This never made it to ars, and the source can identify himself if he so wishes.

MSNBC has a show called Saturday Final, starring a guy named Lawrence O'Donnell show. Penn Jillette, of the notorious magical duo Penn & Teller, is often a guest on the show. http://www.pennandteller.com is Penn & Teller's site. If you know them, you love them. http://www.msnbc.com/news/937609.asp is the url of the show. You'll note Penn is a regular.

In any case, they were doing a roundup of "winners and losers" of the week, and who does Penn pick, but Ken Dandar, for the victory mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/lwvg

This wouldn't be the first time Penn has trashed the cult of Scientology or its dope fiend leader L. Ron Hubbard. Previously, Penn's "quotable quote" on the subject is: "There was nothing good about the Challenger disaster, but it did happen on the day that L. Ron Hubbard died and it blew that useless, evil, rat bastard's obituary off the front page and that, at least, wasn't bad." --Penn Jillette

This quote occurs in several versions, but this is cited as being from "How to Play in Traffic," so while I haven't checked it, it is at least open to correction.

-- Home of the Buttersquash Conspiracy http://buttersquash.net

From: ptsc <ptsc@nowhere.com>
Subject: Re: Penn Jillette picks Ken Dandar as "winner of the week"
Organization: The Buttersquash Conspiracy
Message-ID: <rgv7lv0k68sebu2qmbta4t8u54ujad25q4@4ax.com>
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:22:31 GMT

On Tue, 02 Sep 2003 02:10:51 GMT, ptsc <ptsc@nowhere.com> wrote:

>This never made it to ars, and the source can identify himself if he so wishes.

The transcript has been dropped in my lap.

SATURDAY FINAL, August 30, 2003, MSNBC

[. . .]

O'DONNELL: OK, and now to Penn Jillette, libertarian, the only person I can find on TV who is to the right of Ann Coulter. Penn Jillette, your winner and loser.

JILLETTE: Well, I don't think you're going to argue with me on this. The winner is Ken Dandar who went up against the cult of Scientology. And they wanted to get $2 million out of him because he had been harassing them with this wrongful death suit, and instead, they got like -- they got $4,500. Essentially, the jury sided with him. So it's -- it's a blow for the empire. Wonderful.

And the loser is the airlines. This weekend, airline travel is down 2.6 percent. But government would like you to believe it is because American are cowards and afraid of terrorism. I would like to believe that it is because Americans still have pride and don't want to be treated like criminals at airports.

--