Comical 'Stop' signs

Yahoo! News reported Oak Lawn has removed comical remarks in octagonal shapes it placed under stop signs in an effort to get motorists to obey the law. Mayor Dave Heilmann says the Illinois Department of Transporation determined the signs violated the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. He says had Oak Lawn not removed the signs, the city could have lost federally funded projects.

Did the Federal DoT say so, or does he Illinois department lack sense of humor.

The public safety campaign to cut down on speeding through stop signs began in September. Slogans such as "and smell the roses" and "means that you aren't moving" were placed near 50 stop signs. At the time, Heilmann said he thought the remarks would get motorists to pause, if for nothing else, to read the phrases.

Sounds like a good idea.

Heilmann says IDOT's objection to the signs meant he had to junk $1,700 worth of signs

Isn't that a typo. Shouldn't it be IDIOT

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Netroots rebel

Politico.com reported The nation's top Democrats are suddenly rushing to appear on the Fox News Channel,

They realized if the wanted to have any chance of winning in November they needed to try tp appeal to conservatives and independents.

which they once had shunned as enemy territory as the nemesis of liberal bloggers. The detente with Fox has provoked a backlash from progressive bloggers, who contend the party's leaders are turning their backs on the base

look at where the base has taken them.

and lending credibility and legitimacy to the network liberals love to hate - in a quest for a few swing votes.

In a span of eight days, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY.) and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean are all taking their seats with the network that calls itself "fair and balanced" but is widely viewed as skewing conservative.

As opposed to the extreme liberal nature of the rest of the MSM.

With the party's presidential contest reduced to hand-to-hand combat, Democrats are turning to the ratings leader among cable news channels in a clear rebuff to the liberal activists known as the Netroots. Markos Moulitsas, founder of the leading liberal site Daily Kos, told Politicos Michael Calderone: "Democrats are being idiotic by going on that network."

He probably thinks they should just let him and George Sorus pull their strings.

Ari Melber, the Net movement correspondent for The Nation, told Politico by phone that progressive activists and the Netroots are "not happy about it."

Poor babies.

"I don't think that it is tenable to completely neglect or ignore what your base wants," Melber said.

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Police smash door

kare11 reported Brooklyn Park police were looking for a meth lab, but they found a fish tank and the chemicals needed to maintain it. And a few hours later, when the city sent a contractor to fix the door the police had smashed open Monday afternoon, it was obvious the city was trying to fix a mistake.

At least they realized they made a mistake, and tried to fix it. Did they apologize for hancuffing the occupants, and promise to be more careful the next time?

... Police were executing a search warrant signed by Hennepin County Judge Ivy Bernhardson, who believed there was probable cause the Adams's home was a meth lab. Berhardson, who was appointed to the bench less than a year ago, did not return KARE 11's phone calls.

Don't expect him to.

"Ohmigod," Adams said as she recalled police breaking down her door and flashing the search warrant. "I just kept saying to them, 'you've got the wrong house.' " Police soon realized that themselves. "From a cursory view, it doesn't look like our officers did anything wrong," said Capt. Greg Roehl.

Except break down the door and harrass two innocent civilians on a false report.

Roehl said the drug task force was acting on a tip from a subcontractor for CenterPoint Energy, who had been in the home Friday to install a hot water heater. "He got hit with a chemical smell that he said made him light headed, feel kind of nauseous," Roehl said.

And did he ask what the source of the odor was?

The smell was vinegar, and maybe pickling lime, which were clearly marked in a bathroom Mr. Adams uses to mix chemicals for his salt water fish tank. "I said, 'I call it his laboratory for his fish tanks,' " Mrs. Adams said, recalling her conversation with the CenterPoint technician. "I'm looking at the fish tank talking to this guy."

So he asked, and got the answer. Did he tell that to the police, or just that it made him lightheaded?

Police say there was no extended investigation, just an interview with the subcontractor.

Who apparently did not tell them all he knew.

"Everything this person told us turned out to be true, with the exception of what the purpose of the lab was," Roehl said.

That is a pretty big exception, isn't it? Is it illegal to have chemicals for a fish tank? Do the police normally break down a door of someone with a fish tank?

... CenterPoint energy maintains the home was "unsafe" and it would have "irresponsible" for the subcontractor not to report it.

The residents were safe, at least until the police broke down their door. The fish were safe. Why was the house "unsafe"?

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Doom for Obama?

Eric Pianin wrote on WaPo Should it become necessary in the months from now to identify the moment that doomed Obama's presidential aspirations, attention is likely to focus on the hour between nine and ten this morning at the National Press Club. It was then that Wright, Obama's longtime pastor, reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered - and added lighter fuel.

And continues to pour gasoline on the flame.

... Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial minorities, stood by other past remarks ("God damn America") and held himself out as a spokesman for the black church in America.

I wonder how the black church in America likes its new spokesman.

... "This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright," the minister said. "It is an attack on the black church."

No, only thse churches spouting this foolishness.

He positioned himself as a mainstream voice of African American religious traditions.... Wright seemed aggrieved that his inflammatory quotations were out of the full "context" of his sermons -- yet he repeated many of the same accusations in the context of a half-hour Q&A session this morning.

Showing exactly the context for the statements.

His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"? Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.

We have never flown planes ino buildings, or strapped on suicide belts, or fired rockets not knowing what they would hit, but hoping to hit innocent civilians.

Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."

Which Bible is Wright reading?

His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion.

I don't know which is more of a gutter religion: Islam or the twist that the Nation of Islam applied to it.

He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say

Would that be the UN resolutions creating the state of Israel (Zionism) or the ones sponsored by the Muslims condemning it?

Gaius blogged Yes, Obama has a major problem Wright now. No, it isn't guilt by association, either. It is guilt by failure to disassociate himself from Wright a long time ago. The failure of Obama to realize that Wright was going to be a real liability speaks quite a lot about Obama's judgment - none of it good. Could this, in fact, be the real end of Obama's chances? Very possibly. That popping sound you here is the champaign being opened over at Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Stop the ACLU blogged Barack Obama’s pastor/spiritual advisor/spiritual mentor/campaign advisor evidently believes that his media storm last month was actually beneficial to Obama. So much so, that he couldn’t stay out of the spot light until Obama wrapped up the nomination.

blogged

TIW blogged Folks, Obama HUSSEIN should not only denounce this man as an anti-American-racist-bigoted-liar, but Obama HUSSEIN should demounce Jeremiah Wright for being a disgrace to all humanity. What is really disgusting is that this man has damned thousands of people who have believed that he was a Man of God who was leading them on their way to Heaven, when all the while he was damning their souls to eternal HELL. I’d say, “God Damn Jeremiah Wright,” but God all ready has damned him. So sad.

Robbie Cooper blogged guess who is providing Jeremiah Wright’s “security”? Yep. His former Muslim brothers from the Nation of Islam. Other than from Obama or his campaign staff, I can’t imagine who the hell Wright needs security from…

Badger blogged I’ll bet you Barack Obama just stood there shaking his head in disbelief, asking why no one would shut him up, as he watched this speech given my his spiritual leader and mentor.

Dave Lucas blogged I don't recall if I saw it on a blog or in an op-ed piece, but yesterday I read where Jeremiah is beginning to have a really negative effect on Barack, and that the Main Stream Media is beginning to line up behind Clinton. I also read where many voters in the early primaries that Obama won now say Hillary would get their vote. This is changing the political landscape heading toward the Democratic convention. What next?

Ed Morrissey blogged Wright has to be kidding if he thinks that people can’t find Farrakhan’s public speeches on Jews and see for themselves his rampant anti-Semitism. And Team Obama has to wonder when Wright will stop shooting his mouth off in public.

Pamela Geller blogged "Pastor" Wright At Press Club Buries Obama, Keeps Digging

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Black Brains and White Brains

American Digest reported It would seem there is a profound difference between the black brain and other brains after all. At least according to Reverend Wright. According to this shining exemplar of Barack Obama and the deep scholarship of black liberation theology, black people are right-brained and white people are left-brained.

What about mixed race people like Wright (and Obama). Do they not think with either side of their brains, and is that why Wright keeps saying such stupid things, and why Obama can only say Hope and Change?

Asian people don't make the discussion since that would be, well, unfortunate.

Oops.

If you're like me you've probably been wandering about the world babbling something about racial equality in America that affirms, "There are no differences except differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference." You could also say, "All men are created equal." How left-brained of you.

Now comes Reverend James Wright to set us all straight. He notes in passing that the right-brain of black people is somehow descended from the griots of Africa. The griots were people who could remember long, very long, poems; proto-rappers if you will. White people had something like that too, but then they invented ... writing. Or was it the Asians? I forget since, alas, my griot genes are slim to none.

He also said black students learn differently. Would that not be justification for segragated schools?

Michelle Malkin blogged Jeremiah Wright, racial phrenologist

DavidL blogged Wright violated the PC taboo and attributed racial difference to something other than white antiblack discrimination. The danger is is one were to agree with Wright, he is apt to called a racist. Not only has Wright propped legs under The Bell Curve, he has questioned the premise of Brown v. Board of Eduction, that black children can’t learned unless mixed with whites.

Anne Leary blogged The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a profoundly racist man. Hey Rev. Wright--is God white or black? Or some other color?

TRO blogged Now sit back and imagine for a moment. What would the response be, by blacks and the liberal elite media, if a white person were giving this speech about the innate differences between blacks and whites? Come on, you don’t have to imagine very hard, do you? It’s happened before in our history. Racist whites used that excuse to segregate schools and diners and bathrooms not too long ago if you remember.

186 blogged Thank you Reverend Wright for loosing the election for Barack Obama!

Ed Morrissey blogged This sounds oddly similar to claims made in The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, a book that created a firestorm of controversy with claims that race made a difference in IQ scores, among other claims. The two authors got reviled as racist enablers and their work became denigrated among a wide swath of researchers for seriously overreaching the science on which they relied for their conclusions.

Jake Tapper blogged The bulk of his remarks addressed, however, different groups seeing each other as deficient. He acted out the differences between marching bands at predominantly black and predominantly white colleges.

Sister Toldjah blogged Wright is not just a racist - one who said things in his speech this past weekend that would have a white pastor begging for forgiveness later on a national stage had he made similar remarks about white brains versus black brains - but also one very selfish individual.

Gateway Pundit blogged Oddly enough... This is the same argument used by the KKK in promoting their campaign of hatred.
Not surprisingly, the official website of the KKK (no, this is not a website I frequent!) has plenty of information that echoes what the Rev. Wright told his audience of black leaders last night

Protein Wisdom blogged Even more generally, if a Pat Robertson or a John Hagee gave a widely-publicized speech opining on the relative rhythm and musicality of blacks and whites, or talking about how blacks learn with their right brain, there would be a firestorm of criticism and the establishment media would immediately question John McCain as to whether he would denounce the remarks, etc.

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An Anatomy of Surrender

Bruce Bawer wrote in City Journal Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission.

And once in the House of Submission it must stay there.

... Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies. Call it a cultural surrender.

Call it suicide.

The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.... Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity.

And people turned against tne brave European publishers.

Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam.

Many bloggers, including myself, ran them.

Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.”... So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”

And in Canada, so called "Human Rights Commissions" will go after anyone that speaks the truth about Islam.

.... Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

A better solution would be to speak out against multiculturalism, and say anyone that wants to live in this society should adapt themselves to it, not expect this society to adapt itself to what they are used to.

.... If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.)

Good for Ofcom.

The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.”

And untreated, cancer will spread until it destroys the organism.

.... In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.

And was completely against British law and culture.

... The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission. But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.

Neptunuslex bloggedA fundamental truth about winning and losing is that you can’t beat what you won’t fight.

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Reform For The Nomination Process

Big Tent Democrat wrote on TalkLeft I am watching a C-Span broadcast about the broken, undemocratic, and corrupt nomination process. Elaine Kamarck of the DNC Rule and Bylaws Committee is going through the history and droning on about this and that. And it hit me. The solution to the problem is simple - we should change the Presidential nomination process to a pure popular vote system. This would end all the silly calendar nonsense. You want to go first? Be my guest. That is not going to change the fact that California has the most people.

And therefore just the large states would control everything. Candidates would not even campaign in small states.

This would also let states decide if they wanted to pay for a real election (a primary) or wanted instead to hold a phony election (a caucus).

And only the people that went to the caucus would be counted?

It gets rid of superdelegates. Heck, it gets rid of DELEGATES period. It gets rid of every unDemocratic feature in the process (no overweighting rural districts or urban districts or any district.) Finally, it eliminates the importance of incompetents like Donna Brazile. So there you have it. My proposed reform for the nomination process.

Predictably squeaky commented And while you are at it get rid of the electoral college. Popular vote wins.

Forget about that pesky Constitution. We don't really follow it that much anyway.

p lukasiak commented This is the kind of proposal that gave us McGovern back in 1972, BTD.

That is OK, we need more Republican Presidents anyway.

The idea is that if no candidate can garner support of 60% of the Democratic electorate, it should be up to the party professionals -- which makes perfect sense to me. I would get rid of caucuses -- Obama showed how to game the system, and destroyed the rationale for caucuses in the process (caucuses are designed to give PARTY activists a say,

But you just said if a candidate does not get 60% the party professionals should decide.

when a personality cult overwhelms the caucus system, it doesn't help the party on the local level.) As far as the calendar goes, "Red" states should be stuck at the back of the line.

That is very democratic.

But regardless of what happens, the single most important reform that has to happen is closed primaries -- unfortunately, some states don't register voters by party, so that will be a problem, but it should be DEMOCRATS who vote in the Democratic primary - and you should have to be a registered Democrat for at least six months before you can participate in the primary (unless you just turned 18). No more of the "Democrat for a day" BS....

What about independents.

1jpb commented I like the idea of mostly no scheduling for the primaries. But Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada should go first.

Why???

AnninCA commented I don't believe that the DNC has the authority to change how states conduct their election business.

Precisely, but that has never stopped Democrats before.

The way to encourage states to stop caucuses is to provide money through the DNC to fund alternative methods.

Typical Democrat. If you want to control something, just have some higher organization use money to control.

I like the mail in system for states that don't have the money for primaries. Seed the process. The states apply for the money. THAT I think the DNC could attract money from voters all over to fund. I don't like the 4 states up front. That really was the issue this year. Everyone is sick of Iowa, frankly. LOL* I personally like the idea of rotating early primary schedules. Let other states have a shot once in a blue moon.

I agree. You should start with a few small states, but different states each election.

I don't like the idea of all votes on 1 day. This year in particular we've gotten to vet Obama ONLY because it's been a long primary season. Otherwise, he'd have stormed right in, and we wouldn't have had a good idea of what he is really about.

We still don't know.

MarkL commented how often you can change your party registration? This "democrat for a day" business is not good, IMO. If people change their registration, make it stick. Also, allow independents, but not Republicans.

Can Independents vote in whichever primary they want? Or both?

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