Jun 03 2009

Sadly, this won’t be the last American Jihadist

Category: Islam,media,military,sharia,society — harmonicminer @ 9:55 am

ARKANSAS’ LONE JIHADIST: HOW ALONE IS HE? (much more at the link)

Here we have a new case of an individual U.S. citizen who committed an act of terror in the name of his ideology (Government officials have called it inaccurately a “political and religious motive”) against U.S. military targets. Do we see a pattern here? Are we witnessing a repeat and copycats? In fact, as we review several previous cases, from the Miami cell case, to the Fort Dix Six, the Georgia two, the New York Four, the Virginia Paintball network, and many other cases, we’re witnessing the surge of a phenomenon we have been warning about. I have repeatedly coined it Mutant Jihad, including in my book Future Jihad. Two important elements are to be taken into consideration: One is the fact that in many of these cases, U.S. military personnel and targets have been on the short list of these “homegrown terrorists.” If you study the repeated targeting process of these urban Jihadists, they systematically focus on military deployment inside the United States. In a sense, even as the perpetrators are separate, dispersed, and not connected, their targeting seems war-like: attacking the enemy’s forces on the homeland. The second element to be taken into consideration is the clear fact that in all these cases, without exception, we’re seeing one ideology: Jihadism. Despite various levels of understanding and sophistication, the cells and lone wolves who were involved in the terror acts, legitimized their action under the label of “Jihad.”

When relatively perfunctory Christians are re-energized, they tend to give more money, act nicer towards their families, and maybe volunteer more. New converts to Christianity simply do not become violent. The exact opposite is true.  The comparison of Christian fundamentalism to Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most dishonest things done in our Left media.

But too many American and British mosques and imams preach ways of thinking and feeling about what it means to be a good Muslim that boil down to jihad. I wish it wasn’t true. But it has been pretty well documented, though not well covered in the major media.

A question: how many Muslim groups immediately issued unconditional condemnation of the murder of the soldier at the recruiting office, and denied that such actions are any part of being a good Muslim?  Google it.  See if you can find even one.

In contrast, pro-life groups around the USA immediately and unconditionally condemned the murder of Tiller the Kansas abortionist.

Maybe the imams will save their statements of condemnation of the murder for the mosque attendees.   Yeah, that’s it.

In the meantime, I guess our military recruiters had better start showing up for work in full battle-rattle.

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Jun 01 2009

Violence against abortionists: incredibly rare

Category: abortion,media,society — harmonicminer @ 9:24 am

An abortionist who specializes in late-term abortion has been murdered in church.

Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.

It was, of course, morally wrong to kill the abortionist. However, if there are so “few providers of late-term abortions,” they must be awfully busy to do the 10,000 or so abortions that are done each year after 21 weeks development in the womb.

Survival Rates

* Babies born at 23 weeks have a 17% chance of survival
* Babies born at 24 weeks have a 39% chance of survival
* Babies born at 25 weeks have a 50% chance of survival
* From 32 weeks onwards, most babies are able to survive with the help of medical Technology [EPICure data]

Continuing with the report:

……..

Police did not release a motive for the shooting. But the doctor’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

I always thought a “string” meant something that happened often enough to have a pattern with some kind of frequency.  Can you remember the last time something like this happened?  Be honest now…  what year was it?  What happened?  Did you have to look it up on Wikipedia to remember?  I thought so.

Stolz said all indications were that the gunman acted alone, although authorities were investigating whether he had any connection to anti-abortion groups.

Well, of course.  Anti-abortion groups are full of well-known killers, aren’t they?

Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services clinic is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.

This is a flat lie.  Open your telephone book.  Look up abortion providers in the Yellow Pages, in any reasonably large city.  You’ll find “clinics” advertising “procedures to 24 weeks” and some to 28 weeks.  In any case, most hospitals will do late abortions that are truly required to save the life of the mother.   These specialized late term clinics serve women who have some “reason” other than saving their lives.  And this glaring error alone should create doubt in your mind about the accuracy of the rest of the reporting.

“We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down,” Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president, said in a statement. “Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.”

And you can be pretty sure they mean it, since these people tend to take the ten commandments reasonably seriously.
……..

The last killing of an abortion doctor was in October 1998 when Dr. Barnett Slepian was fatally shot in his home in a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y. A militant abortion opponent was convicted of the murder.

Wait… didn’t someone say there was a “string” of this sort of thing? From where I sit, it seems to be safer to be an abortionist than a university professor. Several have been murdered on campus in pretty recent times.  And it’s LOTS more dangerous to do research on animal subjects than to do abortions….  those animal rights people are SERIOUS.

……
Federal marshals protected Tiller during the 1991 Summer of Mercy protests, and he was protected again between 1994 and 1998 after another abortion provider was assassinated and federal authorities reported finding Tiller’s name on an assassination list.

Another flat lie. The “assassination list” was merely a list of late-term abortion providers, and the text accompanying the list specifically “accused them of ‘crimes against humanity’ and offered a $5,000 reward for the ‘arrest, conviction and revocation of license to practice medicine’ of these physicians.”   If it was an “assassination” list, why have there been no murders of abortionists since 1998?  If abortion foes have ANY significant percentage of people in their ranks who are capable of doing an act like this, how is it that the last one was 1998?  Calling that list an “assassination list” is a capitulation  to the PR strategy of the abortionists…  of course, that’s exactly what the media have done, isn’t it?

So don’t look for reason or balance in the coverage of this murder.  Look for over-heated rhetoric, fulminating with barely concealed hatred for anyone who simply wants to save the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable among us.  Look for an attempt to connect pro-life groups to incitement to murder, without any factual predicate.

While you’re at it, consider this: because of the confluence of political issues, and the fact that anti-abortion people tend to hold traditional values on a range of issues, a larger percentage of them than the general population are also gun owners.  Does anyone think, if any measurable percentage of pro-lifers were willing to kill abortionists, that there would be very many abortionists left?

I am guessing that more abortionists and abortion mill employees have died in car accidents driving to work, since 1998, than this single murder.  There are a LOT of them (abortion providers, that is).   I don’t expect any news coverage of that fact, however.

But that’s the measure of the actual risk of what they do (risk to themselves, that is).  They’re in more danger from tailgaters than rabid pro-lifers.

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May 23 2009

Seeing with one eye — the LEFT one

Category: media — harmonicminer @ 9:13 am

Cheney’s speech contained omissions, misstatements

And Obama’s didn’t? This is just the very model of selective reporting.

In any case, when was the last time you saw ANY report in the major media that simply went down a list of Obama’s statements in a speech, and then quoted someone else contradicting each one with contrary information and perspectives, without then giving Obama’s side a chance to rebut THOSE positions?  What, you say you can’t remember that EVER happening?

I can’t either.

The media could start with fair reporting on what he’s doing to the economy, and plans to do to health care.

But that would be in some alternate universe where the major media wasn’t made up of Obama groupies.

In any case, note that most of the “contradictory evidence” reported by the article comes from people now in Obama’s pay or sphere of influence.

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Apr 14 2009

Obama worship has its limits

Category: media — harmonicminer @ 9:33 am

It is simply shocking that the president of the United States has some secrets he wants to keep.

What’s funny is that as Obama the president takes over, to any small degree, from Obama the campaigner, his supporters are loving the opportunity to pretend objectivity by lambasting him on relatively minor issues, all the while still supporting him, and not acknowledging their own complicity in failing to ask him any tough questions DURING the campaign.  This is all pretty small beans.  Every president tries to preserve and extend presidential power after entering office.  And maybe, just maybe, Obama has learned some things from intelligence briefings since taking office, things Bush knew and couldn’t discuss, that have altered our new president’s perspectives on a few matters.

But journalistic credibility is hard to come by these days, so those still in the tank for the annointed one have to make lots of noise on minor matters to hide their fecklessness in serious reporting on his economic policies, foreign tour debacles, and the like.

Keith Olbermann’s scathing criticism of Obama’s secrecy/immunity claims – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right — which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration — large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann — who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) — devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder’s DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration’s use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and — worse still — a brand new claim of “sovereign immunity” to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here. Just as revealingly, the top recommended Kos diary today (voted by the compulsively pro-Obama Kos readership) is one devoted to attacking Obama for his embrace of Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity doctrines. Also, a front page Daily Kos post yesterday by McJoan vehemently criticizing Obama (and quoting my criticisms at length) sparked near universal condemnation of Obama in the hundreds of comments that followed. Additionally, my post on Monday spawned vehement objections to what Obama is doing in this area from the largest tech/privacy sites, such as Boing Boing and Slashdot.

In the meantime, too much of this post by Greenwald seems to be about what a cool guy he is, and how influential he is.

I wonder when the Left media will get around to serious consideration of the disastrous spending Obama is trying to ram through Congress?  Does anyone think they’re ever going to criticize him three or four times as much as they did Bush, for having deficits three or four times the highest Bush ever had, and doing it year after year (in even the rosiest scenario for the “out years”)?

But to the Left, the growth of government is virtually an intrinsic good.  The bigger the better.  So to divert us, let’s consider again the amazingly disgusting scene of a president keeping secrets.

Sigh.

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Apr 10 2009

Selling out for free

Category: media — harmonicminer @ 10:08 am

Uproar over ‘news story’ ad on front page of LA Times

An advertisement dressed up as a news story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times has reporters at the newspaper fuming and the publisher defending the move.

The advertisement, for the NBC television series “Southland,” appeared on page one of the Times on Thursday. Although it was labelled “advertisement,” the ad resembled a news story complete with a bold-type headline.

According to the blog MediaMemo, more than 100 staffers at the newspaper signed a petition protesting the appearance of the fake news story ad on the front page.

“We the journalists of the newsroom strenuously object to the decision to sell an ad, in the form of a phony news story, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times,” mediamemo.allthingsd.com quoted the petition as saying.

“The NBC ad may have provided some quick cash, but it has caused incalculable damage to this institution,” it said. “Placing a fake news article on A-1 makes a mockery of our integrity and our journalistic standards.

“Our willingness to sell our most precious real estate to an advertiser is embarrassing and demoralizing,” the petition said.

I guess the LATimes’ “journalists” have a problem not so much with selling out as making a profit for it, judging from their behavior in the last election cycle, in which the front page was repeatedly used for unpaid campaign ads for Obama.

Apparently they didn’t find that “embarrassing and demoralizing.”

A “mockery of our integrity and our journalistic standards,” indeed.

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Apr 08 2009

Claiming your rights? You don’t have them anymore.

Category: government,media — harmonicminer @ 9:43 am

The new Miranda non-warning given by airport TSA:

In short:

You do not have the right to remain silent.

You do not have the right to ASK if you have the right to remain silent.

You do not have the right to have money on an airplane.

Media observation:

If, instead of a Ron Paul supporter, this had been an ACORN worker on his way to Missouri to buy votes, don’t you know the media would have been all over this?  Discrimination, harassment, “trashing the Constitution and Bill of Rights” would have been the cry of the hour.

In the meantime, the old line, “If you have nothing to hide then you should give up your rights,” is the first refuge of law enforcement scoundrels, to which the only response is to say, very politely, slowly and evenly, “I disagree, sir (or ma’am), that my rights do not mean anything, and I decline to surrender them without cause.”

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Apr 03 2009

Buy and save ice: it will be valuable some day

Category: global warming,media — harmonicminer @ 7:39 am

If an oil company sponsored a study wherein scientists concluded that arctic sea ice will remain relatively constant within a range of fluctuation, the eviro-pagan-eco-panic lobby would cry, “But those scientists are in the pay of the evil polluters, and aren’t objective!”

The most important thing you need to know about THIS study is in the last paragraph of the article, reproduced here:

Arctic sea ice melting faster than expected

The study was supported by the NOAA Climate Change Program Office, the Institute for the Study of the Ocean and Atmosphere and the U.S. Department of Energy.

You don’t suppose that the NOAA Climate Change Program Office has just a little, teeny motivation to always find climate change in the results of any study, do you?

Nah. They’re all just objective scientists, disinterestedly going about the business of the people.  They really all wish global warming wasn’t true, so they could just go home and collect unemployment checks.

Somewhere between 10 and 100 times as much money has been spent by government as has been spent by private industry researching the same issue, “proving” global warming is a big problem, and is caused by humans, mostly.  Huge numbers of scientists and bureaucrats depend for their very living on continuously finding more evidence of global warming, all the while claiming scientists working for private industry are “tainted” by industry money.

Something smells about this bit of sophistry, and it’s not the methane or the CO2.

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Mar 18 2009

An anchor around CBS’s neck

Category: election 2008,media,Palin — harmonicminer @ 9:32 am

The “most trusted man in America” has had his name used to shower kudos on surely one of the least trustworthy news anchors in America, Katie Couric, who has fewer daily viewers than Rush Limbaugh has listeners, if I’m reading the chart here correctly.

Don’t you know, it’s always profound journalism to attack anyone from the Right.   The simplest way to get professional recognition in academia and journalism is simply to be very left.  Advocate for the, uh, “right” stuff, and you’re a cinch to receive some award from somebody for something.

So you thought Katie Couric did the tough job of revealing “the real Sarah Palin” by demonstrating that she doesn’t read, and is incoherent?

In Media Malpractice, John Ziegler tells the truth about Katie Couric’s deliberate hit-job on Sarah Palin, proving with complete interview excerpts that:

1)  A widely circulated “incoherent answer” from Palin was actually her attempt to answer an incoherent question from Couric, which was always conveniently removed from the replay that “went viral”.  When you see the question, suddenly Palin’s answer makes sense, though everyone from CNN to SNL focused only on the answer without providing the context of what the question was.

2)  Palin’s refusal to list the exact things she reads for Couric,  which was nothing more than Palin’s refusal to be a good little schoolgirl and recite for the schoolmarm, was widely and deceitfully used by Couric and others to imply that Palin doesn’t read anything.

3)  Couric deliberately phrased questions to attempt to remove the best answers from the table before Palin could reply.  “Other than trying to reform Fannie and Freddie, what’s the most important thing John McCain has done to improve regulation?”  That’s about like asking, “Other than Social Security, what’s the most important thing FDR did for old people?”    And then, insanely, when Palin answered that fixing Fannie and Freddie WAS the most important thing McCain had tried to do in the regulation arena, other reporters (like Major Garrett, still impersonating an officer) said she hadn’t even given THAT answer, to Couric’s great joy, of course.  Garrett appears not even to have the grace to be embarrassed about it.

Sure, I wish Palin had mentioned something else just to show she knew McCain’s record, like campaign finance reform, but maybe she thought (justifiably) that “campaign finance reform” was actually a bad idea, and didn’t want to put a positive spin on it.  In any case, the entire episode was among the LEAST revealing bits of journalism around, other than showing very clearly the agenda that motivates let’s-pretend-journalism at CBS.

Media Malpractice has much more, including all the real gaffes committed by Joe Biden when he was interviewed by Couric, which were conveniently downplayed, or totally deepsixed, and to which no follow up questions were asked.

For example, Ed Morrisey reports here:

I guess the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center never saw Katie’s crack journalistic work with Joe Biden. CBS crabbed at YouTube and got the video taken down, but the flavor remains:

Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.

He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.'”

FDR wasn’t President when the stock market crashed, and he didn’t get on TV until a decade later, but Couric never seems to notice either gaffe. Why? She wasn’t out to get Joe Biden.

And that’s pretty much about the size of it for most of what passes as journalism these days. When the Left flubs, it isn’t even news, but creating news by misrepresenting the Right is always fair game.

The schadenfreud of watching CBS News’ ratings in free-fall is delicious.  Keep up the great work, Katie.  I’m sure you can land a nice sinecure teaching journalism somewhere to wide-eyed graduate students who want nothing more than to learn how “the pros” do it.  On the other hand, cheer up:  maybe the clowns you helped elect will send a nice bailout to CBS.

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Mar 13 2009

Chris Matthews vs Ari Fleischer

Category: media — harmonicminer @ 9:54 am

Chris Matthews features prominently in the new movie Media Malpractice as essentially a shill for Obama. (Full disclosure: I provided the music for the film.)

Now, Matthews displays again his uncanny knack for completely distorting facts and misrepresenting contexts. Watch, and judge for yourself:

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Mar 11 2009

Che: Why not make a nice movie lionizing Lenin?

Category: media — harmonicminer @ 9:37 am

The New Che, Same as the Old

Most of what you’ve heard about Steven Soderbergh’s Che is true. At four and a half hours, the film, now playing in selected domestic markets and available on video on demand, is extremely long. And even at this length, the film skips over the least convenient, indeed morally repulsive, period of Ernesto Guevara’s life. It’s a testament to Soderbergh’s skill that the film still has some merit—above all, the director’s typically meticulous composition and audacious experiments with form—but it falls abjectly short of accuracy.

…….Soderbergh presents Che as an unabashedly ideological revolutionary who rejects any path for change aside from violent struggle. For the most part, the film focuses on his two periods of most intense guerrilla activity, in Cuba and then in Bolivia—revolutions to the death in each case. A fellow moviegoer observed afterward that she no longer thought of Guevara as “cuddly.” That’s a start.

Yet for Soderbergh, this violent Guevara remains a sympathetic figure. Such admiration may have motivated the director’s omission of the years that Guevara spent after the revolution in Castro’s Cuba, supervising executions, establishing the state police, and helping build an authoritarian state—unpleasant activities that the Che T-shirt crowd would rather not examine. It’s a politically convenient choice, to be sure, but given the film’s emphasis on Guevara’s guerrilla career, perhaps it makes some artistic sense. A few flashbacks intervene, but for the most part the film concerns itself with combat and survival in the Cuban and Bolivian countryside. This close attention to the practicalities of guerrilla warfare binds together what might have been two tonally incoherent episodes—in two different countries and separated by nine years. Showing Guevara’s comparatively humdrum years in Castro Cuba—where he killed from behind a desk instead of from behind a rifle—might have enervated the film’s narrative energy.

Hollywood continues the whitewash, with just enough truth to claim objectivity, but not enough to provide real understanding of the murderer.

No surprise there, of course, since few of us want to understand murderers, and since telling the truth tends to make for difficult to watch story lines.

I’m still waiting for Hollywood to make a nice movie to “humanize” Lenin, or Stalin, or maybe Hitler.  I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.  Probably win some Oscars.

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