First Door on the Left

Dr. Laura son linked to lurid Web page

The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”

The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.

The site is credited to and includes many photographs of Deryk Schlessinger, the 21-year-old son of the talk radio personality known simply as Dr. Laura…

“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”

Deryk Schlessinger joined the Army in 2004, telling a crowd of Santa Barbara, Calif., Army reservists gathered for an appearance by his mother that he resented the way Americans criticize the war without recognizing soldiers’ sacrifices.

“Real people were fighting, and I wanted to be part of that,” the younger Schlessinger said, according to The Associated Press.

Here’s a stirring image of young Mr. Schlessinger taking the oath back in 2004…

Where did we go wrong?
 

Jerry Falwell was greeted by 72 virgins died today.

In other news, the Ronald Reagan Impersonators will “debate” again tonight.

I do not understand what is going on in our schools these days. It’s almost like the teachers are trying to teach the kids about real life…

MURFREESBORO, Tennessee (AP) — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

“We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation,” he said.

But parents of the sixth-grade students were outraged.

I hope these kids didn’t learn anything… like maybe how to save their own lives if/when such an attack should really occur.

Then there’s the little girl in Chicago who was traumatized and had to have psychological counseling after she was forced to watch two men kissing in a movie. Her grandparents want a cool half million for the terrible experience they endured…

CHICAGO — A girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, alleging that a substitute teacher showed the R-rated film “Brokeback Mountain” in class.

The lawsuit claims that Jessica Turner, 12, suffered psychological distress after viewing the movie in her 8th grade class at Ashburn Community Elementary School last year.

The film, which won three Oscars, depicts two cowboys who conceal their homosexual affair.

Turner and her grandparents, Kenneth and LaVerne Richardson, are seeking around $500,000 in damages.

“It is very important to me that my children not be exposed to this,” said Kenneth Richardson, Turner’s guardian.

The poor child will likely have to be in therapy for the rest of her life. Can you not imagine the trauma she experienced? Surely that alone is enough to get her grandparents the $500,000 they so desperately want.

Real life. What a bummer, huh?

Click on any cartoon to view it full size.

Rudolph Giuliani has pounded the last nail into the coffin of what was once his candidacy for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. There is now no way in hell that the extreme right, now in control of that party, is going to grant him the nomination…

HOUSTON, May 11 – Rudolph W. Giuliani offered a direct challenge to Republican Party orthodoxy on Friday, asserting that his support for abortion rights, gun control and gay rights should not disqualify him from winning the party’s presidential nomination and that Republicans need to be tolerant of dissenting views on those issues if they want to hold the White House…

He said, as he has before, that he personally opposed abortion but believed in a woman’s right to make her own decisions; that he believes in the right to bear arms, but that as mayor of New York, he favored certain aspects of gun control; and that while he opposes gay marriage, he supports protecting gay rights, something he said he did as mayor.

A woman’s right to control her own body, gun control, equal rights for gays… the three things that right wing Republicans hate most (aside from Bill Clinton). Mr. Giuliani may as well save himself and his supporters a lot of time, money and heartache and drop out right now. He most definitely will not be the nominee of the Republicans in 2008.

(Paul at Right Side of the Rainbow disagrees. He believes that Mr. Giuliani’s “candor” will get him nominated. We shall see.)

One of these grinning fools announced his resignation today…

If only the other would take the hint.

President Bush would veto any bill drafted by House Democratic leaders that would fund the Iraq war only into summer, his spokesman said Wednesday, even as the Pentagon held out hope that troops could begin withdrawing if the Iraqi government makes progress by fall.

Once more, grace and dignity surpass ignorance and incompetence…

In a slip of the tongue, President Bush brought roars of laughter to the White House welcoming ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II.

The president stumbled on a line in his speech Monday, saying that the queen had dined with 10 U.S. presidents and had helped the United States “celebrate its bicentennial in 17. …” Bush caught himself and corrected the date to 1976. He paused as if to see if the queen had taken offense.

“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” the president said with a smile.

Bush focused his formal remarks on how the United States and Britain, allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, were standing together in the fight against terrorism. In just four minutes, he mentioned “freedom” and “liberty” seven times and he told the queen: “Your majesty, I appreciate your leadership during these times of danger and decision.”

By contrast, the queen said her fifth U.S. visit was an occasion to “step back from our current preoccupations.”

“It is a moment to take stock of our present friendship, rightly taking pleasure from its strengths while never taking these for granted,” she said. “And it is the time to look forward, jointly renewing our commitment to a more prosperous, safer and freer world.”

(P.S. A lapel pin on a formal dinner jacket? Tacky to say the least.)

(Clicking on it will make it bigger.)

During a September 13, 2001 appearance by Jerry Falwell on the Christian Broadcasting Network’s TV program “700 Club,” hosted by Pat Robertson, the following exchange occurred:

JERRY FALWELL: And, I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But, throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.”

PAT ROBERTSON: Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government. And so we’re responsible as a free society for what the top people do. And, the top people, of course, is the court system.

Does Mitt Romney also concur? Here he is kissing up to Mr. Robertson:

If there is one thing the United States does not need at this time in its history, it is another extremist president.