Predictably, now a California town has banned outdoor smoking.

The new Calabasas secondhand smoke ordinance, which would prohibit smoking in all public areas of the city including parks, sidewalks and outdoor businesses, will take effect by the middle of March, city officials said.

But in their magnanimity, they did allow some exceptions.

The city council agreed to allow smoking in the following areas:

•Private residential property, other than housing used as a childcare or health care facility when employees, children or patients are present

•Up to 20 percent of guest rooms in any hotel or motel

•Designated smoking “outposts” in shopping mall common areas that are at least five feet away from any doorway or opening that leads to an enclosed area.

Check out that first one; private property? They allowed it on private property? Folks, if you can’t smoke a cigarette outside on your own land, how private is that property? I’m not a smoker and I encourage folks not to smoke, but if second-hand smoke, diluted by the vast outdoors, is as bad and harmful as all this, then have the guts to ban it completely.

If you don’t, then legislation like this has no place. If you do completely ban tobacco, I’ll bet some folks, lulled to sleep during all these incremental incursions into their liberty by an ever more intrusive government, will wake up and kick you out. (Which is why I’m sure it’s all being done incrementally.)

‘I’d rather go hunting with Dick Cheney than driving with Ted Kennedy.” — Frank Traynor in a Feb. 15th letter to the editor of WorldNetDaily. (Unfortunately, not a permalink.)

Aesop’s Fables for the 21st century.

In response to reports the United States and Israel are exploring ways to monetarily isolate his terror group, which is currently forming the next Palestinian government, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar yesterday slammed international critics and claimed Hamas doesn’t need “satanic” American money.

But al-Zahar took quite a different tone just prior to Hamas’ major win in last month’s parliamentary elections when he told WorldNetDaily during an interview his organization will “gladly” accept U.S. financial aid and that he will allow American donations to be monitored by “anyone who wants.”

And the fox said, “The grapes are sour anyway.”

Another former Baathist member and former high-ranking General in Hussein’s army has come out to say that he understands that Iraq’s WMDs have been moved to Syria.

[Ali Ibrahim] Al-Tikriti says he knows Saddam’s weapons are in Syria because of contingency plans established as far back as the late 1980s, in the event either Damascus or Baghdad were taken over.

“Not to mention, I have discussed this in-depth with various contacts of mine who have confirmed what I already knew,” he said.

Saddam, after lying for so many years, knew the U.S. eventually would come for the weapons, he said, and wanted to maintain legitimacy with pan-Arab nationalists.

Also, he had “wanted since he took power to embarrass the West, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so,” al-Tikriti said.

“After Saddam denied he had such weapons, why would he use them or leave them readily available to be found?” he said. “That would only legitimize President Bush, who he has a personal grudge against.”

What we are witnessing now, he said, “is many who opposed the war to begin with are rallying around Saddam saying we overthrew a sovereign leader based on a lie about WMD. This is exactly what Saddam wanted and predicted.”

What I find interesting was his motivation to leave the Baathists.

Al-Tikriti said he turned against the Baath Party after his wife stood up to him and questioned his brutal tactics.

“This really made me think, because no one has ever even considered to question the tactics of myself or any others and lived to tell about it,” he said. “This courageous move made me think deep and hard.”

If you’re a married man, or about to be one (as one of our Stones is), this bit of advice is always timely. Listen to your wife. Yeah, you can always come up with a bad biblical example (Adam, for instance) but typically a man’s wife is a source he should tap more often.

And women, you can stand by your man, but stand up to him, too.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

Now they must be really mad. Mrs. McDonald could not be reached for comment.

The mayor of Tall’Afar in Iraq has some choice words for our military. The Mudville Gazette has the full letter, but here are two hard-hitting paragraphs.

Our city was the main base of operations for Abu Mousab Al Zarqawi. The city was completely held hostage in the hands of his henchmen. Our schools, governmental services, businesses and offices were closed. Our streets were silent, and no one dared to walk them. Our people were barricaded in their homes out of fear; death awaited them around every corner. Terrorists occupied and controlled the only hospital in the city. Their savagery reached such a level that they stuffed the corpses of children with explosives and tossed them into the streets in order to kill grieving parents attempting to retrieve the bodies of their young. This was the situation of our city until God prepared and delivered unto them the courageous soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment, who liberated this city, ridding it of Zarqawi’s followers after harsh fighting, killing many terrorists, and forcing the remaining butchers to flee the city like rats to the surrounding areas, where the bravery of other 3d ACR soldiers in Sinjar, Rabiah, Zumar and Avgani finally destroyed them.

I have met many soldiers of the 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment; they are not only courageous men and women, but avenging angels sent by The God Himself to fight the evil of terrorism.

I encourage you, as the saying goes, to read the whole thing.

Heh heh. Great letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. Good satire makes you laugh and makes a point. This one stings.

I FIND all of your editorial cartoons deeply offensive, morally, religiously, philosophically, and spiritually. In fact, I don’t like your editorials, either. And the editorializing in your news coverage is annoying as well.

In keeping with your cowardly policy not to offend anyone, kindly cease publication at once.

Makes you think. Hopefully, it’ll make the Globe think.

Does the Quran prohibit creating any image of the prophet Muhammad? According to Amir Taheri, writing in the Wall St. Journal, no.

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued “fatwas” against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments–which include a ban on depicting God–as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is “an absolute principle of Islam” is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers.

He goes on to list a few of the many famous depictions.

Well then, does this have more to do with a deep Muslim resistance to having their religion made fun of? Again, no.

Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam, just as the Nazi Party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same discourse that claims “suicide martyrdom” as the highest goal for all true believers.

The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of “laughing at religion,” at times to the point of irreverence.

Again, he offers further historical examples.

So if what some are calling the “Cartoon Intifadah” is not religious in its origin, what is it? Mr. Taheri, explains.

The “rage machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood–a political, not a religious, organization–called on sympathizers in the Middle East and Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

It’s political. Much of the defense of Muslims has tried to come at this from one or the other of these perspectives. The fact is that nothing happened for months after the cartoons were first published, and only after a political body called for a response that 10 people (so far) were killed and buildings burned over them. This is a calculated political response, even if it may have gone farther than the Muslim Brotherhood intended.

I’m not thrilled when religion is lampooned, but I understand that not everyone shares the same opinion. One’s religion is as personal as one’s political opinion and so both are subject to it. Hence, I understand that it’s generally all fair game, including my own Christianity. And on the other side, when someone’s offended, it is their right to speak out against what they believe to be wrong, whether in fact, or whether it be one opinion vs. another. But this furor is unjustified on many counts. It’s has a political origin in spite of claims to the contrary. It doesn’t follow Islam’s own history. And it has become outrageous in its excess and cruelty.

This may be the oft-cited “less than 1% of Muslims” who are doing all the damage. I can buy that. But how soon will it be before we see this kind of action from the other 99%, rather than just press releases? There has been some, but it’s been lost in the din raging over some cartoons.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

“I’m not dead yet!”

A woman was yesterday celebrating the end of a seven-year battle to be removed from Spain’s register of deaths after officials insisted she died in 1992.

María Antonia Calvo, 43, from Malaga, had a double reason to celebrate as a court’s decision to declare her alive now paves the way for her to marry her fiancé, Antonio Guzmán.

Previously, bureaucrats had refused to allow the wedding to go ahead as her entry in the Civil Register clearly showed that she had been dead for 14 years.

Don’t expect anyone to die over this.

POLAND’S Roman Catholics expressed outrage today after a magazine published a picture of the much revered icon of the Black Madonna with pop singer Madonna’s face transposed onto it.
“We are shocked to see, yet again, the miraculous icon of the mother of God used in a profanatory way for advertising and business purposes,” Paulinian monks at Jasna Gora monastery in the southern city of Czestochowa.

The monks are the custodians of the icon which Poles believe was painted by St Luke the Evangelist.

Pop magazine Machina published a photograph of the sacred icon, with singer Madonna’s face transposed over the face of the Virgin and one of the singer’s children in the place of the baby Jesus, on the cover of the issue which hit the news stands today after a three-year publishing hiatus.