Man known as Mr. Fix-it Jackson's 31st homicide

A man known to his neighbors as Mr. Fix-it was fatally attacked in his northwest Jackson home, police said Thursday.

Gregory Acker, 49, of 471 E. Ridgeway St., suffered a blow to the head and two stab wounds in his neck, Hinds County Coroner Sharon Grisham-Stewart said.

Police are searching for Acker's missing blue-grayish handyman's van. "No job too small" is written on the van.

Acker is Jackson's 31st homicide of 2003 and the second since Wednesday, when a homeowner fatally shot a man police say was trying to break into his house.

Order not to arrest illegals overturned

" ... we should all be disgusted; however, we should not be surprised."

It's not fair, but Jackson is defined too often by Stokes' histrionics. Not only does he undermine the council, but also he sabotages the city. Stokes should go.

After doing all that they could to obstruct the United States from deposing Saddam Hussein and freeing the people of Iraq from his cruel oppression, the French now want to suspend the sanctions that were imposed against his regime. Why? You can bet that it is not out of the goodness of their hearts. "Follow the money," is a phrase that probably applies here.

This is the fourth full day of military action by the United States of America, and others, most notably Britain, to liberate the people of Iraq from the regime of the sadistic, murderous dictator Saddam Hussein and to enforce United Nations Security Council resolution 1441.

War is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and, yet, some fairly certain information is coming out of Iraq, even as military action continues. Several thousand Iraqi troops have either capitulated or surrendered; many times that number are thought to have simply left their posts and returned to their homes. A smaller number are resisting, some fiercely. There have been some coalition casualties; some coalition troops have been captured by the enemy.

The regime of Saddam Hussein has already violated the Geneva Conventions, according to United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield.

So-called "anti-war" protests continue throughout the world, although to a lesser degree in the United States since the actual onset of hostilities, but the protests are increasingly seen as "anti-American" or "anti-Bush," rather than actually "anti-war."

In the middle of the afternoon, I was sitting at my computer, when, suddenly--crash, bang, crack-em-up! The computer monitor flickered and died. I looked outside and saw a candy apple red Chrysler PT Cruiser sitting in the front yard.

The utility pole was cracked. I telephoned to the electric company, to report the outage. Soon, there was a crowd of people in the front yard, some of them erstwhile passengers in the PT Cruiser, some merely onlookers. The other car involved in the accident, a black Pontiac Grand Am, was across the street, in the parking lot of the convenience store. Presently, there were three police cars, an ambulance, a fire truck, and two wreckers on the scene. I went across to the convenience store, ostensibly to get a soda pop, but, in reality, to talk to the clerk and to look at the other car to see what kind of condition it was in. The front of it was messed up pretty badly.

The emergency medical technicians put the driver of the Pontiac on a stretcher and took him away in the ambulance. I don't know how badly he was injured. Someone from the electric company came in a truck that had one of those devices consisting of a bucket on the end of an arm, designed to lift a person up to the power lines. He surveyed the situation, told me that some of the wires were shorted out, and that a crew would have to come to restore the power. Then he left.

One of the wreckers backed up to the curb, in front of the house, and removed the car from the front yard. I had been concerned that the car might have damaged the house, but it didn't touch it. Now, the lights are back on, and the only evidence of a wreck, other than the cracked utility pole, are a few shallow ruts in the front lawn, which I will fill with dirt in a day or two.

There was a car crash in front of the house on Friday evening, about 5:30. A small car turned in front of a sport utility vehicle, sending the sport utility vehicle skidding. When it slammed up against the curb, it flipped over. There were lots of emergency vehicles, including three police cars, a big fire truck, and two tow trucks, but, amazingly, no one was seriously injured.

Today, I got up at 4:50 a.m. News of the space shuttle disaster filled the headlines.

Mother saw a bird in her bedroom. She said that it perched on top of the door to her bedroom, before zooming off in the direction of the kitchen. We looked and looked for it, but couldn't find it. I turned off the computer, and sat very quietly, trying to hear it. I heard chirping coming from the direction of the back bedroom. Also, I heard what seemed to be rustling inside the computer room, from some boxes that are behind the computer table, and, therefore, very difficult to get to--so difficult, in fact, that I didn't make the effort.

It has been quite a while since I have heard the rustling. From where I sit, at my computer, I can see a gap between the top of the door leading to the back bedroom and the door frame--a gap which looks big enough for a small bird to go through. Since we haven't been able to locate the bird, I suppose that it is possible that it went through that gap, into the back bedroom. Still, I can't figure out what caused the rustling noise that I heard.

10:40 a.m. - Just finished helping Mother to wash her hair, which involves filling several pots and pans with water and pouring the water over her head, while she leans over the kitchen sink. We ate a lunch of Campbell's Chicken and Dumplings soup, before washing her hair.

I plan to take our dirty clothes to the coin-operated laundry, this afternoon, but I told Mother that I would wait as long as possible to see if the bird showed itself. I do want to leave early enough so that I can be back before nightfall.

All your base are belong to us.

Today, being the first day of the new year, I have an unhealthy desire to resolve to post to this weblog every. single. day. of 2003 (but I won't--promise, that is).

Traditionally, we have black eyed peas, greens, and cornbread on New Year's Day. Since we didn't have any of those things, I went to the grocery store today to get them. Actually, I went twice, because the delicatessan didn't have the cornbread ready the first time I went. Mom brought out some of the sliced, smoked turkey from our Christmas feast. We spooned the liquid from the peas and turnip greens over the warm cornbread and had milk to drink. Since today is a holiday, I said what was always called, in our family, the "special" blessing, because my Dad only used it on special occasions.

Hey, there goes what we used to call the "air raid" siren, but which, now, is activated to alert to severe weather. It is also cranked up at noon on the first of every month, supposedly to test it.

Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, has announced that he will resign as Majority Leader of the United States Senate and will serve out the remaining four years of his six-year term.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations says that the inspections for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are proceeding well. The President of the United States says that they are not. Iraq is expected to provide their "declaration" of weapons systems on Saturday. We should be able to get a pretty good idea from it if the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, is serious about avoiding war.

Yesterday, Tom Daschle, the soon-to-be minority "leader" of the Senate of the United States of America, spoke out against talk show hosts that disagree with him and with the ideology of the Democrat party. Basically, he is setting the stage for his party's assault on the talk show hosts of America, the vast majority of whom are critical, and rightly so, of the objectives of the Democrat party.

They will do so with a so-called "campaign finance reform" measure and/or an attempt to revive the discredited, so-called "Fairness" in Broadcasting Act of 1993, which is, in truth, another way that they think that they can silence their critics.

Talk radio shows that espouse the principles of the "nanny state" generally fail. They fail because the argument for the nanny state cannot stand up to scrutiny. Implicit in this argument is a disdain for "the people," who, it is assumed, do not have enough sense to know what is in their best interests; therefore, the poor, misguided citizens need a "nanny state" to take care of them and prop them up. Since talk shows favorable to their ideas generally fail, it it only "fair" to the Democrats that talk shows critical of their ideas be censored!

The Democrats in the United States House of Representatives elected Nancy Pelosi to be their leader today. This is a good thing for the Republicans. Pelosi is such a radical liberal that she will further marginalize her party.

The Associated Press has a story by Sarah el Deeb. She writes, in part:

Egypt's foreign minister said Saturday that he expected Iraq to accept the U.N. resolution to disarm but that Baghdad had not yet made a formal decision.

"I think we can expect a positive position by the Iraqis," Ahmed Maher told reporters after Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri explained Iraq's position to the foreign ministers of the 22-member Arab League.

I think that we can be fairly sure that Saddam Hussein will say that he will accept the resolution to disarm, but that will only be a delaying tactic. That's my prediction. We'll have to wait and see what actually happens. However, we do know this for a fact: Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations, in the past.

Also, it seems fairly certain that, if Saddam Hussein defies the United Nations this time, he will not defy it again.

Many Republicans are hoping that Representative Nancy Pelosi will replace Dick Gephardt as House Minority Leader. They feel that her election would signal that the Democrat party will position itself even farther to the left, a move which, Repuplicans feel, will marginalize it even more.

The Washington Times newspaper reports on the results of yesterday's election.

Jesse Ventura, the Governor of Minnesota, appointed an Independent to fill the vacancy in the United States Senate caused by the death of Senator Paul Wellstone. Ventura had stated that he was leaning toward appointing a Democrat, because Wellstone was a Democrat, until he was outraged by the Democrats shamelessly turning an event billed as a "memorial service" for Wellstone into an unabashedly political rally.

In 1991, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia allowed troops of the United States of American into their country to defend it against Iraq. Now, when the United States of America considers it essential that it defend itself against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's ability to distribute weapons of mass destruction to terrorists targeting their country, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said in an interview broadcast Sunday that the Kingdom will not allow bases on its soil to be used for an attack on Iraq even if the United Nations authorizes military action.

Time magazine has called Foreign Affairs "the most influential periodical in print." In the November/December 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, Barry Rubin, Director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center and Editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, writes:

Arab and Muslim hatred of the United States is not just, or even mainly, a response to actual U.S. policies -- policies that, if anything, have been remarkably pro-Arab and pro-Muslim over the years. Rather, such animus is largely the product of self-interested manipulation by various groups within Arab society, groups that use anti-Americanism as a foil to distract public attention from other, far more serious problems within those societies.