This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Media

  • In case you forgot; the Peirs Morgan edition

    So we’ve got this fellow from across the pond injecting himself into our most energetic national debates named Peirs Morgan who currently works at CNN. Aside from his recent attempts to influence public opinion in the gun debate, it looks like he also said the other day that we need to amend the Bible along with our Constitution.

    There’s movement underway to have his scurvy dog ass deported by petition to the White House. And there’s a counter petition by Brits demanding that we keep his him.

    [T]he counter-petition against deporting Morgan reads:

    “We want to keep Piers Morgan in the USA.

    “There are two very good reasons for this. Firstly, the first amendment.

    “Second and the more important point. No one in the UK wants him back.

    “Actually there is a third. It will be hilarious to see how loads of angry Americans react.”

    So why wouldn’t they want him back. I think a more appropriate question would be “Why would CNN hire him in the first place?” If you’ve forgotten, he was fired as a journalist by the Daily Mirror back in 2004 because he faked pictures of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment mistreating Iraqi prisoners;

    At a news conference in Preston on Friday afternoon, the regiment demonstrated to reporters aspects of uniform and equipment which it said proved the photographs were fake.

    The regiment’s Brigadier Geoff Sheldon said the vehicle featured in the photographs had been located in a Territorial Army base in Lancashire and had never been in Iraq.

    And Morgan stuck to the lie;

    The BBC’s Nicholas Witchell said it appeared Piers Morgan remained unrepentant right to the end

    “According to one report Mr Morgan refused the demand to apologise, was sacked and immediately escorted from the building,” he said.

    Yeah, Peirs Morgan is a bomb thrower, not a journalist. I think CNN should reconsider the decision to hire Morgan, and then, without a job, his stank ass would have to leave the country. One stone.

  • Those gun owners next door

    The Journal News compounded their idiotic posting of gun owners’ personal information on their interactive website this weekend by trying to explain it;

    In May, Richard V. Wilson approached a female neighbor on the street and shot her in the back of the head, a crime that stunned their quiet Katonah neighborhood.

    What was equally shocking for some was the revelation that the mentally disturbed 77-year-old man had amassed a cache of weapons — including two unregistered handguns and a large amount of ammunition — without any neighbors knowing.

    “I think that the access to guns in this country is ridiculous, that anybody can get one,” said a neighbor of Wilson’s who requested anonymity because it’s not known whether the gunman, whose unnamed victim survived, will return home or be sent to prison. “Would I have bought this house knowing somebody (close by) had an arsenal of weapons? No, I would not have.”

    Now, wait a second, the killer “amassed” a cache of unregistered weapons, but somehow that justifies publishing the names and addresses of people who have legally acquired their firearms? How, exactly does that work?

    Combined with laws that allow the purchase of rifles and shotguns without a permit, John Thompson, a program manager for Project SNUG at the Yonkers Family YMCA, said that leaves the public knowing little about the types of deadly weapons that might be right next door.

    “I would love to know if someone next to me had guns. It makes me safer to know so I can deal with that,” said Thompson, whose group counsels youths against gun violence. “I might not choose to live there.”

    Well, then go to the town clerk’s office and find out, dimbulb. In fact, make sure your name gets on the list of people easiest to victimize, but don’t demonize people who don’t see themselves as potential victims.

    In the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and amid renewed nationwide calls for stronger gun control, some Lower Hudson Valley residents would like lawmakers to expand the amount of information the public can find out about gun owners. About 44,000 people in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam — one out of every 23 adults — is licensed to own a handgun.

    And 100% of those 44,000 people didn’t commit any crimes with their legal handguns yesterday, so what’s your point?

    The blog, For What It’s Worth, posts the public information available for Dwight R Worley, the fellow who wrote the article, I’m sure he doesn’t mind that everyone knows where he lives, since he has a gun permit, too.

    By the way, I didn’t link to the LoHud story on purpose because they’ve set up some BS subscription thingie since early this morning that won’t let you see the article until you subscribe. But I found a cache copy of the article.

  • DC Police investigate Gregory

    DavidGregory

    According to a link sent us by Hondo, Snafu Dude and Preston, from Breitbart‘s Warner Todd Huston, the DC police are investigating whether David Gregory violated DC’s restrictive laws against large-capacity magazines.

    Breitbart contacted the office of the police chief and asked if there were any plans to look into this apparent violation of the District’s gun laws. In response, Chief Lanier replied, “Yes, we are investigating the incident to determine if the magazine was in fact real.”

    In my search for large capacity magazines over the last week, I’ve discovered that there are 10-round magazines out there made to look like 30-round magazines, so I’m pretty sure that’s the excuse that we’re going to hear as a way to help gregory escape the clutches of the DC police. Either that or some poor intern will take the fall for smuggling the illegal, harmless inanimate object into the District.

    Anyone who holds out hope that Pretty Boy Metrosexual Gregory will do a perp walk for us is deluding themselves. Some animals are more equal than others.

  • The media and guns

    I guess NBC’s David Gregory fancies himself in the vanguard of gun control in the media. He confronted Wayne LaPierre, from the NRA yesterday on Meet the Press with what looks like a 30-round AR15 magazine.

    DavidGregory

    The problem is that the NBC studio is in downtown DC a few blocks from the White House and large box magazines (more than 10 round capacity) are illegal in the District to even possess;

    D.C. Official Code § 7-2506.01
    “(b) No person in the District shall possess, sell, or transfer any large capacity ammunition feeding device regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm. For the purposes of this subsection, the term “large capacity ammunition feeding device” means a magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

    I’m pretty sure that the law means “no person” when it says “no person” and that Gregory is indeed a person, regardless of his intent of bringing that magazine into the District.

    Besides breaking the law, Gregory wanted to put his hypocrisy on display by poking LaPierre about his idea for having armed personnel in schools to protect the children. The Weekly Standard had this to say about that;

    But when it comes to Gregory’s own kids, however, they are secured every school day by armed guards.

    The Gregory children go to school with the children of President Barack Obama, according to the Washington Post. That school is the co-ed Quaker school Sidwell Friends.

    According to a scan of the school’s online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are police officers, who are presumably armed.

    Moreover, with the Obama kids in attendance, there is a secret service presence at the institution, as well.

    It’s safe to say the school where Gregory sends his kids is a high-security school. It’s just odd he’d want it for his kids, but wouldn’t be more open to it for others.

    But then who is surprised?

    Meanwhile, Derek sends us a link to the the Westchester and Rockland counties, New York newspaper, The Journal News which thought it was important to inform their readers where legal owners live by providing them an interactive map which gives the full name and street address of each legal gun owner for some stupid reason. If I were a non-gun owner, I’d be upset, because now the criminals know which houses not to rob and which are less risk. What does the Journal expect? That neighborhoods will run out of town the folks who follow the law and get permits for their guns?

    Somehow, I guess they think they’re providing a public service, but all they’re doing is showing how they’re creepy little busy-bodies who don’t understand the discussion at all and should have nothing to say, because everything they’re saying is misguided bullshit.

  • Karen Jeffrey: making up news

    Chief Tango sends us a link in the Cape Cod Times in which the periodical is forced to apologize for their “journalist” Karen Jeffrey who has been making up sources for her articles for the last 30 years. 69 phony sources in 34 articles since 1998.

    The investigation of Jeffrey’s work began Nov. 12 when a Veterans Day assignment raised questions among editors, who decided to closely review the story Jeffrey wrote.

    Jeffrey’s Veterans story begins this way:

    “CHATHAM — Ronald Chipman and his family were strolling along Chatham’s Main Street when they noticed traffic slowed. A crowd of people gathered at the small rotary ahead.

    “Flags, uniforms, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The Chipmans were momentarily puzzled.

    “‘I looked at my wife. She looked back at me. We had the same guilty thought — Veterans Day — and we thought nothing about it except as a long weekend on the Cape until we saw that,’ said Chipman, 46, a Boston resident. ‘You live in the city and sometimes you forget about things like this — about things still mattering to people,’ he said.”

    The editors were unable to find the Chipman family. When asked if she could help locate the family, Jeffrey said she could not because she threw away her notes.

  • WaPost supports Tricare hikes

    Chief Tango and Pat sent us a link to the Washington Post’s editorial today in which the Post advocates jacking up Tricare costs for military retirees.

    Yeah, big surprise that the liberals at the Washington Post, who support Obamacare on the false premise that it will lower everyone’s healthcare costs, is willing to jack up healthcare costs for Tricare participants.

    …[T]he administration plans cuts, including shrinking the Army and the Marine Corps. This is risky, given the potential threats the United States faces. Unfortunately, Congress is compounding the problem by protecting expensive items that inflate personnel costs without any corresponding payoff in defense readiness.

    We refer to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s refusal to accept an administration proposal to trim Tricare, the military health-care program for which 9.7 million active and retired military personnel and family members are eligible. Obviously, those who serve or served their country deserve generous health benefits. But Tricare goes well beyond that. The service is free for active-duty service members and their families except for some prescription copayments. For retirees under the age of 65, many of whom are in the work force and eligible for employer-provided benefits, Tricare costs at most $1,000 per year out of pocket — less than a fifth of civilian plans, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    Um, “without any corresponding payoff in defense readiness”? How about retention? Isn’t retention a readiness issue? Who the hell is going to reenlist if we can’t trust the Pentagon to keep their promises?

    Of course, their argument is that many retirees work and can afford health care, but then that’s not the point is it? We paid for our healthcare with our youth and our blood and sweat, based on promises that were made to us. That’s why it’s called a benefit. I don’t care if Tricare costs $.05/year – it’s too much, because that’s what we stayed in the service for.

    The Post supports quadrupling Tricare enrollment fees;

    The maximum fee would quadruple to $2,000 — still far less than most civilian plans. Most beneficiaries would not pay even that much.

    I really don’t care how much less than civilian plans it would cost, that’s not the point. We were promised free healthcare in exchange for our youth and commitment. Now that we’ve fulfilled our end of the bargain, they want to renege on their promise.

    No doubt America’s military retirees are a powerful lobby, their might enhanced by the basic justice of their claim to have given much to their country. At the moment, however, debt is one of the main threats to future U.S. national strength and security, and it makes no sense to deal with it in ways that would also undermine military readiness.

    Oh, so now we’re a powerful lobby? Like the NRA or something? And, yes, the national debt is a security threat, but I don’t see the Post recommending a spending cut anywhere else but for military retirees. You’d think that if they were so concerned about the debt, they’d be urging the administration to make cuts in entitlement programs, like House GOPers are recommending, rather than trying to convince Congress to break their promise to veterans.

    The modest cuts in Tricare benefits that Mr. Obama seeks are abundantly justified by the national interest. His Office of Management and Budget announced Thursday that the president’s advisers will urge a veto of a defense bill without Tricare reform; they would be right to do so.

    You can call them “modest cuts” as much as you want, anything over “free” makes the government a liar. How many young soldiers are looking at this battle over their futures and deciding that it’s not worth their lives and the lives of their families to fight a battle with the government over every little benefit. And you don’t think that has an impact on military readiness?

  • Ricks on Fox

    Oops, I forgot to thank Valerie for the link.

    Yesterday, Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks was on Fox News to talk about the deaths of four Americans at the Benghazi consulate, but instead he decided to make his appearance about the only network who has had the testicular fortitude to report to Americans about those deaths and the circumstances that resulted in those deaths.

    The UK’s Daily Mail says that Rick’s appearance was cut short because of his verbal attacks on Fox News, the network he was on;

    Ricks, a respected journalist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, responded that few people knew how many U.S. security contractors were killed in Iraq and compared that to the attention paid to ‘what was essentially a small firefight’ in Libya.

    ‘I think that the emphasis on Benghazi has been extremely political, partly because Fox was operating as a wing of the Republican Party,’ Ricks said.

    Yeah, given the current crop of Pulitzer awardees, I don’t think that gives him much credibility. During the interview, Ricks says that he’s “covered” numerous firefights. What he fails to mention is that he’s covered those firefights after they were over and from afar – he’s never heard a shot fired in anger. As I pointed out once before, Ricks has absolutely no military experience beyond his reportage. He’s so inexperienced that he has called for the return of a draft. He once put Kayla Williams’ book “Love My Rifle More Than You”, a book based on her experiences as a promiscuous female soldier, on the same level as David Belavia’s House to House.

    Says Fox News;

    ‘When Mr. Ricks ignored the anchor’s question, it became clear that his goal was to bring attention to himself and his book,’ Fox News executive Michael Clemente said.

    There have been a few times that my participation in an interview was abbreviated when it was clear to the interviewer that I wasn’t going to say what they wanted me to say. So, it’s not a rare practice. But, then, I never attacked the network I was on as a wing of any particular party.

    If Ricks had any respect for the profession of journalism, such as is it these days, he’d recognize that Fox News is informing the public, and just because that reportage makes Ricks’ political party uncomfortable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s biased. Wasn’t it Hillary Clinton who said that Fox was the fairest of the networks when they were covering the 2008 Democrat primaries?

    Ricks also makes a quixotic comparison of the contractors killed in Iraq to the four Americans killed in Benghazi. As if one had something to do with the other. The American contractors killed in Iraq were killed in an actual war. The Americans killed in Benghazi were killed in our consulate, ostensibly US territory, not during a war. Their deaths were a result of failed security planning.

    When Ricks said “Nobody cares” about the contractors in Iraq, he’s insinuating that Fox News doesn’t care because the deaths happened under the Bush Administration. But there was a war and although tragic, they weren’t killed by any failures of security planning by the Bush Administration – and the Bush Administration didn’t try to cover up the facts surrounding the deaths. Unlike the Benghazi deaths.

    By the way, I talked to someone who works at Landstuhl Hospital in Germany this weekend where all of the casualties from Benghazi were taken and I was told they treated more than thirty casualties – something else we never heard here in our media.

    Anyway, I’m putting the video of Rick’s appearance on Fox below the jump if you’re at all interested in watching Ricks hawk his book instead of informing the public;
    (more…)

  • WaPost defends Rice with charge of racism

    The Washington Post reaches for new lows today as their editorial staff tries to take up the fight for Susan Rice against the scores of Republican Representatives who signed a letter warning about appointing her as Hillary Clinton’s replacement as the Secretary of State.

    After attempting to make the case for her with such pointless blather as she had nothing to do with the administration’s reaction to the terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate, so why blame her? (Um, because she was on five Sunday morning news shows spreading the party line?) And “she’s nobody’s fool” because she’s a Rhodes Scholar. So was Bill Clinton and he was impeached for lying, so it’s not like studying at Oxford teaches them not to lie.

    So, then comes the thinly veiled charge of racism;

    Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

    The Confederacy? Really? 147 years after the Democrat-inspired Confederacy expired? 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation? Nice. That’s all you’ve got? Racial and geographic profiling? How unenlightened and predictable. Weak sauce. Loose shit.

    On the other hand, Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Post, who it should also be revealed that he is a white male who comes from a state where anti-draft protests took place during the Civil War, lists several reasons why Rice is so unpopular in Washington, and none of them have to do with her race;

    Back when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. Colleagues talk of shouting matches and insults.

    Among those she has insulted is the woman she would replace at State. Rice was one of the first former Clinton administration officials to defect to Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Rice condemned Clinton’s Iraq and Iran positions, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”

    […]

    It was Rice’s own shoot-first tendency that caused her to be benched as a spokesman for the Obama campaign for a time in 2008. She unnerved European allies when she denounced as “counterproductive” and “self-defeating” the U.N. policy that Iran suspend its nuclear program before talks can begin. She criticized President George W. Bush and McCain because they “insisted” on it. But, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler pointed out at the time, European diplomats were rattled by such remarks because the precondition was their idea.

    Milbanks continues in that vein. It stands in stark contrast to the Editorial Board’s cheap, tawdry and irrelevant charge of racism. Apparently, reasonable people can find plenty of reasons to oppose Rice’s appointment as Secretary of State without spending a moment talking about her race, well, unless you really can’t find any good reasons to appoint her.