USNewsLink™ © 2003

2002 MEATHEAD AWARDS
Stupid Is As Stupid Does

by Judith Haney,
The one and only judge in the contest!

Meathead Michael Jackson, Immature-Pseudo-White-Guy, recently engaged in dark, child endangerment, behavior that can only be described as "unbalanced."  A sequence of photographs below show Jackson holding his youngest child, Prince Michael II, outside the protective railing at a height of four stories from a German hotel balcony.

Thus far, Jackson has not been charged with a crime, however, the incident did nothing if not prove what the public already knows, i.e., Jackson labors under the false impression that he can conduct himself in any manner he chooses absent any consequences.

However, the world-wide public rebuke Jackson has suffered over this incident will outlast his contributions to the music industry. And beyond that consequence, we believe Jackson is building a history with the state of California wherein he will eventually be held accountable for his unlawful, bizarre, acts.

Meathead W.W. 'Hootie' Johnson, Chairman, Augusta National Golf Club, the private club, which hosts the Masters, made an unprecedented decision Friday, August 30, 2002, to cut all outside sponsorship ties with its 2003 golf tournament.

Rather than allowing the Masters' telecast sponsors to face pressure from the National Council of Women's Organizations, which wants Augusta National to admit a female member, Meathead Hootie Johnson has decided to suspend one year contracts with its three corporate sponsors and conduct next year's tournament without commercials.

NCWO's Letter of June 12

Hootie Johnson's Letter of July 8

Hootie Johnson's Release to the Press of July 9

In a media release August 30, 2000, Johnson said he made the decision because, "They [the NCWO] have now begun to pressure the media sponsors of the Masters.
"As we predicted several weeks ago," Johnson said in the statement, "the National Council of Women's Organizations has launched a corporate campaign against the Masters Tournament and Augusta National Golf Club to force Augusta National to immediately invite women to join our club."
Johnson said in July that he expected pressure to be exerted against the tournament's corporate sponsors. His statement Friday said that process has already begun.
"We are sorry, but not surprised, to see these corporations drawn into this matter, but continue to insist that our private club should not be 'managed' by an outside group," Johnson said Friday. "As I previously said, there may come a day when women will be invited to join our club, but that decision must be ours.
Meathead Johnson is a director of Bank of America Corporation, Duke Power Company, Liberty Corporation, and ALLTEL Corporation.
Women should immediately boycott the Master's corporate sponsors, cancel their accounts with Alltel, and withdraw their money from Bank of America. To fail to do so would be to endorse this bigot's discriminatory practices.

Hootie Johnson has earned USNewsLink's Meathead Award twice. One for blocking women and one for blocking older players from competing in the Master's Golf Tournament!
When Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones founded the Masters, it was all about tradition. The purse was, for many years, much less than most tournaments. The prize was the coveted green jacket and the lifetime invitation. Now, Chairman Hootie Johnson has sent a letter to some older champions saying they can no longer compete.
He did not have the courage to send a letter to my favorite player, Arnold Palmer, even though he did not have a chance to win. Mr. Palmer showed a lot more class than Chairman Johnson by announcing his retirement from the Masters because, in his words, "I didn't want to get a letter."
If Mr. Roberts was alive, I feel sure he would send Chairman Johnson his letter. Because of Chairman Johnson, we will not be able to see some of the legends of golf in Augusta again. Chairman Johnson has cheapened the Masters to the point that maybe the winner next year will win a green T-shirt.

So, Hootie? Where do you think you'll be playing golf after you're run out of Augusta? - Editor

Meathead Howard Kurtz, author of "How Weblogs Keep the Media Honest," has once again held himself well above the fray by spraying a boatload of HOGWASH across the pages of the Washington Post on the subject of Internet journalists and their respective intentions. It seems Kurtz has added mind reading and crystal ball gazing to the list of his various and sundry pseudo-specialties.
In his latest piece of "I've gotta drum something up in a hurry in order to keep my job" journalism, Kurtz raves, "web loggers, for those who have been vacationing on Mars, are one-person Internet blabbermouths who pop off to anyone is willing to listen. They often slam each other like pro wrestlers, but some of the best take on – sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, often ideologically – the big newspapers and networks."
Kurtz appears to have exhausted his creativity and is now relying upon contrived, misconstrued, and willfully misleading penmanship to keep his job at the Post.
Oh well, it's a man's world after all and Kurtz is a prime example of how men get the prime, high profile, jobs no matter how incompetent and lazy they are, over women who offer energy, creativity, and enterprise in their journalistic work.
And needless to say, it doesn't hurt one bit if you're a Jew since they seem to receive preferential treatment over non-Jews when it comes to getting the best jobs at the nation's leading news publications.
P.S. A private message to Kurtz from Haney: The next time you're in a hurry to rush something to the presses, let's hear from you on the subject of your midnight telephone calls and private emails to Matt Drudge wherein you slip him a "piece" of news. Now that would be worth reading about.

Meathead Rita "Thong-Check" Wilson, 47, a Rancho Bernardo High School administrator, in the Poway Unified School District of San Diego, Calif, was demoted to a teaching position Monday, 6/17/2002, for lifting girls' skirts on April 26th, to make sure they weren't wearing thongs to a high school dance.

Wilson's thong check in front of male students and adults enraged parents, one of whom threatened to sue.

An investigation by the school district concluded Wilson "went far beyond the grounds of propriety" with the underwear inspection.

Students said Wilson lifted girls' skirts before they entered the dance, and told those wearing thongs to go home and change.

Wilson said she was concerned the combination of revealing clothing and suggestive dancing could lead to sexual assaults.

In some cases, said Rancho Bernardo parent Kim Teal, girls also were made to partially undress if Wilson or another teacher suspected that they weren't wearing bras.

According to reports, hundreds of girls attended the dance, which had a "blast from the past" theme and that most of those wearing skirts or dresses reported being grilled about their underwear or forced to show them to Wilson or another teacher, Natalie Johnson.

Wilson and Johnson also checked several boys who were wearing toga-style costumes requiring them to show their underwear, Teal said, and girls were often asked about their bras. "I just got a call from one mom who said her daughter was wearing a poodle skirt and an off-the-shoulder top and a teacher reached right out and grabbed the front of it and pulled it down to check," Teal said.

"I'm very disappointed and deeply saddened," Wilson, said upon learning of her demotion.

Wilson's victims are even more disappointed and deeply saddened that they will have to attend a school system who employs the likes of her.

Meatheads Betty Bettis and Thomas L. Sims, two teachers at Pitcher Elementary School, in Kansas City, Missouri, deserve this award for strip-searching a class of third graders when $5 in lunch money disappeared on Monday, March 18, 2002.

According to several parents, lunch money collected in Bettis' third-grade class apparently came up $5 short. When efforts to find the money, or to get anyone to say what happened to it, failed, a strip search was conducted.

Bettis took the girls into a bathroom and had them remove their clothing to their underwear, parents said. Then the girls were sent in pairs into bathroom stalls and told to look inside each other's underwear. The teacher did not go into the stalls, parents said.

Sims took the boys into the gym, parents said. The boys were led one at a time into a locker room, where they had to strip completely and shake their underwear.

The money, according to the parents' accounts, was later found in a boys' bathroom. District officials confirmed the money was found, but not because of the search.

Meathead Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, deserves this award for his premature, incomprehensible, decision to send American troops to fight in the Operation Anaconda mission without advance and adequate air support and reliable advance intelligence.
1. During interviews, the returning troops from Operation Anaconda said they did not expect to be in the field so long.
2. Some spoke of temperatures well below freezing at night. There were cases of hypothermia, they said, and drinking water would freeze.
3. For the first three days, the troops slept on the ground huddled together for warmth under a single blanket.
4. The soldiers were unprepared for the subfreezing temperatures at 10,000 feet -- some said they hadn't even brought sleeping bags.
5. American troops were unexpectedly forced to do the fiercest fighting in Operation Anaconda after an allied Afghan general retreated under withering fire from foes who might have been tipped off about the attack, senior military officers said.
6. The Afghan retreat and subsequent battlefield confusion in the operation's early hours led swiftly to American combat deaths and allowed hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters to surge into the fight from hide-outs in nearby mountains and valleys, these officials said, creating a massed enemy force larger than American commanders anticipated.
7. Thanks to Tommy Franks misplaced trust in Afghan military leaders, failure to confirm intelligence information, and his reckless disregard for the clear and present danger he placed our American troops squarely in the middle of, our American troops suffered needlessly, lost their lives, and sustained serious wounds.
8. Three U.S. soldiers recovering at a military hospital in Germany described how a mission to hunt al-Qaida and Taliban fighters turned into a daylong firefight in the Afghan mountains.
9. The three members of the 10th Mountain Division said at a news conference that more than 100 U.S. forces members were pinned down Saturday, March 2, 2002, in a valley until helicopters were able to pull them out under cover of darkness.
10. The soldiers were hit by bullets or mortar rounds from enemy fighters who they said were perched on overlooking ridges and ducked into caves to defy U.S. bombers' and helicopters' attempts to dislodge them.
11. "They'd been fighting there for 20 years before we got there," said Spec. Wayne Stanton, 20, of Rockwood, Tenn. "We could hear them laughing at us when we tried to shoot at them."
12. "We're fighting in their back yard," said Spec. Ricardo Miranda, 20, of Salinas, Calif., whose right arm and left leg were heavily bandaged. "They know where every crack in that mountain is, every cubbyhole, every cave."
Congratulations General Meathead! The next time, let's send you to the front without adequate air support, unreliable intelligence information, inadequate supplies, in sub-zero temperatures at an altitude of 10,000 feet. You deserve nothing less than to suffer the same deadly environment you have so willingly exposed our loyal American troops to.

ADDITIONAL READING ABOUT THIS MISSION:

Ambush at Takur Ghar: Part I
Bravery and Breakdowns in a Ridgetop Battle
Seven U.S. servicemen died on an Afghan ridge in an battle that revealed flaws in the U.S. military operations.
Washington Post, May 24, 2002
In the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a Navy SEAL watches U.S. forces destroy munitions captured from al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Navy SEALS played a leading role in the combat of March 4, the deadliest day of the Afghan war for U.S. soldiers.

A Wintry Ordeal at 10,000 Feet: Part II
Washington Post, May 25, 2002

Equipment Failures Hindered Battle
Yahoo, May 24, 2002
The deadliest firefight for the United States in the Afghan war — a mountain battle that killed seven Americans — was beset by communications problems, the Pentagon said Friday.

The war commander, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, attributed the problems to the harsh weather and equipment failures, such as broken radios and shot-up helicopters, rather than to human error.

In a leadup to Memorial Day, he praised the bravery of the troops and the success, though costly, of the operation in recounting the battle on the frigid mountaintop against dug-in al-Qaida fighters. A commando who fell out of a helicopter and six soldiers who tried to rescue him were killed.

"That battle showed heroism," Franks said. "It showed fog, uncertainty, it showed friction, elements common to every war I think we've fought."

"In the end the bravery and the audacity and certainly the tenacity of the people involved in that operation carried the day."

During the battle, in March in an area of eastern Afghanistan the locals call Takur Ghar, U.S. commanders watched helplessly as a Predator drone relayed live video of some of the fighting.

The operation was hurt by communications problems, from a reconnaissance flight that failed to detect al-Qaida forces lying in wait to the difficulties that troops on the ground and in helicopters had in raising their commanders and nearby warplane pilots.

Franks indicated troops in the heat of the fight might have used a wrong radio frequency.

But he said no changes in command arrangements between regular and special forces were made as a result of a Pentagon review. He said of the people on the scene that day: "I think their judgments were good."

Nor did he think it was extraordinary that equipment would malfunction given the circumstances. "In the middle of a firefight, things will get shot up," he said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was briefed on the review's findings on Thursday.

"As in most human endeavors, plans are never executed exactly the way they're developed," Rumsfeld said.

The battle was part of Operation Anaconda, a U.S.-led effort to encircle and eliminate a large number of al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in the mountains south of Gardez. It began early in the morning of March 4, when a CH-47 Chinook helicopter tried to drop a team of Navy SEAL commandos near the top of a mountain.

There were heavily armed al-Qaida fighters there, and they shot at the chopper with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The helicopter was hit, and as it lurched away to safety, Navy Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts tumbled out the rear door.

Roberts survived the fall, but was eventually surrounded and killed by the al-Qaida fighters.

Six others were killed as two other Chinooks dropped in teams to rescue Roberts or recover his body.

One man, Air Force Tech. Sgt. John Chapman, was with Roberts' group of SEALs. They had boarded another Chinook and returned to the mountain to get Roberts but also came under fire and fell back, farther down the mountain, before the third Chinook arrived.

Five of the dead were from that last team, Army Rangers and Air Force commandos whose Chinook landed after daybreak at the spot where Roberts fell out of his helicopter. The third Chinook also came under heavy fire and was disabled; it was believed that the four Rangers killed were shot either inside the helicopter or as they were trying to leave it.

The surviving members of the Ranger unit battled the al-Qaida forces for hours before being evacuated.