendance, according to Andersen’s suit.

And this is only one example of a growing trend of police and investigators using the children to get at the parent.

There was another ongoing murder sensation of a woman who lived with her divorced husband. (I can’t keep track of the names of all these lurid murder cases on TV. There are too many of them and I find all the fascination with them on almost sickening.) Police investigators and all the media dog-piled on the husband, accusing him of murdering his ex-wife. Nevermind that the wife went out every night to have anonymous sex with her MySpace internet “Friends” to go “find herself”, and any one of those very friendly “Friends” could have murdered her.

Instead of doing actual investigation the police investigators wanted to interrogate the man’s kids (and yes, they still lived in the same house while the wife went a-whoring). When he refused to allow his kids to be further traumatized by the murder of their mother, the media, the man’s neighbors, a police trooper who pulled him over months ago, all chimed in and said just what a bad man he was. The policeman who pulled him over sagely declared, “You can just tell. There was something about his eyes.” (And they have the audacity to call all these hearsay comments news! Incredible!)

Last I checked, they still want to put the man’s kids under the spotlight.

In our modern judicial system, if the press grabs hold of your case, it’s not just the fate of your life that they’re deciding. They’re deciding if you’re fun to watch and talk about, if you’re good for ratings. You’re entertainment, via Geraldo Rivera and Greta Van Susteren and just about every cable news station there is. C’mon, dude. Dance!

This is madness… just madness.

I thought this was a joke but this looks dead on serious. I really don’t know what to make of this.

June 19, 2007 (Sawf News) – Collin Powell praised actress Angelina Jolie, recently appointed to the Council on Foreign Relations, for her understanding of global issues, dismissing remarks made about her to the effect that she is merely looking for a photo-op.

“She’s absolutely serious, absolutely informed,” says Powell in the latest issue of the Newsweek. “Her work with refugees is not something to decorate herself. She studies the issues.”

“For her, it’s not about saving the world, it’s about saving kids,” he says. “She doesn’t need this. This needed her.”

Har, har, har… ahem…

Houston we have lift off. We’re heading out into space and into La La Land. Over.