When The AR Are.....
.......praising the terrorists for their "gallant sacrifices,"........
 
Shouldn't That Be Animal Rights As A Blood Sport?
 
Do You Think Friedman Understands He Would Be A Fried Man If Left To The AR?
 
 

Politics as blood sport

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is fighting mad over Pamela Anderson's threats

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Times Deputy Editor of Editorials
Published February 6, 2005

Are Republicans soft on cockfighting?

That is the troubling but unavoidable conclusion that must be drawn from GOP leaders' continuing silence on the issue.

In a stunning role reversal, it has been left to Democrats - besmirched by Republicans as effete, escargot-eating Girlie Men - to defend America's proud cultural heritage of wagering big money on fights to the death between roosters with razors strapped to their legs.

In New Mexico, one of two states where cockfighting is, inexplicably, still legal, Democratic legislator Benjie Regensburg is defending the "sport" in the face of a new effort to ban it. The critics, Regensburg said, "say it's brutal, but these are people who value the life of a rooster more than a human being."

Regensburg sees cockfighting as part of the fabric of New Mexico culture. "I've seen rooster fights used to determine who's running for school board or who's coming out on top in a disputed cattle sale," he said.

State Sen. Shannon Robinson, D-Albuquerque, agreed: "It's part of a way of life, and it's a sport. It's a breeder's sport. It's almost an industry."

Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the normally diplomatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, claims to be undecided on the issue of whether cockfighting should remain legal in his state. But Richardson is cockfighting mad over the threats and slurs directed at New Mexico by animal-rights agitators.

The crusade to ban cockfighting in New Mexico is being led, naturally enough, by former Baywatch thespian Pamela Anderson. In a letter to Richardson, Anderson warned darkly that "the whole world is watching, especially Hollywood, which your office actively courts for the film business."

Richardson lashed back at Anderson and other celebrity meddlers: "It goes beyond distraction sometimes. Some of the implied threats coming from these Hollywood personalities are condescending and insulting."

Meanwhile, Democrats in Oklahoma, where cockfighting was banned in 2002, are seeking a compromise that might satisfy rooster-loving activists such as Anderson.

Democratic state Sen. Frank Shurden proposes fitting fighting roosters with little boxing gloves: "Who's going to object to chickens fighting like humans do?" Shurden asks. "Everybody wins. To me, it answers everything."

Well, it doesn't answer the question of why any sane person would live in Oklahoma, but it does throw the issue back into the opponents' corner. What are they holding out for? Rooster headgear?

The procockfighting hard-liners may already view Shurden as an animal-rights appeaser, but at least he's no John Kerry.

During last year's presidential campaign, Kerry did everything he could think of to pander to the heartland values of Red State voters. But he never could get it right.

During a campaign stop in Philadelphia, Kerry ordered a cheese steak, just like a regular guy - but he asked for Swiss cheese instead of the usual Cheez Whiz. "It will doom his candidacy in Philadelphia," predicted Philadelphia Inquirer food critic Craig LaBan. "In Philadelphia (Swiss cheese) is an alternative lifestyle."

When Kerry was in Wisconsin, he dutifully praised the Green Bay Packers - but he said they played at "Lambert Field" instead of hallowed Lambeau Field. "He's out of touch," said Dean Achterburg, a community leader from Pewaukee. "I think he would be more fitting at a polo match than at the all-American sport of football."

Despite the urban legend, Kerry didn't really say, "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" But his professed love of stock-car racing still was unconvincing: "There isn't one of us here who doesn't like NASCAR and who isn't a fan," Kerry said at a Wisconsin union rally.

Those and other gaffes - the dorky snowboarding photo op, the contrived goose hunt - hurt Kerry and reinforced the image that Democrats aren't quite red-blooded enough to lead the country (even though Republicans George W. Bush and Trent Lott are the only national politicians I know of who were male cheerleaders back in the days before the job entailed catching and grabbing beautiful, half-dressed young women in ways that are illegal in establishments serving alcohol).

Maybe it's just a coincidence that all these Democrats in New Mexico, Oklahoma and other Red states are speaking out to defend Americans' right to watch roosters slice each other to pieces. But I think it might be part of an organized Democratic effort to win votes by building a more macho image.

After all, who among us doesn't like cockfighting?

Robert Friedman, editor of the Perspective section, can be reached at friedman@sptimes.com

 
Source: http://www.sptimes.com/2005/02/06/Columns/Politics_as_blood_spo.shtml
 
 
 
Churchill advocated violence against meat industry
Supported attacks on humans in defense of 'animal rights'
Ward Churchill, the embattled University of Colorado professor who prompted a national furor by condemning 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns" and praising the terrorists for their "gallant sacrifices," later endorsed violence against people involved in the meat industry.

In a foreword to the book Terrorists or Freedom Fighters: Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (edited and introduction by Steven Best, a University of Texas El Paso philosophy professor and animal-rights activist), Churchill expands his Nazi comparison to modern medical researchers and meat companies.

"To assault the meatpacking industry," Ward Churchill writes, "is to mount a challenge to the mentality that allowed well over a million dehumanized humans to be systematically slaughtered by the SS einsatzgruppen in eastern Europe during the early 1940s, and the nazis' simultaneous development of truly industrial killing techniques in places like Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka."

Churchill contends groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front haven't gone far enough in defending "animal rights." He claims that drawing a "line in the tactical sand" that embraces "property damage" but excludes murder is "arbitrary" – and again invokes Eichmann: "Given the opportunity to do either in, say, 1942, would it have been more effective/appropriate to have torched the office of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat whose peculiar expertise made an orderly implementation of the Final Solution possible, or to have eliminated Eichmann himself? The answer need not be rendered as an abstraction."

Tuesday, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens urged the university to fire Churchill. And the state House passed a non-binding resolution yesterday calling his comments "evil and inflammatory." A similar measure was awaiting action in the Senate.

The CU regents plan to discuss Churchill's future at a special meeting today.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the controversy stems from an essay Churchill wrote titled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," written shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he describes the thousands of American victims who died in the World Trade Center inferno as "little Eichmanns" (a reference to notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann) who were perpetuating America's "mighty engine of profit." They were destroyed, he added, thanks to the "gallant sacrifices" of "combat teams" that successfully targeted the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y., near Syracuse today, but officials at the school canceled the appearance, citing security concerns and death threats they had received.

Source: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42734