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

Category: Media

  • That shooting in Colorado

    I’m sure you’ve already read or heard about the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colorado last night at a showing of the movie “The Dark Knight”. I’m hearing that 15 are dead and 50 others are injured. But, as tragic as it is, the media, and especially Fox News, have made me not care about it anymore because of their idiot coverage of the event.

    Apparently, the gun man threw a smoke grenade into the crowd before he opened up. How do I know it was a smoke grenade, because the idiot reporters are calling it “possibly tear gas”. Yeah if it was tear gas, there would be nothing “possibly” about it. You’d know if it was tear gas.

    Yeah, I heard witnesses complain about irritation to their throats and trouble breathing, but smoke grenades do that, too. Like I said, if it was tear gas, we wouldn’t be wondering what it was.

    But I don’t know how long Fox News can continue to repeat the same tired descriptions of the event without telling viewers something new, but I guess they’re going for the record. At least some of the other channels are reporting other news instead of running the same video in a loop over and over. I don’t think they’ve even told us what the weather is yet.

  • The post in which I end my feud with Rick Maze

    Yeah, it was fun while it lasted, but I guess it’s time I end my feud with Military Times’ Rick Maze. So this is my public unilateral withdrawal from the fray. I will however continue to hold him to a journalistic standard, but maybe I won’t do it in the manner to which I’ve become accustomed. Or maybe I’ll just hand off his articles to someone else to write about while I lurk in the shadows. The Puppetmaster.

    Yes, there is a story behind this post. Just trust me.

  • C’Mon, Army Times – At Least Get the Headline Right!

    As Reagan might have said: “There they (the media) go again.”

    Army Times recently had a headline that, to be blunt, appears to be BS. And it appears to be BS due to either slipshod reporting or a deliberate decision to misrepresent reality.

    The headline claims that extra costs associated with Pakistan’s closing the normal supply routes for Afghanistan last November are over $2 billion. However, that figure is not supported by the information in that article itself.

    The figure was apparently obtained by adding additional Army costs for higher than projected fuel prices AND the closure of the Pakistani supply lines to Afghanistan ($1.7B), plus additional USAF costs for airlift ($0.369B) and C17 engine maintenance ($0.137B).  The article doesn’t identify any additional Navy costs, or any others for the Army and USAF, that are associated with  Pakistan closing the Afghan supply lines.

    These three items total $2.206B – which is pretty close to the figure given in the headline.  I’d guess that’s where the number came from, and that someone didn’t add correctly and got $2.1B instead.

    However, not all of these increased costs are due to the Pakistani supply line closure.  The Army buys one helluva lot of fuel; it uses a lot of that fuel in places outside of Afghanistan.  And as I recall, fuel costs spiked worldwide recently – to nearly $4/gallon in the US – which I’m sure was far more than originally projected.  The closure of the supply lines in Pakistan had nothing to do with that part of the Army’s increased costs included above.  And the USAF clearly states that only part of their costs for additional airlift and C17 maintenance are due to the supply line closure.  Calling all of those cost increases the result of closing those Pakistani supply lines is therefore bogus.

    Bottom line:  very shoddy work, Army Times.  I have little doubt that Pannetta’s estimate of an extra cost of $100M/month last month was low.  But based on what’s presented in the article, your estimate doesn’t appear to be any more accurate.

  • The Durango Herald retraction

    I swear, Katie Burford is like lightening. She sent us a link to her retraction of the Timmy Oliver fantasy at the Durango Herald, you should read the whole thing…and to her credit, Katie asked me for my DD214 and I sent her a copy. Baby steps….

    EDITOR NOTE: The article has for some reason disappeared, so I got the text from a cache copy and put it below the link;
    (more…)

  • To TAH From Katie Burford of the Durango Herald

    In reference to Timmy Oliver, pot smoking trailer dwelling Druid;

    Well, I just spoke to him. He said he could provide no documents. When I asked him why he lied, he apologized to the people he hurt. When I asked him if this was an acknowledgment he lied, he equivocated, falling back on the explanation that he was special ops but it was all classified. When I told him I was printing a retraction if he couldn’t produce any documentation, he said that was fine because he couldn’t prove any of it.

    As the reporter who propagated Oliver’s falsehoods, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies and deepest regrets to all the true service members out there who really did make the hard sacrifices. I wish I could say it was a cub mistake, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know better. I feel wretched that my intent was to show the public the true face of veterans but instead did the opposite. Thanks to all that took the time to expose this falsehood. I will be reporting these findings in a follow-up story to run in tomorrow’s newspaper. (Note: the story up on the website has an editor’s note stating that concerns have been raised about the accuracy of his account.)

    Jonn, could you send me a couple of comments to go in the follow-up story about why you do what you do and what should be done about folks who lie about their service?

    Many thanks,
    Katie Burford, city editor
    Durango Herald

    I think that’s some kind of TAH record, isn’t it?

  • TAH on MSNBC and ABC News

    TSO and I did interviews on Tuesday with Gael Fashingbauer Cooper of MSNBC. She was the only member of the MSM who actually gave TSO credit for his work on the Timothy Poe thing while I was off the net. So she wanted to do a little more work about us on the day that the Supreme Court decision is released. So you should go read the article and actually the comments seem to be supporting us, somewhat, so that’s encouraging.

    Actually, overturning SVA gives us more business, because since the Ninth Circuit overturned it, we’ve seen an explosion of phonies. Even Dallas Wittgenfeld emailed me the other day and said that it was his first amendment right to tell whatever stories he wanted on the internet. So there you go. It’s up to us to enforce a standard.

    And while you’re at it, I’ll be on ABC World News Tonight, they tell me. Doug Sterner and I got to commiserate about the decision in front of the Supreme Court building. We did a few interviews in the crowd of Healthcare bill supporters, and they were pretty obnoxious. I almost smacked one (imagine that) waving an Obama sign behind me while I was interviewing about Stolen Valor. But Doug played “rational guy” while I was “angry guy”.

    So I’m going to be on the road back from Bethesda and I’ll miss the broadcast so let me know how it turned out. It was nice to step out from behind the screen for a change, but smelly hippies still smell. Here’s a 30-second video of the crowd;

  • The Roles of the Races

    I suppose it’s truly silly of white victims of black criminals to expect equal treatment by the mainstream media. But still, it’s aggravating when we keep getting smacked in the face repeatedly with examples like this. Here we have a spontaneous act of senseless and extreme violence perpetrated against an innocent, white male out walking his dog, by a black male and it is reported without any hint that the attack could have been racially motivated.

    Reverse the races of the two men involved and imagine how this would be delivered to the public. The white perp’s race would be in the first paragraph if not the first sentence and the term possible hate crime would follow closely. Instead of the calm reporting of the facts as in this article, there would be a tone of outrage conveyed and demands for immediate police apprehension of this murderous white bigot whose violent racism has instilled a sense of fear throughout Chicago’s black communities. You get the drift.

    I suppose we should give credit to the Chicago NBC affiliate for at least identifying the attacker as black, a fact surely to go unreported should the story get picked up by the networks, that being an unlikely scenario considering the roles of the races.

    View more videos at: http://nbcchicago.com.

  • VoteVets; Romney and draft

    So, last week, Jon Soltz from the “non-partisan” organization VoteVets was on that show on MSNBC which has that idiot Lawrence O’Donnell hosting. At about 5:38 into this video, O’Donnell mentions that Mitt Romney had four deferments for college and his missionary work during the Vietnam War and Jon Soltz condemns Romney for avoiding the draft.

    See, I was under the impression that VoteVets didn’t have a problem with deferments from the draft because they helped Harry Reid’s campaign in the last election and Reid had successfully avoided the draft while he enjoyed deferments. But suddenly, when someone who is not a Democrat got college deferments for the draft, it’s a big deal.

    By the way, O’Donnell tells a whopper during the discussion. He says that the draft ended before he was old enough to face the draft. The last draft round was in 1972, the year I turned 17 (I was born in 1955). O’Donnell was born in 1951 according to Wiki, which means that O’Donnell was 21 years old the year that the draft ended, which also means that he got deferments for college (you were eligible for the draft when you turned 18 years old), and yet here he is criticizing Romney for it. Wiki says that O’Donnell graduated from high school in 1970, so he got at least two deferments before the draft ended.

    So, I’m guessing that the word hypocrisy isn’t in their vocabulary around that network or whatever they call that show.