David McElroy

It’s been almost eight years since the nation was subjected to a full nine-sixtheeth of a second of Janet Jackson’s bare breast on television — and the evil perps still haven’t paid a price. Sodom and Gomorrah are clearly just around the corner.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission fined CBS $55,000 for the brief “wardrobe malfunction” when part of Jackson’s costume slid open during a live Super Bowl performance. A long legal battle has ensued over whether the FCC had the legal power to do this, and a federal appeals court ruled this week that the decision was arbitrary.

The outcry from advocates for “decency” was swift and heartfelt:

“Today’s ruling reaches the level of judicial stupidity and is a sucker-punch to families everywhere,” said Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel sucker-punched. I just feel as though a bunch of people with nothing better to do are still pursuing something that would have been best forgotten by the day after the day it happened.

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Nobody who follows the Middle East can be surprised to find out that Israel is apparently considering an offensive attack on Iran. Why is Israel considering attacking Iran? Because the Iranians are trying to develop nuclear weapons. Who already has nuclear weapons? Israel.

The Iranian government is made up of fundamentalist religious nuts. I’m not thrilled about the idea of them having nuclear weapons. But I’m also not happy about Israel having nuclear weapons — or Pakistan or India or France or Russia or the United States. If you want to get brutal about reality, there’s only been one government so far that has shown the willingness to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons — and that wasn’t Iran.

If a war between Israel and Iran (and possibly other neighbors) starts, it seems very likely that the United States will be pulled into the mess. It seems even more likely that the flow of oil to the U.S. economy will be disrupted. Gasoline and heating oil will become massively more expensive, which will probably create cries for price controls, leading to shortages and possible rationing. Even if you disregard to tremendous human cost to the participants, the price for the rest of the world will likely be huge if a full-scale war erupts.

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If this video of a judge beating his 16-year-old daughter in a fit of profane rage doesn’t disturb you, there’s something wrong. Judge William Adams can’t even control himself, but he’s had power over other people. He’s a perfect example of why it’s immoral and scary for a few to have power over others.

This video was made in 2004, but it was only posted to YouTube last week. Hillary Adams was 16 when she set up a camera in her bedroom to finally catch her father on videotape during one of his angry rampages. She finally decided to post the video last week. You can read her comments to a Corpus Christi television station here — along with her father’s admission that it is indeed him in the video. (You’ll have to scroll down the page to find comments from both of them.) Police are investigating to decide whether the beating was a crime.

There are a lot of things to read and digest about this story. In the video, the father is angry at the girl for something involving a computer. She now says it was because she was downloading music over the “file sharing” service called Kazaa, which wasn’t legal at the time, so this is the “stealing” that the father was upset about. You have to wonder what the man would have been like if she had don’t something really serious.

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