And you’ll find somebody who needs a hug. (language advisory)

And all I said was this….

Wordle

Juan Williams has been fired by NPR.

Cable news blogger Johnny Dollar red-flagged NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik’s Twitter feed, which announced tonight that liberal NPR analyst/Fox News contributor Juan Williams’ contract was terminated — over comments Williams made about Muslims on The O’Reilly Factor. He gave his honest opinion: “[W]hen I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”
Guess who stirred up the pot to get Williams fired?

More: NPR – where the “P” stands for “Plantation”.

At Instapundit:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dale Beihoffer writes: “According to the NYT story on Juan Williams, ombudswoman Alicia C. Shepard said that Juan was a ‘lightning rod’ for NPR, noting that ’she had received 378 listener e-mails in 2008 listing complaints and frustrations about Mr. Williams.’ Your readers should be able to do much better than 378 emails to her!”

Just 378? Heck, I think we can manage that many ourselves. Click here to complain that Ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard should be fired for her illiberal position on the Juan Williams controversy.

Thank goodness:

“No” to US (and other) deserters/Mickey I. Update

‘…One wonders whether the oh-so-progressive and feminist Toronto Star (or any other media outlet) will look askance at the Mickster’s referring to a female politician as a “missus“.
…
Upperdate: Only Don Martin in the National Post seems to have noticed Ms Guergis’ relegation to missus:

…Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff now refers to Helena Guergis as “Mrs. Jaffer,” a cheap tactic to smear a woman who goes by her maiden name. Perhaps Conservatives should refer to Mr. Ignatieff as Mr. Zsohar, given that his wife Zsuzsanna goes by the name on her birth certificate, but having met her I’d say her name would link to a character improvement…’

“So now I have a nice stick, and nobody died.” More from the Ann Coulter debacle.
Plus! An overhead view of ip address 99.255.163.5

Racist!

Lord Monckton – manhandled;

Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.
However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.
Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.
In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.
Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.
He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.
I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.
[…]
It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.

Question: What do you get when you cross Antonia Zerbisias with Robert Mugabe?
Answer: I don’t know. Why not send her over to find out?

I Told You So – “In a joint statement posted on both of their Web sites, WWF Brasil and DDB Brasil are taking shared responsibility for the creation and initial approval of this ad … “
Update – They also produced a video. Someone approved a production budget.
(Original post continues below)
Relax.

It’s probably just a promotional campaign for this year’s World Wildlife Fund “Round The World” private jet expedition.
Ed Morrissey has an update – “WWF says they may sue [the ad agency] for releasing this print ad without authorization and with their logo prominently featured”.
Sounds like backpeddling to me. Only one year ago, this same organization was perfectly content to have their logo prominently featured in an ad in which a passenger jet threatens King Kong.

Democrat campaign worker damages Colorado Democratic headquarters;

Police said that about 2:20 a.m., 24-year-old Maurice Schwenkler, now in custody, and an at-large accomplice took a hammer to the picture windows displaying posters touting President Barack Obama and his health care reform efforts.
Early Tuesday, Democratic Party chairwoman Pat Waak said the damage to her building in Denver’s art district was a consequence of “an effort on the other side to stir up hate.” She tempered her statement after Schwenkler’s political history was revealed.

Update – Why?

Frank Ricci, meet Joe The Plumber.
( I told you to read this for a reason.)
more here…

Special needs blogging at the Huffington Post;

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga’s position over Dennett’s and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn’t publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.
Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

Via

Via Ezra, who finds similar sentiments elsewhere on the roll.

Look: a small part of me loves this. The raw partisan within me is rejoicing at seeing the embarrassing degeneration of the Liberal Party.

And that’s where Ezra and I part company.
A large part of me loves this.

President-elect Obama chooses “eliminationist hate preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at Obama’s Inaguration”
Our plan is falling into place…

University!

To any experienced journalist there was always a strange subtext to the abrupt removal of Dr. Larry Reynolds from his posts as Head of the Department of Family Medicine and Professor at the University of Manitoba and Head of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s Family Medicine Program. Something rang wrong in the alleged reasons his contracts were not renewed. And why he was given all of one month’s notice to clear out.
It took a while, but now we can reasonably conclude the real reasons he was axed. (Yes, we know, technically his contract was not renewed, but essentially he was dismissed from jobs he didn’t want to leave without an explanation.)
Watching the university launch a campaign of character assassination against Dr. Reynolds was one thing. But when they breached his legal rights to privacy by leaking bits of his personnel record, it was clear something was up.