Willbanks Woman Found, Reportedly Got Cold Feet

“ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) – A Georgia bride-to-be who vanished just days before her wedding turned up in New Mexico and fabricated a tale of abduction before admitting Saturday that she got cold feet and ‘needed some time alone,’ police said.

Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, was in police custody more than 1,420 miles from her home on what was supposed to be her wedding day Saturday.

‘It turns out that Miss Wilbanks basically felt the pressure of this large wedding and could not handle it,’ said Randy Belcher, the police chief in Duluth, Ga., the Atlanta suburb where Wilbanks lives with her fiance. He said there would be no criminal charges.

Wilbanks had called her fiance, John Mason, from a pay phone late Friday and told him that she had been kidnapped three days earlier while jogging, authorities said. Her family rejoiced that she was safe, telling reporters that the media coverage apparently got to the kidnappers.”

Funny we didn’t hear these reports on Friday night.

Clearly getting married to this guy wasn’t the big deal; they already shared a house….But the big wedding 1400 guests and 23 attendants might have had somehting to do with it. I wonder if the police and the FBI will be sending a bill.

But, you know what? I wouldn’t worry about the expense. I see movie rights in this.

AP this morning reports that someone made a phone call that caused a bit of a ruckus:

“CLOVIS, N.M. – A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

Someone called authorities Thursday after seeing a boy carrying something long and wrapped into Marshall Junior High.

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” school Principal Diana Russell said.”

Hmm. OK, let’s not be too hard on these folks. I’ve had burritos in school that could be considered lethal weapons. Of course you have to eat them, first.

Have we gotten to this point, though? Are we this gun phobic?
(Sigh) Apparently so.

LGF points out that

A US intelligence satellite recorded the Giuliana Sgrena shooting incident last month in Iraq—and it proves beyond a doubt that Sgrena was (and is) lying: US satellite recorded checkpoint shooting, shows speed of Italian car.

Ouch… THAT’s gonna leave a mark.
But what I want to know is, how CBS found the willingness to put this on the air.

Reuters, of all people, has the story.

Jon, over at GOP Bloggers has been having a little fun with the Democrats;

just called Harry Reid’s office. He’s the Democratic leader in the Senate. I asked if there was a Democratic plan for Social Security. The aide said Reid is against President Bush’s plan. I said I was aware what Reid was against but was interested in what he was for. This question completely flustered the aide. She alternated between saying that there was no problem, that she did not know where the Democratic plan was, that I was wrong to say that the Democrats had no plan even though an aide in the Leader’s office wasn’t aware of one, and that Reid opposed President Bush’s plan (that was the most frequently mentioned part of the Democratic position).

Well, THAT says it all.

He goes further…  and I’ll repeat the call, here:

call his office (202-224-3542) and ask where you can find the Democratic plan for Social Security. The girl who answers is sweet, and I feel bad for her that she is put into the position of evading on behalf of her cowardly superiors. But until these Democrats feel the heat of Americans demanding to know where the Democratic plan is, they will continue to get away with not having one and just attacking the President.

Amen, and Amen.  Light the fires, people.

Michelle over at A Small Victory has been going over what she calls over-rated LP’s.

Today she lists “Bat Out Of Hell”, and explains why.

I respond:

For what amounted to a first effort, it was a great album. Consider the times involved. In a musical world where everything was either musical syrup, or even with what existed of Rock and Pop, was coyly hiding behind one facade or another and never really pouring themselves into any performance as a result, Meatloaf was a bit refreshing.

Your complaints here seem to be centered on the idea that the thing… and indeed, all of Meatloaf’s work, specifically where Jim Steinman’s writing, is/was over the top, in every dimension…Audibly, playing, lyrically…. story line…”Everything louder than everything else”, to swipe a phrase.

I’ll be honest with you; I didn’t like BOOH at first. And I particularly got damned tired of playing “Paradise” every time I played a wedding… which meant for a few years there, I was playing it on the order of 100 times a year for a few years. It may have been just a seven minute record to you, but to me it was a coffee break…

Then we didn’t hear from the guy for a freakin decade, except for ‘dead ringer’ in which we saw the drug problems coming out. The producers tried to mix him down to cover the flaws, but it didn’t work.

And when Stienman released “Bad for Good” (1981?) as a solo act…(Which sucked performance- wise) I began to understand where some of the Bombast in Meatloaf’s act was coming from…. Bombast Steinmen himself didn’t have the pipes to pull off.
According to what I was hearing at the time, Mealoaf didn’t either, between the drugs and the touring.

I DID see a really great song in “Rock and Roll Comes through”, and imagined how Meatloaf would have done the tune.. and took Steinman’s release of the song as meaning we’d never hear Meatloaf do it. (Steinman’s version actually made the top 40… a disappointing 31 or 32, I think)

I kinda went dark on the whole thing, at that point.

A few years went by.. what, 13 years or so? And finally BOOHII was released, with “Anything” and… thank God… “Rock and Roll comes through”
and I started paying attention again. My wife actually talked me into going to see his roadshow out here to Darien Lake, where he’s supposedly playing again this summer. THe stage show was the best I’d seen in years… as Spock once said.. repeatedly.. on an Information Society record… the guy was Pure Energy and was literally pouring himself into it.

Well, I was hooked; I’ve always respected someone willing to go the distance night after night.

I’m considering going to see him again when he comes to town this summer.

Now, keep in mind some perspective, here… I listen to about everything going from clasical to Rap, so I’m not as influnced, I suppose, by style as some might be, as much as performance within the chosen musical medium…. Rock, blues, jazz, whatever. On sheer stage gravitas, he’s got my respect.

Kurtz At The Corner adds on to yesterdays post about the Democrats and their attacks on the Christian Right. He notes a conference being set up at CUNY, by among others, People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, The Nation, The Village Voice, and the National Council of Churches, and says, correctly:

After the election, there was some talk of Democrats reaching out to Christians and toning down their language of attack. This conference shows that the Democratic left is determined to go the opposite route. The strategy seems to be to tar the Republicans as captive of Dominionist Christians-folks who want to force every American to pay church tithes and bring back capital punishment for blasphemy and witchcraft

Even Harry Reid this morning is saying it’ll take a miracle for the Democrats to win back the Senate. Personally, I figure it’ll take one for them to hold onto what they have… and given the way they’re playing the Religion angle, I tend to doubt a miricle will be forthcoming for them.
(snork)

“The Republicans take control of the Georgia Legislature for the first time in a century and they repeal the Jim Crow Laws. The democrats scream the Republicans are racists, but it seems when good things happen for Blacks in Georgia, Republicans are behind it. “

Scared Monkeys has the details.

Funny how the Democrats ever got around to doing this.

Snugg Harbor has some new lawn equipment.

How much does one need to drink to get their brain to come up with such a beast?

So says AP

Personally, I think we should be easy on him.
No, really.
I think we should release him…. in Iranian airspace… at around 25,000 feet.
And televise it.

Yes, I saw it.
If you didn’t, here’s the text… and a vid link too, I think.

First complaint; I don’t think he hit the Democrat obstruction quite hard enough…. though that’s not a major bitch at the moment. IN fact, I suppose that if he’d hit it any harder we’d have heard about how he was getting desperate and shrill. Still, I wish he’d have said more about that issue.

Secondly on Energy… He’s right, there is no quick fix here… at least in what’s on the table thusfar. The one thing that’s not entered into the mix… and I think he’d be wise to do it.. is to eliminate the EPA’s demands regarding all of the multiple blends the Refieries are expected to deal with… at least until such time as we get more refining capacity online.  It’s the one thing he can do to lower gasoline costs in the short term… and it will show in rather dramatic fashion just how badly the EPA’s nonsense has been futzing us up.

Social Security; He’s still hitting that one, though he’s not having to hit this one very hard… the ideas he’s put out… Personal accounts… are polling well even before last night.. even among longtime Democrats. The Democrat Leadership, particulalry in the Senate, in my view, are in a hard place on this one.

Overall, a good performance.

Much as he doesn’t like doing them… he reportedly hates setting up for them… Bush tends to loosen up, and really gets in command of the room, once he gets in there and gets started.

As an aside…I understand this reaction, very well, and on a very personal level. When I was doing radio and when I was doing DJ work at parties and whatnot, I would invariably get nervous.. Yes, every day of the year… every time you key the mike… and you never really get over it. It happens every time. After a few hundred times, you learn though, that that the trick is getting the butterflies to fly in formation.  But you never do get over getting nervous before an event. Matter of fact, I swore to my DJ’ing partners… that the day I didn’t get nervous before a show was the day I’d quit; it meant the excitement, and the passion was gone.

To tie this back, then… Bush, once he got in there, marshalled his butterflies very well indeed; he always does.  I think he’d do himself a service by doing them more often than he does.

And I saw something in his eye last night; I saw someone who was realizing he was doing well…  I think as a result of last night, he’ll be less reluctant in future to do these conferences.

Q&O has more.
So does OTB.
Boortz does too.

Longtime readers will know well that I consider myself a cultural conservative… And, in turn that how successful someone is within a culture, and it’s society is proportional in large part to the degree to which the person, of whatever sex or race, absorbs and adopts, the majority culture. I’ve argued this many times in these spaces.

Doctor Thomas Sowell today confirms what I have long held to be true.

It’s not race… or racism… it’s culture that’s at the center of the issues.

I have some arguments with some of his termenology, but I don’t think he’s far enough off with it to make much of an issue with.

Seems clear to me by way of reading her site this morning that regardless what else she may have gone under with this recently diagnosed cancer.. that Laura’s not lost her
teeth:

“I think I took a turn for the worse when in the middle of the night I turned on CNN to see Al Gore popping gasket about “extreme” judges at the moveon.hasbeens rally. Or was that Darrell Hammond from an old SNL? “

They’re still waiting for the test results to see how nasty that tumor they removed really was.

Laura’s staff makes an imprtant point in all of this:

Remember, Laura’s breast cancer was picked up during a simple breast examination by her OB/GYN. She was a dope (her word, not ours) for not going for a check-up for 4 years! The tumor was not even visible on a mammogram! You MUST make sure that you, and every woman in your life does a monthly breast self-examination. Learn to do it correctly, slowly, carefully. If you feel ANYTHING that seems strange or unusual, go immediately to your OB/GYN. Make sure that you and/or the women you know go for an annual gynecological appointment for a comprehensive check up. Laura is embarrassed to admit she had not been to her doc in more than three years. Really stupid (her words, not ours). Don’t be afraid to ask your friend, girlfriend, sister, mother, or wife if she has done everything to detect breast cancer. We all need someone to remind us, get on us, demand that we take care of ourselves.

What happens to the Democrats, if as I suspect…. Even after this …they can’t prove any wrongdoing on the part of Delay?

It’s as I’ve said for years… Giving a Democrat what they say they want is often the best weapon you can use against them.

Hey, Glenn; Have you lost your boody MIND?