Remember the Terrorist Bride captured near Baghdad, earlier this week?
Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit has more pictures of the blushing bride in his full bridal get-up, as well as the unfortunate mugshots that followed.
The fake bride turned out to be the son of Mahdi Army leader and killer of many Sunnis, Abu-Deraa, now hiding in Iran.
Wow! Transvestites have really been in the news this week!
Joe Blow: Oh…. Seniors?
Alaskan Airlines: Nooooo….
Joe Blow: Students?
Alaskan Airlines: Noooo0…
Joe Blow: Uhhhh….disabled veterans???
Alaskan Airlines: No!
Joe Blow: I give up! What type of ‘certain’ customers get a special discount?!
Alaskan Airlines: Gays! That’s who!
Joe Blow: Wait a minute….gays?
Alaskan Airlines: You heard right!
Joe Blow: Is that fair? I mean….
Alaskan Airlines:
Save 10% off your Holiday travel to Newark/New York City. Purchase your tickets today. This Feature Destination runs through January 6, 2008.
Welcome.
Whether it’s your first flight with us or your 400th, we are thrilled to have you join us. In “Our World”, diversity abounds. From the land of the Midnight Sun to the beaches of Mexico and Miami, from historic Boston to the desert of Palm Springs and Tucson. alaskaair.com is a welcoming resource for our LGBT travelers.
Joe Blow: Uhhhhhh…..
Alaskan Airlines:
Upcoming Events
Stay up to date on all the LGBT events where Alaska Airlines flies. Take advantage of our special discounts to many of the events.
Joe Blow: What about me? Do I get any discounts for being…..um….a Christian, white, male?
Alaskan Airlines: WTF, dude?!
Found via Clayton Cramer’s Blog
Hat tip: Retired Geezer
Ask, and you shall receive. I’m sick of arguing about religion too.
CNN has a video story about a serial masterbator who calls himself Baseball Playa, and videotapes himself doing his thing at a his favorite shopping center in Glendale, AZ. He then posts the videos on the internet, over 30 so far.
Consumer reactions range from, “disgusting!” to “disgusting!”
The police have launched an investigation.
Hat Tip: Crime Scene KC
English School teacher Gilliam Gibbons has been charged with “insulting religion, and inciting hatred”, a crime punishable by up to 40 lashes, and six months in prison.
The British government says the foreign secretary has summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the religious hatred charge against the teacher.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesman, Michael Ellam, said Miliband would discuss the charge of inciting religious hatred against teacher, Gillian Gibbons. The meeting will take place as soon as possible, the Foreign Office said.
An American Muslim group, the American Islamic Congress has strongly denounced the Sudanese Government for jailing the English teacher for naming a teddy bear Muhammad, in a statement, today:
“We denounce this fabricated outrage,” stated Nasser Weddady, the organization’s Civil Rights Outreach Director. “The Sudanese government’s ridiculous case trivializes the feelings of Muslims around the world.”
Earlier today, the Sudanese government charged Gillian Gibbons, a teacher at Unity High School in Khartoum, with insulting religion and inciting hatred for naming a class teddy bear “Muhammad.” She faces up to 40 lashes and six months in prison.
“The sad legacy of the Danish cartoon riots is that we have to speak out immediately when extremists try to provoke clashes over trivial matters,” Weddady explained. “This is not about cultural sensitivities. There is no excuse for someone to be sent to jail and whipped over a teddy bear’s name. Ms. Gibbons needs to be freed at once.”
Jana El-Horr, a Peacebuilding Fellow with the American Islamic Congress, noted that the Sudanese regime is trying to distract attention from the ongoing genocide in Darfur. “Muslims around the world are horrified over the brutal killings in Darfur,” El-Horr explained. “Now the Sudanese regime is trying to rally support by putting on the ‘defender of Islam’ hat. But we won’t be fooled.”
The Teddy Bear Outrage comes public perception of Muslims continues to decline, as documented in a recent Pew Forum poll.
“The Muslim world has much more pressing and urgent problems to deal with than a random teddy bear,” Weddady observed. “This ridiculous case has the potential to further tarnish popular perceptions of Muslims. What’s truly offensive here is the action of the Sudanese regime, which only entrenches the perception of Muslims as hyper-sensitive.”
I’d like to see some Muslim groups in other countries follow the AIC’s lead, and strongly condemn this ridiculous ordeal.
UPDATE:
Another Muslim group, The Muslim Council of Britain has also expressed outrage:
“This is disgraceful and defies common sense,” said Secretary-General Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari. “There was clearly no intention on the part of the teacher to deliberately insult the Islamic faith.
“The children in Mrs Gibbons’s class and their parents have all testified as to her innocence in this matter. We call upon the Sudanese President, Umar al-Bashir, to intervene in this case without delay to ensure that Mrs Gibbons is freed from this quite shameful ordeal.”
Sgt. Antwan L. Walker 
22 years old from Tampa, Florida
2nd Forward Support Battalion, 2nd Infantry Division
May 18, 2005
Sgt. Antwan Walker was excited about coming home from Iraq to celebrate his 23rd birthday with his family and friends. His mother, Andrea Pringle, was busy planning the party when an Army official unexpectedly came to her house.She said he told her Thursday that her son was killed the previous day by a bomb blast in Ramadi. The Department of Defense hasn’t publicly confirmed his death.
Sgt. Antwan Walker, known as Twan to his friends and family, joined the Army in 2000. Pringle said her son joined to earn money for college.
“Twan had a lot of goals in life,” She said. “He was very ambitious and very smart.”
Sgt. Walker had been in Iraq for about a year. He called his family often but didn’t want to talk about war. Instead, he talked about starting a real estate career and his three children.
“He was such a good dad,” his mother said. “All he wanted to do was make a good life for his kids.”
In April 2005, Walker wanted to talk about the fighting. He told his mother five soldiers he was traveling with were killed. His phone calls became more frequent after that.
Pringle said she had days when she couldn’t eat or sleep because of her worries. But she never forgot to give her son her support.
“I always told him I’m proud and be safe”.
These brave men and women sacrifice so much in their lives so that others may enjoy the freedoms we get to enjoy everyday. For that, I am proud to call them Hero.
We Should Not Only Mourn These Men And Women Who Died, We Should Also Thank God That Such People Lived
This post is part of the Wednesday Hero Blogroll. For more information about Wednesday Hero, or if you would like to post it on your blog, you can go here.
By Indian Kris Kringle @ 9:31 AM
Mary Bomar’s fraudulent investigation
In April 2006, Park Service Director Mary Bomar ordered an internal investigation into claims that the planned Flight 93 Memorial is actually a terrorist memorial mosque, built abound a giant Mecca-oriented crescent. Bomar’s investigation was a total fraud, concluding, for instance, that it isn’t possible to calculate the orientation of the crescent because the site-plan has not been geo-referenced. (Page 2, PP2 of September 2006 summary report. Page 1 here.)
In fact, the original Crescent of Embrace site-plan was drawn on a topo map that the Memorial Project provided to all participants in the design competition. A topo map is the epitome of a geo-referenced map. North marked on a topo map is true north, which is the only piece of information needed to calculate the orientation of the crescent. Just connect the tips of the crescent, form the perpendicular bisector, and calculate how many degrees it points from north (53.4).
Also known are the crash-site coordinates, which is all that is needed to calculate the direction to Mecca (55.2° clockwise from north). All of this is trivially easy to verify. Just use the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com to get a graphic of the direction to Mecca from the crash site and place it over the crescent site plan:
Somerset PA is ten miles from the crash-site. The “qibla” is the direction to Mecca. Red lines show the orientation of the crescent. The crescent points 1.8° north of Mecca. (Click for larger image.)
A request for oversight
Because it is the director’s office that has been covering up the Mecca-orientation of the crescent, oversight can only come from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne himself. Several people sent letters to Secretary Kempthorne two weeks ago, showing how the giant Mecca-oriented crescent remains completely intact in the so called redesign. But Mr. Kempthorne also needs to know that he is getting bad information from his subordinates in the Park Service.
Thus a request for all readers of this post: if you have a minute, please copy and paste this entire post into an email for Secretary Kempthorne.
We don’t need for the secretary to understand all the terrorist memorializing features in the design, or the numerous proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included so that his accomplishment will be undeniable once it is a fait accompli. It is enough that he be concerned about features that can be readily interpreted as terrorist memorializing, whether they are intended or not. As Congressman Tancredo put it: we need “a new design that will not make the memorial a flashpoint for this kind of controversy and criticism.”
But even getting to the most basic facts about what is in the present design requires getting past Mary Bomar’s fraudulent report, which tries to pretend that there is nothing that can even be interpreted as untoward.
Mary Bomar’s intellectually dishonest “experts”
In addition to claiming that topo maps are not geo referenced, Mary Bomar’s internal investigation cites a small number of academic experts, all of whom spout nothing but the most absurd non sequiturs. One is Dr. Daniel Griffith, professor of “geo-spatial information” at the University of Texas. About Alec Rawls’ analysis of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent, Dr. Griffith writes:
… Mr. Rawls’s arithmetic calculations appear to be correct … [but] … just because calculations are correct does not make the resulting numbers meaningful.
Dr. Griffith’s point, it seems, is that the mere fact of Mecca orientation does not imply intent. Who said it did? The way Murdoch proves intent is by repeating his Mecca orientations (scroll down to the last section here). But intent is not the only thing that matters. Even without terrorist memorializing intent, it is inappropriate to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the crash site.
The Memorial Project knows this, but it is committed to defending the crescent design, so it keeps using its doubts about intent as an excuse for denying the facts. Dr. Griffith, for instance, is telling every reporter who will listen that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca. “Anything can point toward Mecca,” he told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, “because the earth is round.” One billion Muslims face Mecca five times a day to pray, and Griffith pretends there is no such thing as facing Mecca!
Of course he knows better. The first thing that Griffith’s report does is calculate the direction to Mecca:
I computed an azimuth value from the Flight 93 crater site to Mecca of roughly 55.20°.
Bomar expert #2
Dr. Kevin Jaques, specialist in Islamic sharia law from the University of Indiana, acknowledges that the Mecca-oriented crescent is similar to the mihrab around which every mosque is built, but says:
…just because something is ‘similar to’ something else does not make it the ‘same’.
Yes, well, similar–very, very similar–is exactly the problem.
Like Daniel Griffith, Mr. Jaques is trying to make hay of the fact that Mecca orientation does not by itself imply intent. So what? Intentional or not, it is unacceptable for the central feature of the Flight 93 memorial to be a geometric match for the central feature of a mosque. Jaques is pretending that the questions he raises about intent somehow make the facts irrelevant.
Professor Jaques also dismisses the likeness between the Mecca-oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab by noting that lots of religious structures have prayer-direction indicators, not just mosques:
The biggest hole in [Rawls’] argument is that all of the elements he points to are common architectural features that one would find in a church or synagogue. The mihrab originated in pre-Islamic buildings and can be found in temples, churches, and synagogues around the Mediterranean.
This is logic? Because Christian churches are often oriented to the east, that somehow makes it okay to build the Flight 93 memorial around a half-mile wide Mecca oriented crescent? If this is “the biggest hole in [Rawls’] argument,” then there are no holes in Rawls’ argument.
Project spokesmen know the truth, and are lying about it
Memorial Project spokesmen have followed the lead of these academic frauds, using doubts about intent as a pretext for denying the facts. Asked about Rawls’ Mecca orientation claim, Patrick White, vice president of Families of Flight 93, denied it:
Rawls’ claims are untrue and “preposterous,” according to Patrick White, Families of Flight 93 vice president. “We went through in detail all his original claims and came away with nothing.”
In fact, Patrick White is fully aware of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. At the Memorial Project’s public meeting in July he argued that the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”
Joanne Hanley has done the same:
“Alec Rawls bases all of his conclusions on faulty assumptions,” said Joanne Hanley, the superintendent of the Flight 93 National Memorial. “In addition, the facts are twisted and people are misquoted, all to serve his intended purpose.”
But she too has admitted the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, telling Mr. Rawls in a 2006 conference call that she wasn’t concerned about the almost-exact Mecca orientation of the crescent because: “It isn’t exact. That’s one we talked about. It has to be exact.” (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, page 145.)
These are your subordinates Mr. Kempthorne. Please do not let them get away with this fraud. Congressman Tancredo is demanding answers from Director Bomar and many of us are hoping that you will do the same. There is not much time. Construction on Paul Murdoch’s terrorist memorial mosque is about to begin.
Sincerely,
[Your name]
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