Posts from ‘News’
Alexander Haig died today at the age of 85. He had a remarkable military career as a four-star general, Supreme Allied Commander, and Vice Chief of Staff of the Army. His career was puncuated by many commendations and awards for bravery and valor, including the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star with oak leaf cluster. After his many years in the military, he served as Chief of Staff for both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan. More from Fox News:
Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who served Republican presidents and ran for the office himself, has died.
Haig died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from complications associated with an infection, his family said. He was 85.
The four-star general served as a top adviser to three presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own. President Richard Nixon appointed him White House chief of staff in 1973. In that role, Haig helped the president prepare his impeachment defense and handled many of the day-to-day decisions normally made by the chief executive.
In later years, Haig spoke of Nixon in cautious terms.
“I found with President Nixon — and I’m sure there are similarities today — that these are very political beings,” he told Fox News in 1998. “They wouldn’t be in that office if they weren’t politically astute.”
Haig later served as secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan.
The Boston Globe has an article with a lot of very interesting and lesser known information. Here’s a portion:
Alexander M. Haig Jr., who as secretary of state declared “I’m in control here” when Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, and as White House chief of staff seven years earlier was so much in control as to be effectively running the government during the final days of the Nixon administration, died today of complications from an infection, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was surrounded by his family, according to two of his children, Alexander and Barbara.
A hospital spokesman, Gary Stephenson, said Haig died at about 1:30 a.m. He was 85.
President Barack Obama praised Haig as a public servant who “exemplified our finest warrior-diplomat tradition of those who dedicate their lives to public service.”
“I think of him as a patriot’s patriot,” said George P. Shultz, who succeeded Haig as the country’s top diplomat in 1982. “No matter how you sliced him it came out red, white and blue. He was always willing to serve.”
Richard Nixon once described General Haig as “the meanest, toughest, most ambitious s.o.b.” he’d ever known. Nixon, who was instrumental in Reagan’s appointing General Haig secretary of state, meant it as a compliment.
In the restrained, deliberate world of international diplomacy, General Haig stood out dramatically. His blend of forcefulness and volatility inspired both respect and wariness. So aggressive was his demeanor that Reagan administration rivals dubbed General Haig “CinCWorld” (for “commander in chief, world”).
The nickname punned on CinCEur, which had been General Haig’s designation as commander in chief of US forces in Europe, a position he held from 1974 to 1979.
General Haig’s rise to that position had contributed to his controversial image. Thanks to the sponsorship of Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whom he had served as deputy national security adviser, he rose from colonel, in 1969, to four-star general, in 1973. “Four stars in four years,” his biographer Roger Morris termed it, “promotions comparable only to Dwight Eisenhower’s in the tumult of World War II.”
Although General Haig saw combat in two wars and earned several medals for valor, so rapid an ascent fostered the belief he was a “political general” who owed his rank to the favor of civilian superiors. General Haig’s tenure as White House chief of staff during the final 16 months of the Nixon presidency did nothing to dispel that notion. Further underscoring his political reputation was his flirtation with running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 and his actively seeking it in 1988. (He withdrew after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucuses.)
General Haig’s interest in politics did not extend to oratory. The Washington Post’s George F. Will called him as “an aerobic instructor for the English language, making it twist and stretch.” His instructions took the form of “Haigspeak,” which uniquely combined periphrasis, convolution, and bureaucratese, with a healthy salting of neologisms. “Caveat” was a verb in Haigspeak, and “epistemologicallywise” an adverb.
Rest in peace, General Haig.
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I was out all day driving my kids to various doctor and therapy appointments when I heard about the wacko who penned a six page suicide note, torched his house, and flew a plane into an Austin, Texas building that housed an IRS office. I read part of the suicide note on The Smoking Gun and it was a laundry list of grievances about everyone and everything, from GM execs, to the American health care industry, the Catholic church, organized religion as a whole, the late Daniel Patrick Moynahan, the American public, and the list goes on and on. It seems some people are trying to pin this on the Tea Partiers, but it is pretty clear to me from just a cursory review of his letter that he was not a Tea Partier by any stretch. I don’t think he was a leftist, either. Rather, he seemed like a paranoid loner who had some serious mental issues that he was incapable of dealing with.
Tiger Woods is a freak. The rate at which he cheated on his wife is so monstrous that it is pathological. Not only did he cheat on her with women in Las Vegas and New York, but he had sex with a porn star and we learned yesterday that he had an affair with a waitress at the Perkins restaurant he and his wife took their kids to eat. I am not kidding. He was out schooling for women to score when he was having breakfast with his family. What will come out next, that he picked up the girl behind the counter at his local BP station?
It’s obvious the man does not have a conscience. He wanted sex and didn’t care about how his behavior would devastate his wife and kids. His wife was smart to move out. I can’t imagine there would be any amount of money in the world that would make her to stay in her marriage with him.
And let’s not forget something here. All these women were just from the states. He did a lot of traveling all over the world for tournaments, so I would not be surprised one bit if we learn at some point that there are other women in all corners of world who have had affairs with him.
As for all those companies who have endorsed Woods, they would be smart to drop him. He’s a soulless freak and the last thing they need is a soulless freak pedaling their products.
Michael Daly at the New York Daily News weighs in as well.
Update: Eugene Robinson has a column in which he expresses his outrage, not at the fact that Woods is a soulless, philandering freak, but that he only screwed beautiful, busty white women.
Ace has the best take as far as I’m concerned:
I can’t believe this nonsense. It’s now come to the point where there’s a quota system for your skankwhores and pincushions. It’s not that you violated your marital vows with so many women, Tiger: It’s that you failed to implement a trained Diversity Outreach manager to select your nightcrawling guttertrollops and ensure you were drawing from a racially-conscious pool of talent.
Update II: All Tiger Woods advertisements have been pulled from prime time television. That’s fine with me. I don’t have any interest in seeing his face. I hope his sponsors drop him. I emailed Gatorade and told them I won’t purchase their products as long as they continue to sponsor and partner with him.
Traverse City isn’t a big city, so the turn out wasn’t like that in OKC, which Michael wrote about below. But I was thrilled with the several hundred people who came out to protest big government spending, regulation, and taxes among other issues. It was a beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and it was about 53 degrees. And the location was simply gorgeous. We were at the corner of Grandview Avenue and Union Street, with the Grand Traverse Bay behind us. It was a very busy intersection with cars passing both ways honking their horns enthusiastically in support. It was a great experience.
I interviewed a few people who attended. I’m uploading the videos now and will post them later tonight.
In the mean time, here are some photos.
Jeanine and Kathy
Of course, my three babies.
Last year, the Canadian Human Rights Council, a inappropriately named group, put commentator Mark Steyn on trial for what it called Flagrant Islamophobia because of his book America Alone. It was a shocking attempt to police the thougths and speech through intimidation and persecution. Steyn ultimately won out and was acquitted, but the fog of political correctness gone wild still hangs in the air above Canada.
Now, we have a Quebec judge who undermined a father’s parental rights over his daughter. It’s amazing that this was even heard in court to begin with, but this judge overstepped his bounds by about a light year and told the father he could not discipline his daughter in the manner he saw appropriate:
A Quebec father who was taken to court by his 12-year-old daughter after he grounded her in June 2008 has lost his appeal.
Quebec Superior Court rejected the Gatineau father’s appeal of a lower court ruling that said his punishment was too severe for the wrongs he said his daughter committed.
The father is “flabbergasted,” his lawyer Kim Beaudoin told CBC News.
In its ruling, issued Monday, the province’s court of appeal declared the girl was caught up in a “very rare” set of circumstances, and her father didn’t have sufficient grounds to contest the court’s earlier decision.
The family’s legal wrangling started with a dispute over the girl’s internet use.
She had been living with her father after her parents split up when he grounded her in 2008 for defying his order to stay off the internet. The father caught her chatting on websites he had blocked, and alleged his daughter was posting “inappropriate pictures” of herself online.
Her punishment: she was banned from her Grade 6 graduation trip to Quebec City in June 2008, for which her mother had already granted permission.
The father — who had custody — withheld his written permission for the trip, prompting the school to refuse to let the girl go with her classmates.
That’s when the girl asked for help from the lawyer who represented her in her parents’ separation, and petitioned the court to intervene in her case.
The judge sided with the daughter and said the father – the father – overstepped his boundaries by grounding her, so the judge allowed the girl to go on her trip.
Can you believe that?! A judge told this father he had no right to ground his own daughter. Of course, this father has absolutely no authority in this girl’s life anymore because no matter what he may try to do to discipline her, she can just sue him and have his punishment overturned.
“Either way, he doesn’t have authority over this child anymore. She sued him because she doesn’t respect his rules,” Beaudoin said. “It’s very hard to raise a child who is the boss.”
The girl — who now lives with her mother — doesn’t have much of a relationship with her dad now, Beaudoin said.
“We went from a child who wanted to live with her father, and after all this has been done, they’re not speaking anymore.”
“We have a lot of work to re-establish a link between those two.”
Beaudoin believes the ruling reflects a loss of moral authority in Quebec’s court system.
In Quebec’s court system? No. This reflects a loss of moral authority in Canada’s parents, who no longer have any.
“Is this what we want in our society? Laws are supposed to reflect our values. And if the courts aren’t reflecting that, maybe the government will, to prevent children from going this way,” she said Tuesday, adding her client may take the case to Canada’s Supreme Court.
In its Monday ruling, the appeal court warned the case should not be seen as an open invitation for children to take legal action every time they’re grounded.
Good luck with that, buddy. This judge just opened a legal Pandora’s box that tells kids they can shirk their parents’ rules and take them to court. And there’s another issue here: where was the mother in all this? If she had any integrity at all, she should have sided with the father for two reasons: 1) out of principle, and 2) to protect her own parental rights because hers have been eroded right along with her ex-husband’s. One precedent has been set, so when the mom disciplines the daughter in a way that the daughter doesn’t like, she’ll be taken to court, too. Since the report doesn’t say the mother stood with the father, I’m going assume she sided with the daughter.
This father had better appeal this to Canada’s Supreme Court and have it – hopefully – overturned in order to protect all parents’ rights in Canada.
John J. Miller, a former Michigander writing at The Corner, points me to this story about a Troy, Michigan judge who dismissed a case against a drunk driver:
In a very rare move, the city of Troy is appealing a district judge’s decision to dismiss a drunken driving case last month because it was based on observations of another motorist, rather than the officer who finally stopped the suspected driver.
Troy police stopped the car, a Chevrolet Lumina, in a subdivision off Rochester Road about 1:30 a.m. Nov. 11 after a motorist used a cell phone to report the Lumina had been weaving. According to court records, a 38-year-old Sterling Heights driver was arrested for operating a vehicle while intoxicated. He recorded a 0.10 blood alcohol level on a breathalyzer test — higher than the 0.08 in which a motorist is deemed too intoxicated to drive in Michigan.
But Troy District Judge William E. Bolle dismissed the case during his first court appearance on Feb. 24.
“…You can’t just assume that a cell phone caller is reliable, many times they are,” Bolle said, according to a court transcript. “I’ve had occasions where they were not. I’ve had occasions where they’re a spiteful person that’s called the police and made allegations that in fact were not really true.”
A transcript of the dispatch tape records the caller’s description of the weaving driver.
“I have a car in front of me driving erratically … oh my God,” the caller said.
“Yeah, you got to send somebody out here for sure. He’s all over the road.”
This is a probable cause issue. When an officer pulls over a car, he must have witnessed something that caused him to do so, whether it was the driver was speeding, weaving, or had a broken tail light. We’ll have to wait for the appeal to see what happens here.
CNN has compiled several videos that captured US Air flight 1549 as it was being set down on the Hudson River by Captain Chesley Sullenberger. Watching it confirms what so many witnesses said, which was that the descent and landing were so perfect that if you couldn’t see the river, you would have thought the plane was landing on a runway. No matter how many times I watch this video, I’m still in awe of Sully’s skill and bravery.
About me
I am a conservative. I believe in the greatness of America. I also believe that she is this world's last best hope for freedom, liberty, individualism, and self-reliance.
