GAO Katrina Report

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0214061katrina1.html

Erotica, Guns and tattoos- what's the problem?

GU? PU!

It’s kind of a surprise to see the Washington Post (who recently let their paper be used by a deported terrorist to spread Hamas propaganda) publish this hard-hitting op-ed by Eric Adler and Jack Langer on the terror-supporting hate group known as the Palestine Solidarity Movement, scheduled to hold a conference at Georgetown University: Why Is Georgetown Providing a Platform for This Dangerous Group?

"This month Georgetown University plans to host the annual conference of an anti-Israel propaganda group called the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM). The PSM certainly is controversial. It is also dangerous.
The purported aim of the PSM is to encourage divestment from Israel. To this end, its conferences boast a cavalcade of anti-Israel speakers whose speeches often degenerate into anti-Semitism. At the 2004 conference at Duke University in North Carolina, for example, keynote speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh referred to Zionism as a “disease.” Workshop leader Bob Brown deemed the Six-Day War “the Jew War of ‘67.” Not to be outdone, Nasser Abufarha praised the terrorist activities of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The PSM maintains that it is a separate organization from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends foreign students to the West Bank and Gaza to foment anti-Israeli sentiment.
All the same, the two groups seem to have intimate ties. At the 2004 PSM conference, for instance, the International Solidarity Movement ran a recruitment meeting called “Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists.” In that session, the organization’s co-founder, Huwaida Arraf, distributed recruitment brochures and encouraged students to enlist in the ISM, which, she acknowledged, cooperates with Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Another ISM co-founder, George Rishmawi, told the San Francisco Chronicle in a July 14, 2004, news story why his group recruits student volunteers.
“When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore,” he said. “But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.”

Adler and Langer point out that Georgetown’s easy acceptance of this vile group, despite their well-documented support of suicide bombing and mass murder, might have something to do with that recent gift from Saudi Arabia:

"In agreeing to host the PSM from Feb. 17 to Feb. 19, Georgetown can’t even claim that its regard for free speech and expression trumps all. In 2005 the university’s conference center refused to host an anti-terrorism conference sponsored by America’s Truth Forum on the grounds that it was “too controversial.” So why is free speech and expression of cardinal importance now? Perhaps it is related to the recent $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal (lgf: search), a prominent financier of the families of Palestinian suicide bombers."

Johnny's Friday Funny

There was an old priest who got sick of all the people in his parish who kept confessing to adultery. One Sunday, in the pulpit, he said, "If I hear one more person confess to adultery, I'll quit!" Well, everyone liked him, so they came up with a code word. Someone who had committed adultery would say instead that they had 'fallen.' This seemed to satisfy the old priest and things went well until the priest passed away at a ripe, old age.

A few days after the new priest arrived, he visited the mayor of the town and seemed very concerned. "Mayor, you have to do something about the sidewalks in town. When people come into the confessional, keep telling me they've fallen." The mayor started to laugh, realizing that no one had told the new priest about the code word. But, before he could explain, the priest shook an accusing finger at him and shouted, "I don't know what you're laughing about, because your wife has already fallen three times this week!"

Here’s a bracing dose of clarity from Theodore Dalrymple, at Cato Unbound: Is “Old Europe” Doomed?

The late Professor Joad, a popularizer of philosophy rather than a philosopher in the true sense, used to preface his answer to any question by saying, “It depends on what you mean by…”—in this case, “doomed.”
The word “doomed” implies an ineluctable destiny, against which, presumably, it is vain for men to struggle. And this in turn implies a whole, contestable philosophy of history.
Historical determinism has two sources: first the apparent ability of historians, who of course have the benefit of hindsight, to explain any and all historical events with a fair degree of plausibility, even if their explanations of the same events differ widely, thus giving rise to the impression that if the past was determined, the future must be determined also; and second the tendency of people to assume that current statistical or social trends will continue, or in other words that projections are the same as predictions. One has only to consider the exponential growth of a bacterium on a Petri dish, which if continued would mean that the entire biosphere would soon consist solely of that organism, to realize that projections do not necessarily give rise to accurate predictions.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that a pall of doom does currently overhang Europe. In retrospect, the Twentieth Century may be considered Europe’s melancholy, long withdrawing roar (to adapt Matthew Arnold’s description of the decline of religion). And just as, according to Disraeli, the Continent of Europe would not long suffer Great Britain to be the workshop of the world, so the world would not, and did not, long suffer the Continent of Europe to dominate it, economically, culturally and intellectually. Europe’s loss of power, influence and importance continues to this day; and however much one’s material circumstances may have improved (just take a look at photographs of daily life in France or Britain in the 1950s and compare them to daily life there today), it is always unpleasant, and creates a sense of deep existential unease, to live in a country perpetually in decline, even if that decline is merely relative.
Combined with this is the fact that most European populations experience a profound feeling of impotence in the face of their own immovable political elites. (My wife, who was born in Paris 56 years ago, cannot remember any period of her life from adolescence onward when M. Chirac was not a prominent figure in French public life, and had he not died after a mere fifty years at or near the top of the greasy pole, the same might have been said of M. Mitterand.) This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.

Read the whole thing...

George Plimpton Fashionable American writer who founded the Paris Review and turned sports journalism into an art form Eric Homberger Monday September 29, 2003The Guardian

George Plimpton, who has died aged 76, became a best-selling author by not only writing about sporting heroes but by participating in those sports as well. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard man with a hint of an aristocratic British accent - also had another life as co-founder and editor, for 50 years, of the Paris Review. In the spring of 1952, he went to the French capital to join up with his old friend Peter Matthiessen, who was hoping to start an expatriate literary magazine. Plimpton took two bottles of absinthe to the founding meeting, and, having helped choose the title, was appointed editor. The Paris Review was explicitly a creative writer's journal, carrying no book reviews or literary criticism. It had no overt political line, and was not wedded to avant-garde writing. Its craft interviews featured such names as EM Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. Collected in more than a dozen anthologies, they have made a distinctive contribution to contemporary understanding of the creative process. Plimpton had a brilliant track record of spotting talent; among his finds were Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. In 1973, he relocated the review to an office in his home on 72nd Street, New York, where his parties became a preppy, literary, alcoholic, heterosexual alternative to the nightly saturnalia at Andy Warhol's Studio 54.
At the same time, Plimpton was playing an important role in bringing sports journalism in from the tabloid ghetto. With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered. He wrote about the way professional athletes coped with failure, ambition and envy, making them sound like interesting people.
From the late 1950s, he was a writer for Sports Illustrated, a magazine that crossed the barrier between Playboy and the hardcore sporting magazines, and it was while on assignment that his ventures into participatory journalism began. He wrote to Archie Moore, then the world light-heavyweight champion, asking if, in the cause of literature, he would agree to a three-round exhibition bout in Stillman's gym. Moore said he would be delighted. So, to prepare himself, as he recounted in Shadow Box (1978), Plimpton visited the Racquet Club library on Park Avenue, chose at random The Art And Practice Of English Boxing, published in 1807, and settled into a large leather armchair. After his encounter with Moore, Plimpton persuaded the baseball leagues to let him pitch to professional players at an exhibition game. His account of that humiliation, Out Of My League, was a bestseller in 1961. Then he posed as a rookie quarterback at the summer training camp of the fearsome Detroit Lions football team. Telling the story in Paper Lion (1966), he revealed both his respect for the players as individuals and his strong rapport with the team. The players also seem to have understood that this tall, bumbling writer was a celebrity too, to be treated accordingly.
Plimpton was the son of a patrician New York family: his lawyer father served in the US delegation at the United Nations; Adlai Stevenson was a family friend. After Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive New Hampshire preparatory school, he read English at Harvard, served as a second lieutenant in the US army, and went on to study at King's College, Cambridge. His friendships extended widely across the American establishment. A lifelong Democrat, he was at the 1961 White House party where Gore Vidal squared off with Bobby Kennedy. Removing the novelist's hand from Jackie Kennedy's back, Kennedy said: "Fuck off, buddy boy." Vidal replied: "You fuck off, too." Despite not having heard this repartee, Plimpton, who loved gossip, gave an account of it to Truman Capote, who embellished the scene in a way that humiliated Vidal - and resulted in an ill-tempered lawsuit between the two men. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Plimpton was everywhere. He was with Bobby Kennedy in 1968 when the presidential hopeful was assassinated; it was Plimpton who helped wrestle down the killer, Sirhan Sirhan. He was in Norman Mailer's apartment the night the writer stabbed his wife Adele, and he was a prominent guest in 1968 at a fundraiser for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. For a time, he was known as Mr Radical Chic. He was married twice: to Freddy Medora Espy, and then to Sara Whitehead Dudley. He had four children.
· George Ames Plimpton, writer and editor, born March 18 1927; died September 25 2003

Suspect Ends Up Covered in Pot After Chase

WAXAHACHIE, Texas - Wildflowers may not be the only thing sprouting up along a 15-mile stretch of Interstate 35 in Ellis County this spring.

Seeds of an illegal plant were inadvertently sown after a police officer stopped a car with no license plate light early Friday morning and smelled a strong odor of marijuana. When the officer returned to his car and called for backup, the driver drove away, Milford Police Chief Carlos Phoenix said.

As several law enforcement agencies joined the chase, the fleeing driver tore open and threw 17 to 19 bags out of his window.

"There was marijuana flying everywhere," Phoenix told the Waxahachie Daily Light.

After driving over a second set of spikes set out by authorities, the suspect finally stopped and was taken into custody, and he was "literally covered in marijuana," Phoenix said.

Officers picked up two duffel bags, a backpack and three or four gallon-size freezer bags from the interstate, but the wind blew much of the substance and seeds, Phoenix said.

Also, some people with police scanners heard that a man was throwing marijuana out of his car window and drove to the scene to try to retrieve it, Phoenix said.