Nashville, Tennessee’s Bill Hobbs, the Volunteer State’s second best known conservative blogger, lost his job at Belmont University for publishing a cartoon featuring Mohammed, alluding to the Danish cartoons which have created an international uproar.

In February, no doubt at the time Islamic mobs were setting fire to embassies over those cartoons, about the same time I got mad and put up a link to Gustave Doré’s illustration of Mohammed in Hell (see Danish cartoons button in the right column), Bill Hobbs decided to follow Jyllands-Posten’s example and invited readers to “Exercise your right to free expression by drawing cartoons of Islam’s ‘Prophet Mohammed,’ before the West gives in to Islamist intimidation and fear of Islamist violence and makes it illegal to do so.” He provided an inspirational tongue-in-cheek example: a stick figure Mohammed holding a bomb, deliberately captioned in childish letters: “Mohammed Blows.”

Hobbs had a vulnerability, however. He was prominently involved in supporting Republican State Senator Jim Bryson‘s gubernatorial capaign, and had created a Bryson for Governor blog. Democrat blogger Mike Kopp saw a way to bash Bryson by going after Hobbs, so last Wednesday, he posted this:

I’ve know Hobbs for many years and while we never see eye to eye on the issues, I’ve generally found him to be fairly reasonable to deal with.

But Hobbs has shown me a darker side to his mind with his insensitive, moronic site.

I have no quarrel with a person’s right to free speech, but as a Christian I believe this kind of expression goes against all the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

This prompts me to want to ask candidate “man of faith” Jim Bryson if he condones this kind of distasteful insensitivity to people of other faiths; and it also prompts me to want to contact Bob Fisher, the president of Belmont University, to inquire if he too believes this kind of expression is in line with the University’s mission to promote and uphold Christian values.

If Jim Bryson wants to continue to use Hobbs and his blog followers to spread his message, so be it. But if he does, he better be prepared to deal with the political consequences.

And, you know how it works, if a city has colleges, it has commies, and free alternative leftwing weekly papers aimed at young people, featuring the good restaurant and music scene reviews. The Nashville Scene (naturally) has one of those loudmouth leftie political columnists, a jerk named John Spragins, who two days ago decided to pile on, too, climbing atop his portable pulpit, and advising readers loudly that he was holier than Hobbs:

First, let’s sort some things out. For starters, Hobbs has the right to free speech, and Kopp has the right to hold him accountable for that speech. (For that matter, so do Belmont, Bryson and the Nashville Scene.) Hobbs’ stated point—that the media shouldn’t be intimidated into self-censorship by angry mobs of Muslims—is fairly non-controversial. Even those who chose not to publish the original cartoons would agree that violence is an illegitimate means of political expression.

But by deliberately desecrating Islam’s central figure—“the ‘Prophet Mohammed’ ” as Hobbs sneered, using quote marks for sardonic emphasis—he attacked an entire religion, not a group of fanatics who pervert the religion’s teachings. Then he drew him as a bearded stick figure holding a bomb and said he “blows.” It seems bearded Muslim terrorists are the new big-nosed, money-grubbing Jews. The more things change….

Clearly, not much that’s really interesting happens in Nashville, Tennessee.

Roger A. knows all the principals and seems shocked and awed by the job the lefties did on Bill Hobbs.

HJ mourns.

Glenn Reynolds sounds disgusted.

Michelle Malkin thinks the whole thing is “Horrible.”

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UPDATE

Riehl World View looks at John Spraggins, and finds he is not exactly Mr. Clean on the decorum and civiity front himself. Riehl also identifies exactly where Mike Kopp is coming from:

It should be noted that the individual who first posted on the cartoon in a negative manner, the post that Spragens linked, Mike Kopp, apparently owns the domain for an individual once encouraged to run in the same race as the candidate Hobbs was working for. Quite a coincidence, that. Kopp is a former Gore press secretary and has a long history of work for the Democrat Party.

But first, I’d like to point out that harwellforgovernor.com was registered on September 23, 2005, by Mike Kopp of Nashville, and the domain is reserved for one year from that date. According to a Google search,…

The moral, folks, is that leftist democrat hypocrisy works like a charm on cowardly and conformist university administrators.

Gaius Arbo thinks plain envy was at work here.
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FURTHER UPDATE

Knoxville News Sentinel’s Michael Silence observes that Mike Kopp is being kept busy deleting comments to his blog.

JB comments on Mike Kopp’s “I did it for the children!” post last Friday:

On Friday afternoon, after news had broke that Hobbs would be resigning from Belmont, Kopp broke his silence on the controversial events of the day (note the number of deleted comments):

As I pulled into my multi-racial, multi-cultural subdivision in West Nashville, I drove past a small group of children whom I know to be members of several Muslim neighborhood families playing in a yard up the street from my home. One of the children, a young girl, waved at me and smiled. In an instant it became clear to me why I had written as I did about the blog Mohammed Cartoons.

I called the Tennessean reporter to tell her that had I not pointed out the insensitivity of the blog, I would have had trouble facing my neighbors; the children and their parents who walk our sidewalks each day and call out in friendship at every opportunity. “Shame on me,” I told the reporter, “if I hadn’t taken a stand on this matter.”

Geez, what a hack! Kopp found an offensive cartoon that had never been publicized or viewed, took it out of context and ensured that it was published in the Nashville Scene for anyone to see and has the audacity to claim he “did it for the children!” Any reasonable person can see Kopp’s handiwork for exactly what it is. It was a political hit job designed to hurt Jim Bryson and put a popular conservative blogger in his place.

Phil Bredesen should be mindful of the kind of people he pays to represent his campaign and the tactics they use. Mike Kopp’s disgraceful smear has solidified the support of many Republicans – who were on the fence about Bredesen – behind the candidacy of Jim Bryson. Thanks Kopp.

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FOLLOW-UP

A three judge panel of California’s “Ninth Circus,” as Rush Limbaugh likes to call the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, has preposterously decided that the enforcement by the City of Los Angeles of a municipal ordinance, which states that “no person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or public way,” violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and punishment by criminalizing “the status of homelessness by making it a crime to be homeless.”

Clinton appointee Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote in her decision:

(this) case stands for “the proposition that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the state from punishing an involuntary act or condition if it is the unavoidable consequence of one’s status or being.”

Wardlaw scoffed at the position Los Angeles officials took in the case.

“The City…apparently believes that [the plaintiffs] can avoid sitting, lying and sleeping for days, weeks, or months at a time to comply with the City’s ordinance, as if human beings could remain in perpetual motion. That being an impossibility, by criminalizing, sitting lying, and sleeping, the City is in fact criminalizing [the plaintiffs] status as homeless individuals.”

The judge said that evidence introduced in the case, entitled Edward Jones v. City of Los Angeles, showed the plaintiffs “are not on the streets of Skid Row by informed choice.”

The notion that the framers intended to ban municipal prohibitions against public dormition (or vagrancy) as “cruel or unusual” is patently ridiculous. Sturdy beggars were publicly flogged for idleness in most states at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

Even farther-fetched is Judge Wardlaw’s notion of non-volition. If an individual ceases attempting to lead a responsible life, declines employment, and chooses to devote his waking hours to the cheapest possible forms of drug or alcohol-induced intoxication, funded by crime or begging, and neglects to make provision for his own shelter, he didn’t have a choice? When exactly was it that choice vanished?

One of the most apt commentaries on Judge Wardlaw’s absurdly indulgent philosophy can be found in Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M.

In M, the crimes of a child-murderer have paralysed both ordinary life and criminal activity in Berlin, as the police furiously search for the pedophile serial killer. The criminal underworld decides to take matters into its own hands, in order to remove the extraordinary police surveillance and get back to normal profitable business. Finally, Hans Beckert (played by the young Peter Lorre), the murderer of small children, is trapped by the criminals in a basement, and hailed before an informal underworld tribunal, which has every intention of ordering his immediate extermination.

“Ich kann nicht anders,” (I cannot do otherwise) Lorre screams pathetically, pleading for mercy (which is not forthcoming).

(Ironically, Beckert is quoting Martin Luther‘s response, April 1, 1521, to the efforts of the Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms to persuade him to reconcile with the Catholic Church, and avoid dividing the Christian Church.)

Liberals, like Judge Wardlaw, confuse the existence of the involuntary impulses with having no choice about complying. Lots of people, probably almost everyone, feels an inclination to behave completely irresponsibly, in a fashion which could –in the end– lead to a life spent sipping Thunderbird in the gutter, and panhandling for quarters, but not everyone gives way to that particular impulse. I daresay there must be in the world people who feel sexual temptations involving children, who don’t choose to implement them, as well. It is difficult to see how one can excuse Willie the Wino for having no choice (Ich kann nicht anders!), and not excuse Hans Beckert and Ted Bundy too.

From David Corn:

My office is a block from the U.S. Capitol…

..Yesterday, the transcript of the final thirty-one minutes and sixteen seconds of Flight 93 was released. This was the fourth plane, the one apparently heading toward Washington, perhaps to attack the White House, perhaps to strike the Capitol. (Several experts seem to think the Capitol was the primary target of the Flight 93 hijackers. Perched on a hill, it certainly would be an easier target to hit than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.) As I read the transcript, my eyes filled with tears. The heroic actions of Flight 93 passengers become rather visceral when you read–and mentally hear–their words and those of the al Qaeda hijackers. It remains unclear whether the passengers made it into the cockpit or were about to break in before the hijackers decided to roll the aircraft and crash it into a field in Pennsylvania. But there’s no doubt that the passengers did force this action and thwarted whatever attack the hijackers had in mind.

All of us who work on Capitol Hill–in the Capitol or not–owe these passengers our profound gratitude. Having heard about the attacks in New York, they decided to take action. They probably realized that the lives were already lost, but they would go out fighting–to save others. They were not soldiers, not cops, not professionals paid every day to risk their lives to help someone else. They were just folks on a plane, brought together only by their travel plans.

I thank them and their families and friends (anyone who had taught or inspired them to do what was right and courageous). I will keep their actions always in mind.

The fullest version I’ve found appears on the second and third pages of the Globe and Mail article.

I don’t actually watch South Park, but the big story today was about a poke the South Park show’s writers took at their own network for forbidding the cartoon program’s displaying an image of Mohammed.

video

There is some debate on whether or not this story may be a spoof.

Why should I do all all the work of writing this up, and attaching all the links to the major bogs covering all this, when Pajama Media‘s editor in Sydney already did?

William Sloane Coffin Jr. was born in 1924 in New York City to a wealthy and prominent family. His great grandfather founded the prestigious W.& J. Sloane and Company department store in 1843. His father and grandfather attended Yale, where both were members of the illustrious Skull and Bones senior society.

Coffin attended the Buckley School in New York, Deerfield Academy and Andover, and Yale. His undergraduate education was interrupted by the draft in 1943. In the Army, he did not seek out combat assignments, but instead won admission to OCS, and trained as an interpreter. His most notable contribution to the war effort consisted of successfully sending some 1500 Russian prisoners of war back to death or prison in the Soviet Union. For which feat, he received the Army Commendation medal and a promotion.

He returned to Yale as a member of the graduating class of 1949. In accordance with family tradition, he was tapped for Bones. He wrote a senior paper revealingly titled: Notes Towards a History of Bolshevik Trade Unionism. In 1949, he entered Union Theological Seminary, then headed by his uncle, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, also a Yale graduate and Bonesman.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 prompted Coffin to leave the seminary to serve as an Operations Officer with the CIA. Coffin was assigned to recruiting agents from refugee camps for covert entry into the Soviet Union. His first two groups of agents simply disappeared. Pravda ran a front page cover story detailing the capture of Coffin’s third and largest group of agents.

In 1953, Coffin left the CIA and returned to the seminary, this time, however, attending Yale Divinity School. He became famous as a Divinity Student for dashingly riding a BMW motorcycle, and for regaling fellow students with tales of war-time derring-do (stories of parachute drops behind enemy lines and secret missions), and for singing Russian songs.

In 1956, he married Eva Rubinstein, daughter of the famous Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein. They separated in 1968, and he married again later twice.

In 1956, he also accepted the position of chaplain at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He moved on to Williams College after one year, where he made a reputation as a radical by attacking fraternities for a dearth of minority admissions. In February 1958, he was finally offered “the only job (he) really wanted:” the chaplaincy at Yale.

Coffin brought the ideal combination of personal assets to the Yale Chaplain’s position: an impeccable blue-blood background (featuring deep Yale roots), and superior intelligence, combined with energy, charisma and dramatic flair. William Sloane Coffin could actually attract an audience to college chapel for the pleasure of watching him perform. A Coffin sermon would reliably be original, timely, and delivered with both humor and emotional depth.

Coffin’s career as chaplain coincided with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and he quickly found that Civil Rights presented the perfect opportunity to utilize the message of Christianity to attack the existing order of Society from an unanswerable moral high ground. Predictably, elderly and sclerotic alumni demanded his dismissal, and equally predictably the Yale Establishment chose to view him as an invaluable asset: a brave, eloquent, and original in-house conscience.

The US War in Vietnam emerged in the mid-1960s as the pre-eminent leftist cause, and Coffin was among the earliest of Establishment luminaries to oppose the war. He joined the opposition’s ranks in the Summer of 1965. In addition to organizing protests, signing petitions, and servng on committees of opposition, Coffin employed his position as Chaplain of Yale University with tremendous skill in service to the cause.

Yale undergraduates inevitably experienced a certain moral discomfort, protected by student deferments and able to enjoy the all-too numerous pleasures of Ivy League Unversity life, with the knowledge that others of their own generation were being drafted to fight, and sometimes die, in their stead. It was naturally, therefore, highly agreeable to Yale undergraduates of those 1960s to be assured in the stentorian baritone voice of authority of their admired chaplain that the war was wrong, they were not only justified in avoiding serving, they were far, far morally superior to those who did!

Coffin used every means to indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates, starting (even prior to the beginning of Freshman year) at a Summer Retreat held for the benefit of religiously conscientous Protestant students, which he turned into an indoctrination seminar through which the youthful admirer of Reinhold Nieburh from the hinterlands was commonly transformed into Lenin’s useful idiot.

Doonesbury ©1972 G.B. Trudeau

The Anti-War Protest Movement made William Sloane Coffin a national figure. In 1968, along with Benjamin Spock, he was one of the “Boston Five,” indicted for conspiracy to violate the Selective Service laws (by public advocacy of resistance and evasion). The government ultimately dropped the case.

He was prominent in the 1970 protests opposing the trial in New Haven of several members of the Black Panthers for the torture-murder of Alex Rackeley, erroneously believed by his tormentors to have been a police informer. Coffin proclaimed in a sermon: “I am prepared as an anguished citizen to to confess my conviction that it might be legally right but morally wrong for this trial to go forward.”

In 1972, Coffin went to Hanoi to “accept” the release of three America POWs as part of a major North Vietnamese propaganda operation. He repeated the same kind of stunt in 1979 by accepting the invitation of the Iranian government to celebrate Christmas with the American hostages in Teheran.

But as the 1970s advanced, with the Vietnam War and the Protest Movement winding down, Nixon in the White House, and the old Yale passing away as the result of the impact of coeducation, Coffin experienced increasing problems in his personal life. He took a year’s sabbatical from Yale in 1973, hoping to write his memoirs and save his second marriage. The effort failed. In November 1974, he inflicted a hairline skull fracture on his second wife. He had begun to beat her when they quarreled.

In January, he informed President Brewster that he would not be seeking another five year extension of his contract as Yale’s chaplain.

His career seemed at an end. He moved in with Arthur Miller for six months, and finally took refuge in a barn at his brother’s house in Vermont. He began keeping company with the female manager of the local general store, whom he eventually married seven years later. In 1977, however, he was called to the pulpit of Riverside Church on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side.

The Riverside appointment allowed Coffin to enjoy again a comfortable position of suitable social importance which he could also use as a base for political activism. He stepped down in 1987 (after a confrontation with a prominent Black minister over the church’s position on homosexuality) to accept the presidency of SANE/Freeze, the well-known Soviet front organization. He retired circa 1990.

He died yesterday at his home in Stratford, Vermont, at the age of 81, of congestive heart failure.

His talents were as great as his views were unsound. William Sloane Coffin undoubtedly contributed as much as any other single individual to the conversion of the American community of fashion to political Radicalism. I strongly suspect that he was a knowing and conscious Soviet Agent of Influence.

Nearly a hundred million people in Southeast Asia today live under despotism and in poverty, and 58 thousand Americans died in vain, because William Sloane Coffin (and a small group of allies) succeeded in changing the opinions of the majority of Yalemen, and the majority of Americans, in a few short years in the late 1960s.

Associated Press

I think there are several very obvious ways.

MIT Climate Scientist Richard Lindzen, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses one of the ways you can tell: by the ongoing pattern of intimidation of dissenters and stifling of debate associated with Global Warming in the scientific community.

If it wasn’t bunk, they wouldn’t have to punish dissent and censor debate, would they? If they weren’t liars and opportunists, they wouldn’t act with the ruthlessness and dishonesty which have become characteristic features of Global Warming orthodoxy enforcement.

A “for instance” seems obligatory, so I’ll just point to Scientific American‘s threatening to sue Björn Lomborg for daring to quote the special hatchet job they published on his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in a web-published reply to their attack.

Mark Steyn contemplates the necessity for facing down Iran:

A big chunk of Western civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it’s dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, Islam figures: Hey, why not us? If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.

Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz in New Republic has a provocative essay on the history of privacy (both that private citizens and that of government), attitudes of the left and right toward both, and considers the contemporary impact and proper limits of the right to privacy of the individual and exposure to public scrutiny of government operations.

A bullet is fired from a pistol in a rest directly at the edge of a shinsakuto, a newly made samurai sword. There is a winner. video

History has not treated the Green Mountain State very kindly.

In the 19th century, freedom-loving Vermonters flocked to fight against Slavery in the War Between the States in such numbers, and fought so bravely, that the state’s population was significantly reduced. Previously an industrial power, Vermont entered into a period of long decline, ultimately becoming a quaint backwater, a kind of reservation of old-fashioned Yankee culture.

The rise of Environmentalism and the Counterculture in the last century, brought even worse disaster to Vermont, in the form of an invasion: an invasion of goat-milking hippies, trust-fund revolutionaries, and back-to-the-land tree huggers, who arrived in numbers adequate to transform the Granite state’s ethos from the rock-ribbed Republican spirit of self reliance formerly epitomized by Calvin Coolidge into the rich guy Bolshevism represented by Ben & Jerry.

Today scrofulous beatniks misuse the traditional Vermont town meeting to make pretentious political statements and strike leftist poses. The latest fad is for Vermont town meetings, as in Newfane voting under the leadership of some pony-tailed musician-cum-antiques-restorer, to call for President Bush’s impeachment.

It’s not only in town meetings trying to set national policy though that Vermont feels the impact of the invasion of the crunchies. The leftist flatlanders brought their own big spending approach to local politics along as well. These days Vermont ranks right at the top nationally in per capita taxation.

Ethan Allen must be spinning in his grave.

Quick! Call the ACLU, alert the editorial page crusaders, and queue up Warren Zevon’s Poor, Poor Pitiful Me on the stereo. My civil rights have been violated.

A book I ordered from a store in France arrived yesterday in an impressive purple-ziplocked baggie, bearing abundant evidence of official scrutiny.

You or I could probably tell that a padded envelope contained a paperback book just by feeling it, but the government needed to X-ray it.

This terrrible intrusion on my privacy struck me as very similar to having one’s emails data-mined. The government is applying a cumbersome, and rather clumsy, kind of mechanical mass processing in an effort to find the small threatening needle in the vast haystack of American international communications.

Since I’m not actually trying to exchange signals with al Qaeda or import botulism toxin, I and my French book are nothing more than background static to the people conducting those searches.

The reality is: they’d have to have enough of an actual interest in you to focus some real attention on you, before they could violate your privacy. X-raying packages, like data-mining emails, is meaningless to you, unless you actually are one of the real objects of all the searching.