• QUICK HIT No. 4

JIMMY Z's QUICK HITS™
Collect 'em, trade 'em, pass 'em around!

State of the democrat party: Pussified

The democrats running for president were interviewed at their press conference (‘debate?’) by a liberal news media guy, and totally chickened out – ran away from – being interviewed in a ‘debate’ on Fox News (said debate was endorsed by several key liberal support groups; still the democrats ran scared – and we bet George Soros nixed that one), yet the Republicans were not reluctant at all to be interviewed by a raving, frothing, liberal moonbat – the hysterical Chris Matthews – thus proving again that we republicans are the party of courage; the party of inclusion and unification; the party who faces the challenge from those who disagree. The democrats? They still remain the party of surrender and cowardice; the party of division; the party who run away from challenges by those with whom they disagree. --JZ

"Democrats run away from Fox like scared puppies."
--Byron York on Laura Ingraham's radio show, 4 May 2007



Quick Hit followed by this great column by Mike Reagan - Enjoy.

Profiles in cowardice
By Columnist Mike Reagan

If ever there was a revealing contrast between courage and wimpishness it is the behavior of the competing political parties in connection with the pre-primary debates now going on. Most revealing was the way the Democrat presidential hopefuls arranged to hold their debates and the way the 2008 Republican candidates chose where to hold their debates.

As revealed in their willingness to see the United States defeated in Iraq, the Democrats also showed the white flag of surrender when faced with a terrifying debate hosted by the evil Fox News. They ran for cover.

The Democrats refused to participate if Fox is to be in charge of the debate and the coverage of the session, with Fox reporters questioning the candidates and moderating the session. After all, the last thing the Democrats want is a fair and balanced presentation, which is what Fox offers. They demand a rigged game. [Nice. --JZ]

According to MSNBC, “The first debate, which was to be co-sponsored by Fox and the Nevada Democratic party, had been set for this August but was canceled. Fox then teamed with the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute for a Sept. 23 debate that is still scheduled, even though John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all said they won’t attend.” That more or less leaves Dennis Kucinich and a couple of other hopeless hopefuls to face the lions in the Fox’s den next September.

As my pal Ann Coulter put it, “The not-visibly-insane Democrats all claim they’ll get rough with the terrorists, but they can’t even face Brit Hume. “In case you missed this profile in Democrat machismo, the Democratic presidential candidates are refusing to participate in a debate hosted by Fox News Channel because the hosts are ‘biased.’ But they’ll face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!”

And over at the Hot Air blog, it was noted that that this is a win-win situation for everyone, [except for both remaining Centrist Democrats]: “the Dems get to show how tough they are against an enemy who’s more their speed and Fox gets to tout itself as the network that frightens the left.” The idea of facing Fox on live TV scares them silly and the Democrats, as is their usual practice, ran for cover. If they can’t dictate the rules of the game they won’t play. And Fox made it clear that they would make the rules, which is their right.

On the other hand, you have the Republicans who will be debating tonight at my father’s library in a contest run by MSNBC and moderated by none other than Chris Matthews. Think about it – the Democrats run away from a fair and balanced Fox-sponsored debate while the Republicans have no problem agreeing to a debate moderated by the Bush-hating, anti-GOP Matthews, whose idea of balance is to tilt everything towards the Democrat side, and run by NBC, the most liberal network. The GOP attitude: “Bring ‘em on,” contrasted with the Democrats’ cut-and-run strategy.

In this case, as in the case of the war in Iraq, the Republicans are standing up while the Democrats continue to display that large yellow streak that runs down their spines, even retreating in the face of what they regard as a deadly threat: an unbiased Fox network. They always insist on having the umpires in their back pockets. If they are fair and unbiased the Democrats won’t play in their ballpark. As Dracula is said to cringe before a crucifix, the Democrats tremble in the face of facts.

The Republicans, however, are not only willing to fight an unpopular war in Iraq against the insurgents , but are also willing to face the hostility of the home-grown insurgency that has captured the Democrat party, the mainstream media, and liberal Chris Matthews and NBC.

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.” E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

• CELEBRATING A LOSER

The media can't get enough of McGreevey

The former governor sucks - literally and figuratively - but the leftwingers celebrate his sins.

Jim McGreevey left office in shame. Yes, shame. He left his daughter and his wife, choosing instead to have sex with men. At the very least, a moral man would have abstained from sex and stayed to keep his family intact. But not slimey McGreevey.

Now, he will become an Episcopal priest. This is disgusting in a number of ways. First, it shows us yet again that the Episcopal church has nothing whatsoever to do with God's Word, the Bible. The Bible clearly and without hesitation calls homosexuality sin. As Bill Keller of liveprayer.com likes to say, you choose when to pull your pants down and who to have sex with. Sex is a choice.

Second, it shows us that McGreevey is running from Catholicism because he just didn't like what the Bible teaches. The Catholic Church does not embrace homosexuality. Instead, it welcomes all sinners but holds true to Biblical teaching. McGreevey wanted no part of that.

McGreevey's wife has written a book, and in it she slams him bigtime. I'm glad she did. She was pretty civil about it, considering how selfish he's been. His life is all about having sex with men now, you see, and that kind of sexual-centered lifestyle is nothing but selfishness.

Imagine if, instead of going to a non-bible based church like the Episcopal church who EMBRACE SIN, he had said “I renounce the sin of homosexuality, and I am going to be working with a Christian based ministry that helps homosexuals out of their sinful lifestyle, and I will be trying to get my marriage back together for the sake of our children.” Can you imagine what the sin-celebrating leftwing media would have done to him?



We recorded a song parody not too long ago, called "Bats of the Moon," based on "Cats in the Cradle." The first verse has to do with McGreevey. Click HERE to listen.

"They made him a hero, they shouted hooray; had a wife but he threw her away."



Here are some bits from other sources - the links are there for the full articles if you wish to read more.

Ex-New Jersey governor's wife spills beans on marriage
Mercury News wire services

The wife of former Gov. James E. McGreevey describes him in her upcoming memoir as self-absorbed and controlling and says that, among other demands, he insisted she move out of the governor's mansion before his official resignation. The descriptions appear in Dina Matos McGreevey's book "Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage," scheduled to hit bookstores May 1. A copy of the book was obtained by the New York Daily News.

Matos McGreevey wrote that her husband offered only an indifferent apology days after he appeared on national television in August 2004 and announced he would resign, saying: "I am a gay American." Before that appearance, she wrote that McGreevey told her to compose herself, saying, "You have to be Jackie Kennedy today," and repeatedly told her what to say and how to act in the aftermath of his admission.

Matos McGreevey also said her husband told her if she stayed at the governor's mansion until the last minute it would make her "look like white trash."

More HERE.

McGreevey's Wife: 'It Can Happen to Anyone'
The Estranged Wife of the Former N.J. Governor Talks With Others About Gay Spouses
May 3, 2007 —

So many people think they should be able to see the signs. But in a marriage where one spouse is gay [CHOOSES TO BE GAY --JZ] and the other is straight, the latter is often the last to know. Dina Matos McGreevey realized that when her estranged husband, Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, announced he was gay in 2004. On "Good Morning America," she sat down with women and men, including three from the Straight Spouses support group, to talk about whether someone can really know if their spouse is gay.

Though she heard rumors about her husband's homosexuality before he came out, Matos McGreevey never paid attention to them.

"When you're married to someone, whether it's a politician or someone in a powerful position, there's always innuendo, there's always rumors, and if you're going to chase after those rumors you're not going to do anything else," she said. "And if you're in a relationship, you trust that person, whether it's a marriage, or you're living with someone, otherwise why be in the relationship?"

Still, Elaine Bennett didn't understand how Matos McGreevey had failed to connect her husband's waning desire for her with his homosexuality. Matos McGreevey explained that she didn't think her husband was truly homosexual.

"I know that people have a difficult time accepting the fact that I didn't know. But I think a lot of that, for many people, is that they don't want to believe that it can happen to them," she said. "And it can happen to anyone."

More HERE.

• THE WORST OFFICIATED OF ALL PRO SPORTS

May 2, 2007
Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls
By ALAN SCHWARZ

(SOURCE)
An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well. A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”

N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern said in a telephone interview that the league saw a draft copy of the paper last year, and was moved to do its own study this March using its own database of foul calls, which specifies which official called which foul.

“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.

Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound. The N.B.A. denied a request for its underlying data, even with names of officials and players removed, because it feared that the league’s confidentiality agreement with referees could be violated if the identities were determined through box scores.

The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal, but several prominent academic economists said it would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.

The three experts who examined the Wolfers-Price paper and the N.B.A.’s materials were Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers; David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield, the author of “The Wages of Wins,” which analyzes sports issues using statistics; and Larry Katz of Harvard University, the senior editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data.

But they said they continued to find the same phenomenon: that players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a vocal critic of his league’s officiating, said in a telephone interview after reading the paper: “We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.”

Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”

Two veteran players who are African-American, Mike James of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Alan Henderson of the Philadelphia 76ers, each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently. “If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”

Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims. Rod Thorn, the president of the New Jersey Nets and formerly the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said: “I don’t believe it. I think officials get the vast majority of calls right. They don’t get them all right. The vast majority of our players are black.” Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.

For the 1991-92 through 2003-4 seasons, the authors analyzed every player’s box-score performance — minutes played, rebounds, shots made and missed, fouls and the like — in the context of the racial composition of the three-person crew refereeing that game. (The N.B.A. did not release its record of calls by specific officials to either Mr. Wolfers, Mr. Price or The Times, claiming it is kept for referee training purposes only.)

Mr. Wolfers said that he and Mr. Price classified each N.B.A. player and referee as either black or not black by assessing photographs and speaking with an anonymous former referee, and then using that information to predict how an official would view the player. About a dozen players could reasonably be placed in either category, but Mr. Wolfers said the classification of those players did not materially change the study’s findings.

During the 13-season period studied, black players played 83 percent of the minutes on the floor. With 68 percent of officials being white, three-person crews were either entirely white (30 percent of the time), had two white officials (47 percent), had two black officials (20 percent) or were entirely black (3 percent).

Mr. Stern said that the race of referees had never been considered when assembling crews for games. With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew. “Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price also report a statistically significant correlation with decreases in points, rebounds and assists, and a rise in turnovers, when players performed before primarily opposite-race officials. “Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,” they write. The paper later notes no change in free-throw percentage. “We emphasize this result because this is the one on-court behavior that we expect to be unaffected by referee behavior.”

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price claim that these changes are enough to affect game outcomes. Their results suggested that for each additional black starter a team had, relative to its opponent, a team’s chance of winning would decline from a theoretical 50 percent to 49 percent and so on, a concept mirrored by the game evidence: the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.

“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” Mr. Wolfers said. The N.B.A.’s reciprocal study was conducted by the Segal Company, the actuarial consulting firm which designed the in-house data-collection system the league uses to identify patterns for referee-training purposes, to test for evidence of bias. The league’s study was less formal and detailed than an academic paper, included foul calls for only two and a half seasons (from November 2004 through January 2007), and did not consider differences among players by position, veteran status and the like. But it did have the clear advantage of specifying which of the three referees blew his whistle on each foul.

The N.B.A. study reported no significant differences in how often white and black referees collectively called fouls on white and black players. Mr. Stern said he was therefore convinced “that there’s no demonstration of any bias here — based upon more robust and more data that was available to us because we keep that data.” Added Joel Litvin, the league’s president for basketball operations, “I think the analysis that we did can stand on its own, so I don’t think our view of some of the things in Wolfers’s paper and some questions we have actually matter as much as the analysis we did.”

Mr. Litvin explained the N.B.A.’s refusal to release its underlying data for independent examination by saying: “Even our teams don’t know the data we collect as to a particular referee’s call tendencies on certain types of calls. There are good reasons for this. It’s proprietary. It’s personnel data at the end of the day.” The percentage of black officials in the N.B.A. has increased in the past several years, to 38 percent of 60 officials this season from 34 percent of 58 officials two years ago. Mr. Stern and Mr. Litvin said that the rise was coincidental because the league does not consider race in the hiring process.

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price are scheduled to present their paper at the annual meetings of the Society of Labor Economists on Friday and the American Law and Economics Association on Sunday. They will then submit it to the National Bureau of Economic Research and for formal peer review before consideration by an economic journal.

Both men cautioned that the racial discrimination they claim to have found should be interpreted in the context of bias found in other parts of American society. “There’s bias on the basketball court,” Mr. Wolfers said, “but less than when you’re trying to hail a cab at midnight.”

Pat Borzi contributed reporting from Minneapolis and John Eligon from East Rutherford, N.J.

• QUICK HIT No. 3

JIMMY Z's QUICK HITS™
Collect 'em, trade 'em, pass 'em around!

PROTESTERS CAUSE MAYHEM,
ACCUSE POLICE
latimes.com photo

These instigators you see on television with the bandanas over their faces? These are hispano-terrorists. They seek to cause mayhem. They are not interested in fighting any kind of political battle for the downtrodden. They are CRIMINALS. They are MEChA racists. They are La Raza bigots. They are swine.

And the vast majority of these urban hispano-terrorists, and the majority of the protesters as a whole, who interrupt the productivity of Americans (and more specifically interrupt the daily lives of hard working Americans) are NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE HERE. Our police should not even have to deal with these pieces of human debris, at all.

Get out. You bring nothing but hate. We don't need you. --JZ

• National Day Of Prayer

Here's a nice idea for Thursday, May 3rd, from the America Family Association. --JZ

May 1, 2007
Meet At City Hall on National Day of Prayer, 2007

"Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord..." Psalms 33:12

On May 3, I invite you to participate in Meet At City Hall from 12:20 pm to 12:40 pm during the National Day Of Prayer. At thousands of city halls across the country, individuals will gather to pray for a moral rebirth in our country. The National Day of Prayer is an annual event established by an act of Congress which encourages Americans to pray for our nation, its people and its leaders.

Your participation in Meet At City Hall is very simple. Simply show up at your local city hall at 12:20 pm on May 3. There will be others present. Spend the 20 minutes in prayer.

If you want to help promote Meet At City Hall, we suggest you invite members of your Sunday School class or church to join together and organize, as you desire. You can invite some public officials, local pastors, church choirs, etc. to participate. The amount of organization and promotion is entirely up to you. Let us unashamedly take our Light from underneath the basket and set it on a table.

Click HERE for the National Day of Prayer website.

The history of the National Day of Prayer

In 1988, A bill was introduced to Congress which fixed the annual NDP at the first Thursday in May. The Senate bill, S 1378, was introduced by Stron Thurmond (R-SC); a matching House version was initiated by Tony Hall, (D-OH). It received broad bipartisan sponsorship and support, and became Public Law 100-307. It was signed into law by President Reagan on May 5 the same year.

He commented: "On our National Day of Prayer, then, we join together as people of many faiths to petition God to show us His mercy and His love, to heal our weariness and uphold our hope, that we might live ever mindful of His justice and thankful for His blessing."

So, here then is a another thing we can thank the late, great President Ronald Reagan for. --JZ

• WE LOVE DR. LAURA

The Good Doctor rips into a pro-baby killer columnist who was moaning about the recent Supreme Court decision that is - let's be honest - only common sense. We recommend Dr. Laura's blog - click HERE. --JZ

Making Judgments About The Supreme Court’s
Latest Decision About Abortion
May 1, 2007 on 12:00 am

I just about lost it reading Linda P. Campbell’s syndicated column (SOURCE) about the Supreme Court’s abortion decision not being simple or neat. Let me take some of her points one by one, as she explains her abhorrence of any controls over any abortion, in addition to the barbaric sucking out of a baby’s brain after the head emerges from the birth canal (partial birth abortion).

First, she says “And of course, a woman who’s about to undergo an abortion ought to understand the details, risks and implications just as much as she should before a tummy tuck, hip replacement, or appendectomy.”

All those procedures require an office visit and an explanation of the process, and then a new appointment for the procedure. Call any Planned Parenthood you like - or walk in, and you can get an abortion right then and there, as long as it isn’t too busy. Planned Parenthood, NOW (the National Organization of “I don’t know what kind of ” Women) and other “feminist” organizations have always been against the waiting period, a sonogram to show the baby’s level of development, or a discussion about the benefits of giving life and finding a suitable two-parent, married mom and dad family for adoption.

Second, she says, “I can’t imagine the circumstances that would cause a woman to choose abortion. But I can appreciate that each one who does has reasons that only she can reconcile with her conscience.”

I have been on radio taking calls from slightly more than 50% women for 32 years. I know why women have abortions, because they’ve called. It is rarely because of severe anomalies or life-threatening circumstances. It is generally because of “circumstances,” usually meaning the one-night stand, casual boyfriend, fiancé, or sometimes husband doesn’t want a child or else dumps them.

Ms. Campbell continues: “It’s all too tempting to make judgments about which motives we consider justified and which we don’t. But then we risk wandering into scary territory. How far do we want to let lawmakers and zealots reach into our most personal and private decisions when they haven’t a clue about what’s best for us?”

What?? We should make no judgments about motivations to kill another human being? Self-defense in an armed robbery deserves the same respect as the intentional murder of innocents by a suicide-bombing? A woman who keeps having casual sex and uses abortion as birth control can’t be judged differently from a pregnant woman with a serious heart problem who might die if the pregnancy goes to term?

I, for one, am sick and tired with the “nothing should be judged” nonsense. Of course we judge - that’s how we make decisions and choices every day. To judge is to discern good from evil, right from wrong, and selfish from selfless. Without that, we are just lower animals.

Abortions out of shame, embarrassment, or inconvenience are a horrible, despicable disaster. An Abortion to save the life of the mother is self-defense.

There. I dared to judge.