Sarah Palin Dares Kathy Griffin To Go Toe 2 Toe

The smart money's on the moose hunter, kids,...

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Is It Safe Yet To Say, "You Should All Shut Up?"

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Jon's reference to cultural currents influencing suicide is apt, considering he's discussing "Dancing With The Stars", though we think it would've been even more helpful if he had spoken up when the national conversation was specifically about what might be tormenting the lives of gay teens.

DWTS oughtta be a no-brainer.

According To The French All Of This Is "Normal" - Not "Selfish" - But The Height Of "Sophistication"

"The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.

Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.

He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Dr Hughes’s death adds a further tragic chapter to a family history that has been raked over with morbid fascination for two generations.

Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In 1969 he suffered another terrible loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.

Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.”

Her turbulent marriage to Hughes became a modern myth, from their first meeting at Cambridge where he kissed the young American Fulbright scholar “bang smash on the mouth” and she bit his cheek so hard that it bled, through the whirlwind secret wedding all the way to its catastrophic ending.

Plath’s suicide in effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door.

Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers.

Dr Hughes’s parents split up before he was 1, his father leaving Plath for Assia Wevill, the exotic wife of another poet. The winter that followed was unrelentingly harsh. Struggling to get by on very little money as a single parent with two young children, Plath’s fragile mental state collapsed. She wrote many of her finest poems in a final burst of creativity and killed herself early one February morning.

Six years later Wevill, who had lived with Hughes and the children for much of the intervening period, also gassed herself. It was March 23, 1969 – 40 years ago today – and her death differed from Plath’s in one appalling respect: she had murdered four-year-old Shura in the process."

-- Ben Hoyle, telling one more of those stories that make it easy to despise humanity, in The Times Online.

Ashley Judd Is An Animal Rights Butt-Monkey

From Michele Malkin:

"You have no doubt read about the grisly botched abortion case in Florida where the intended murder victim was born alive, then left in a trash can to die. The details of the story involve senseless savagery. The mother’s lawsuit says the clinic staff knocked the 23-week-old baby 'off the recliner chair where she had given birth, onto the floor. The baby’s umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag and threw it out.' The mother is horrified and deeply regrets the abortion; her lawyer said: 'She came face to face with a human being And that changed everything.'

You won’t see pro-choice extremist Ashley Judd appearing in ads condemning such barbarism and speaking up on behalf of women suffering post-abortion trauma. You will, however, see her in those new animal-rights ads condemning the “senseless savagery” of predator control in Alaska."

We will never understand the berserk liberal mind, or how they keep their heads from exploding from all of the cognitive dissonance.

Apparently, we can’t expect the berserker Judd to think about her priorities related to “senseless savagery”, after all

She’s real busy lately.

There's No Excuse

"A small group of women and children were in the Wasilla Bible Church doing crafts when the blaze was set at the building's entrance."

-- Celeste Katz, on the dastardly deed done to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's church, in The Daily News.

Greens: So Damned Stupid They're Dangerous

"It is the same every time the price of oil rises. Television news editors send camera crews off to garner driver rage at the pumps. Green activists rant about capitalist fat cats. Government ministers - convenient amnesiacs when it comes to who takes almost 70 pence in the pound at the pumps - make dark mutterings about windfall taxes. All because of the erroneous belief the oil companies need 'reining in'.

But anyone with an understanding of basic supply and demand economics knows well enough that Big Oil is not the big player in the energy market. More often than not the oil majors are just as helpless in the face of global market forces as any other consumer.

But who said the oil was running out? The truth is that potentially massive reserves, literally trillions of barrels of oil, are lying around waiting to be tapped.

Russia's flag-planting PR stunt on the Arctic seabed last year was not about some new-found concern to protect the environment - it was about oil. Then there's the vast potential in Alaska and generally off the Americas. That's before we get to the prospect of extracting the black stuff from enormous reserves of Canadian oil sands.

This is where Big Oil's profits do have an upside. They make all of these previously non-viable hydrocarbon reserves - at least another 200-300 years' worth - a far more viable proposition.

If governments decide to plunder these profits through windfall taxes, we all lose. After all, it is pension funds and stockholder investment portfolios that 'own' Big Oil. We cannot possibly expect the oil companies to pay stockholder dividends, swell our personal pension funds and re-invest in the improved technology needed to tap these new reserves if they are artificially over-taxed.

So is the $200-plus barrel inevitable? Possibly. But the reality is that we in the West are far from helpless, unless we choose to be. An energy fix would undoubtedly take time and involve not a little pain. But, first, we should let Big Oil make its mega-bucks, re-invest in new drilling techniques and pursue formerly difficult-to-extract oil reserves.

Second, we should stop worrying quite so much about the habitat of the lesser-spotted Greenback and start drilling off Greenland, the Antarctic, Alaska and the US coast where massive reserves undoubtedly exist. Nature's Greenback will do what it has always done: adapt, moving elsewhere until the derricks are dismantled.

Third, we should turn to the world's vast natural gas reserves and, with coal-fired (Europe and America are awash with the cheap stuff) and nuclear power, let them take more of the energy strain. Opec would soon get the message and increase capacity."

-- Peter Glover, speaking common sense - and stating the (non-green) obvious - for The First Post Daily

I'm telling you, people: you get too carried away, with those goodie-goodie green dreams, when you're only hurting your silly selves,...