December 22, 2004 -

BUMPTIOUS BOYCOTTERY!

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It's a joyous season, but the jerks are ever with us.

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Now, details...

HI don't know that Jack In The Box can be hurt by my boycotting them, since I seldom eat there. But if I had the impulse to stop at a Jack In The Box I would cut it short over their stupid Christmas television commercials on television. You probably have seen them. People in an office are wearing antlers and everyone says , "Good Holiday Spirit." Then one dork shows up with antlers that scrape the walls and a dorkette says, "Too much Holiday Spirit, Bill."

Sorry, Jack, but it's "Christmas Spirit." Politically correct BS makes me want to say bah, humbug! (And go to Whataburger.)

I wanted to applaud the normally PC Charles Osgood on the CBS Sunday Morning show when he ended his broadcast with the words, "Merry Christmas." Class.

And there is one of the nation's best columnists, Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer writes for the Washington Post and opines for Fox News Channel. He is Jewish but during this season, he says, "Merry Christmas." Class.

And there is Target. No class. Target stores banned Salvation Army volunteers from their premises. Bah, humbug! But the Almighty (and a nice old Arkansas boy named Sam Walton) gave us Wal-Mart, which is matching dollars dropped into Salvation Army kettles at its stores. A good year-round shopping slogan for Target is, "bah, humbug, boycott!"

There are some jerks who never go out of season. Take, for instance, the left-wingers and various other creeps who routinely sue to impose their will on the majority and they have been winning more often than not. But maybe the tide is turning. In colleges across the country, conservative students are increasingly filing lawsuits and organizing protests to defend THEIR academic freedom. In this case, they just want freedom from the liberals and socialists who populate college faculties.

At the forefront of the freedom from propaganda movement is Students for Academic Freedom, with chapters on 135 campuses. SAF has close ties to David Horowitz. Horowitz was born into a household of communists. He once was a liberal campus activist but now is a conservative one. The movement from conservative thinkers has seen a University of North Carolina student sue over a policy requiring ALL incoming students to read the a book about the Quran before arriving for school.

In Colorado, conservatives withdrew a legislative proposal for an "academic bill of rights" backed by Horowitz, but only after state universities agreed to adopt its principles.

One academic weenie whined that Horowitz's movement has resulted in her getting hate mail from strangers, prompting Horowitz to say: "These people are such sissies. I get hate mail every single day."

Unlike the tenured college sissies, Horowitz understands that academic freedom includes the right to have opinions that differ from the party line.

It seems likely that some Lithuanians are having a merry Christmas. Of course, they might go blind from it, too. Lithuanian border guards have discovered a hose about 2 miles long that is being used to smuggle vodka from Belarus. Vodka from Belarus costs much less than the Lithuanian versions. Of course, there are those who say it often makes drinkers go blind, so there can be a downside to saving money.

However, this would seem to indicate that people in the Baltics are on their way to running moonshine. If they follow the American model, maybe they'll go into running ‘shine by automobile and within a few years they will have NASCAR.

Austin needs to give rest to the hand-wringing and whining over the tragic deaths of an Austin Police Department commander and her husband, who was a retired cop. Cmdr. Shauna Jacobson, a 20-year department veteran, and Kurt Jacobson died Dec. 12 when their Harley-Davidson struck a guardrail on Texas 71, about a mile east of the bar where they joined other officers who were participating in a motorcycle charity ride for a victims services counselor with multiple sclerosis. The Jacobson's had alcohol levels well above the .08 that defines impairment in Texas.

But Austin, in its liberal tendency to make tragedies more tragic, is prolonging the grief of the Jacobsons' family and friends, with an "outside investigation" to establish what happened. It's clear that the Jacobsons had too much to drink, got on their Harley and died tragically. Austin's whiney Chief of Police, Stan Knee, wants to see if other cops drinking with the Jacobsons should have known they were impaired and stopped them.

It's possible that Chief Knee leads such a monastic life that he doesn't know that there are people can appear to be somewhat sober even when they are reasonably drunk. Austin should give the story a rest and leave the Jacobson family and friends to grieve. There is nothing to gain from the hand-wringing except chapped hands.

QUESTION FOR THE DAY: Do the moguls who run Target stores really need those several dollars that shoppers might "waste" on the Salvation Army kettle?