The rumors and misinformation about the wildfires is spreading as fast as the fires themselves.

The basic truth is that a kid with matches started at least one:

Officials: Boy With Matches Started Fire

Officials blamed a wildfire that consumed more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes last week on a boy playing with matches, and said they would ask a prosecutor to consider the case.

The boy, whose name and age were not released, admitted to sparking the fire on Oct. 21, Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Diane Hecht said Tuesday. Ferocious winds helped it quickly spread.

"He admitted to playing with matches and accidentally starting the fire," Hecht said in a statement.

The boy was released to his parents, and the case will be presented to the district attorney's office, Hecht said. It was not clear if he had been arrested or cited by detectives.

The others will likely be found to have a been either accidents or similar negligence.

But the rumour mill really loves to make hay out of this stuff. 

One email I got claimed that the fires were the work of an Anti American Illegal Immigrant rights group.  This is now being reported as a hoax, but in a area where tensions already run hi, I am not surprised to see some reactionaries on the Anti-Immigration side seize the story as a way to make their case even harsher. 

While I admit the stories that also surfaced about illegals stealing supplies from Qualcom stadium are concerning, I cannot with any degree of honesty expect that lawful citizens were all behaving perfectly, so making the case against illegal immigrants in that just proves that the Immigrants are greedy and or desperate, just like the residents. 

Personal I think the case against illegals is well made without resorting to sensationalism.

OF course in the Senate, a different theory emerged.

According To Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the culprit is (you guessed it) GLOBAL WARMING!

Wildfires get personal for lawmakers

I really get a kick out of watching this video.  KT takes the age old concept of a one man band to some great digital lengths and her energy is infectious.

Every sound except the audience clapping is her, live.  No prerecorded tracks, she does this all essentially with a single looping device.

I own a similar device and I can assure you that to get it right, stay on tempo and in key is no easy trick.  Enjoy.

Ann Coulter versus Alan Colmes on her Comments about Jews.  I post this not because Ann is a great theologian, but because Ann is a fighter.

Ann was pressed by Alan on her anti Semitic comments and he attempted to toss off a an underhanded insult about 4 minutes into this.

What I like is that Ann will have none of his condescension.  About 1 minute left in the clips she reverses the attack, and pins him to the wall.

In other words, she fought back instead of accepting the insult.

Whether she is on sound doctrinal footing or not in the classic Christian v Judaism debate is not relevant, what is relevant is that she believes what she does and defends it.

In a world where many Christians defer to political correctness and soft sell, I find anyone who stands firm somewhat invigorating.   I may not always agree with her, but I have to respect her passion.

And I wish more conservatives would take a page from her book (no pun intended) and stop making nice and fight for their beliefs.  Too often the liberals win by default when the conservatives fall back on sensibility and politeness.

Maybe that is the path of moral authority in some cases, but in others it is surrendering without a shot being fired.

Clip courtesy of Hot Air.

It is shocking but I am not shocked.  This is actually less of a surprise to me then many, as the local schools went down this road already.  I'll get right back to that.

I first noticed the story at Hot Air:

FIRE: U of Delaware student indoctrination teaches that all white people are racist

You can’t make this stuff up: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has found a program that would make the most totalitarian Communist proud of its hard left bias, its heavy handedness and gall.

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students’ rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech…

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a “diversity facilitation training” session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”  (emphasis added)

Don't worry, be happy! seems to be the message from the Georgia Bulldogs.  Via Hot Air.

Video: The Georgia Bulldogs’ “excessive celebration”

Here’s the back story: Georgia tends to lose to Florida. They hate Florida and they hate losing, and they usually get to experience both at the same time every year.

With the season more or less on the line Saturday, stoic Georgia coach Mark Richt decided to shake things up.

“I told the team two weeks ago that I was going to create enthusiasm, whether they liked it or not,” he said. “If they didn’t get a celebration penalty after our first touchdown, all of them would be doing early morning runs.”

So what did the Bulldogs do when they scored first on Florida, late in the first quarter?

Say what you will, but I think it was a beautiful thing.   They eventually won 42-30. 

As they say, attitude is everything...and celebration rules are lame anyway.

If they keep that up, I may actually start caring about College football.

Yep, that's right.  22 schools have a 40% drop out rate, including all the conventional Public High Schools in Tacoma.

22 Washington high schools labeled 'dropout factories'

 In about 7.6 percent of Washington's 290 high schools, 40 percent of the students enrolled as freshmen don't make it to their senior year.

The 22 schools in Washington that researchers call "dropout factories" are spread throughout the state, but are found mostly in poor rural and urban school districts. Every comprehensive high school in Tacoma made the list, but none in Seattle or Spokane did.

Now granted, without access to their statistics and methodology it is impossible to figure out if the numbers are slanted or falsely represented, but the fact remains that dropouts are concerning.

In Tacoma, where every comprehensive high school had a dropout rate of more than 40 percent, district officials did not respond to repeated requests for information from The Associated Press.

Oak Harbor School District spokesman Joe Hunt contested the study's method. Hunt said Oak Harbor High School apparently made the list because the way it counts the freshman class distorted the dropout rate. The school counts not only incoming students as freshmen, but also freshmen from the previous year who didn't earn enough credits to become sophomores, inflating the size of the class.

It's a fair concern, but that would be isolated to the one school, and it does not explain the nationwide trend/

A Seattle Public Schools official couldn't pinpoint why his district managed to stay off the list of "dropout factories," but he had a few ideas.

Some Seattle high schools - Rainier Beach, Cleveland and Chief Sealth high schools - have hired dropout prevention specialists, who knock on parents' doors, talks to kids and work with law enforcement to combat truancy, said Ballard High School Principal Phil Brockman, who was the district's interim high school director for six months.

Several Seattle high schools have special programs to reach out to families, such as Latino support programs at Ballard and Chief Sealth high schools and the black achievers programs at four schools.

...while others defend the Islamofascists.  In the wake of the Islamofascist Awareness Week protests two articles caught my eye.

One defends the use of the word itself, which the New Oxford American Dictionary, defines  as "a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century".  

Defending Islamofascism:  It's a valid term. Here's why.

The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's a historical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion.

Which ignores the obvious fact that the term is not meant to be applied as an all inclusive property, it is a specific label assigned to a particularly virulent subset is Islam, and all attempts by the liberals and Islam defenders is disingenuous. 

Oddly enough my 17 year old daughter immediate grasped this distinction, yet most liberals will not.

He and others don't want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn't applied to any other religion.

Well, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being "singled out" on this point.

Here is yet another reason to like Fred! Thompson:  His Immigration plan.

While I might differ on the odd point or two, overall his plan actually makes sense.  It treats the problem as a whole, and attacks it from all angles, not just from the Border fence as many others.

Border Security and Immigration Reform Plan

In the post-9/11 world, immigration is much more of a national security issue. A government that cannot secure its borders and determine who may enter and who may not, fails in a fundamental responsibility. As we take steps to secure our borders and enforce our laws, we must also ensure that our immigration laws and policies advance our national interests in a variety of areas, and that the immigration process itself is as fair, efficient, and effective as possible.

Securing the Border and Enforcing the Law

A fundamental responsibility of the federal government is to secure the nation's borders and enforce the law. The following policies and initiatives will put the nation on a path to success:

1. No Amnesty. Do not provide legal status to illegal aliens. Amnesty undermines U.S. law and policy, rewards bad behavior, and is unfair to the millions of immigrants who follow the law and are awaiting legal entry into the United States. In some cases, those law-abiding and aspiring immigrants have been waiting for several years.
   
   
2. Attrition through Enforcement. Reduce the number of illegal aliens through increased enforcement against unauthorized alien workers and their employers. Without illegal employment opportunities available, fewer illegal aliens will attempt to enter the country, and many of those illegally in the country now likely will return home. Self-deportation can also be maximized by stepping up the enforcement levels of other existing immigration laws. This course of action offers a reasonable alternative to the false choices currently proposed to deal with the 12 million or more aliens already in the U.S. illegally: either arrest and deport them all, or give them all amnesty. Attrition through enforcement is a more reasonable and achievable solution, but this approach requires additional resources for enforcement and border security:
   
   
   1. Doubling ICE agents handling interior enforcement, increasing the Border Patrol to at least 25,000 agents, and increasing detention space to incarcerate illegal aliens we arrest rather than letting them go with a promise to show up later for legal proceedings against them.
      
      
   2. Adding resources for the Department of Justice to prosecute alien smugglers, people involved in trafficking in false identification documents, and previously deported felons.
      
      

911 Truthers are the poster children of deranged conspiracy theory fools. 

They love to confront anyone to forward their insanity, like when Bill Maher turkey walked them off of his live show last week (strong language warning).

This week they tangled with former President Clinton, who was also in no mood for it.

Here are clips from both and as a bonus, the last clip is Bill's opinion of the Truthers from his New Rules segment.

I admit I give many liberals a bad time for their ideology, but in this case it goes to show that even liberals have their limits on irrationality.  Maybe there is some hope.

 Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, , guerrilla radio, Right Truth, The Populist, Shadowscope, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Nuke's, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, High Desert Wanderer, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

I am reposting this blog with permission from Sister Toldjah because I think she does a marvelous job on the subject.  She is fairly passionate about it.

I have long said that abortion is a subject I have strong opinions on, but as i am a man society says my opinion is less persuasive then a womans choice, so in fairness, I defer to a real live woman Who happens to share most of my beliefs.

Whoopi Goldberg: We must show “reverence” for women who’ve aborted their babies