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

Category: Media

  • The “white lie” journalists

    The latest half-assed defense of liars comes from Forbes’ Kai Falkenberg, their Editorial Counsel in a column she titles “Liars Rejoice! The First Amendment Protects You” where she says;

    On July 23, 2007, Xavier Alvarez, a director of the Three Valley Water District Board of Directors, introduced himself at a board meeting by saying: “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.” Each of these statements — with the exception of “I’m still around” — was a lie. Alvarez was indicted and convicted under the 2005 federal Stolen Valor Act for falsely claiming that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor (the nation’s highest military honor).

    Falkenburg concludes;

    If protecting free speech requires that we tolerate tall tales, that in the scheme of things, seems a small price to pay.

    I wonder if she noticed that Alvarez made his statement in an attempt to win votes for his political office. That he was defrauding voters, just like Rick Strandlof was defrauding voters when he used his Rick Duncan personae to influence people to vote for anti-war candidates. Of course, Strandlof/Duncan was backing Democrat candidates, so in her mind it was probably justified. Just like Richard Blumenthal was forgiven for his lies about his Vietnam service while he apologized with another phony Marine standing right behind him.

    Everyone wants to sound so smart by announcing that they’re willing to accept some lies about military service to defend the First Amendment, but whose freedom is being intruded upon? The voters. is it any wonder that people have little faith in our government when we can’t stop voters from being influenced by dishonest vote thieves who hide behind the shield of the First Amendment to continue their dishonesty and election theft?

    Republicans are attacked for their military service (Dan Quayle, George W. Bush) and Democrats are allowed to completely lie about their service. Doug Sterner is right when he says that party affiliation has nothing to do with stolen valor, but it’s used to exonerate phony soldiers. Anyone have any doubt that culture warrior Michal McManus will walk free as a victim of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell even though he was booted from military service six years before DADT?

    Even Jesse MacBeth was walking around a free man after perpetrating a huge fraud on the American public until he decided to defraud the VA.

    Yet George Bush is still thought to have been AWOL because a bunch of dimwits don;t understand what “not observed” means on an OER. And Dan Quayle was dodging the draft by hiding out in the National Guard (101 National Guardsmen and 1300 Reservists were killed in Vietnam).

  • POS Denver Post’s weasel words

    The Denver Post is on my shit list. When Rick Strandlof/Duncan was busted for being a phony a few years back, TSO and I (mostly TSO) helped reporters from the Post track down Strandlof’s lies and involvement with various organizations (IVAW and VoteVets) and political candidates in the previous election. Last year when I asked them to reciprocate on another piece we were working on, suddenly they couldn’t remember that we had helped (in their own article on Strandlof they called us “a group of Washington, DC veterans”) and said that “their policy” precluded collusion with us.

    So it’s no surprise to me that their editorial board comes out in defense of lying today;

    Sometimes defending the First Amendment involves standing up for miscreants, no matter how distasteful.

    And passing yourself off as a war hero, as some have done in recent years, is about as low as you can go. Yet lying isn’t illegal, and Americans who lie about receiving military honors are protected by the Constitution.

    There are limits to free speech and the Supreme Court agrees. For example, I can’t tell people I’m a police officer, or that I’m an federal appellate court judge. Or a member of the POS editorial board of the POS Denver Post.

    That’s why we opposed the Stolen Valor Act, sponsored by then-Congressman John Salazar of Colorado, and that’s why a federal appeals court this past week upheld a ruling that determined the law, which makes it illegal to lie about receiving military honors, violates free speech.

    That’s how the Post tries to protect themselves by coming down on both sides of the issue. Denounce the criminals then denounce the law that makes them criminals.

    A free-speech exception for lying would gut the First Amendment. As 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski wrote, “Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying.”

    “If false factual statements are unprotected, then the government can prosecute not only the man who tells tall tales of winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, but also . . . the dentist who assures you it won’t hurt a bit.”

    “Living means lying” is a cop out. Everyone does it so we can’t make it a crime. If a dentist tells me “it won’t hurt” and it does, I won’t ever go back, thus punishing the liar. If I vote for a political candidate based on the recommendation of a phony veteran, I’ll never get that vote back.

    The case that was upheld last week involved a California man who pleaded guilty in July 2008 to falsely saying the year before that he had won the Medal of Honor. In Colorado, Rick Strandlof pretended to be a former Marine captain who had won a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, and was convicted under the law.

    But last summer a Colorado-based federal court judge decided, and rightly so, that prosecuting Strandlof under the law was an unconstitutional restriction of free speech. It’s important to note Strandlof didn’t financially benefit from the lies. Had he, he could have — and should have — been charged with fraud.

    In my example above, VoteVets paid Strandlof to appear in videos supporting a candidate Hal Bidlack who was running for State legislature. Strandlof also appeared as Rick Duncan during the 2008 campaign of Jared Polis who is still serving in Congress. The people who voted on the basis of Strandlof-as-Duncan’s endorsement have been defrauded and they have no recourse, thanks to the Ninth Circuit.

    The truly sad part of this, we acknowledge, is that free speech has never been free. It has been achieved by the spilled blood of war heroes — the same people these scoundrels are impersonating.

    Yeah, again the Post is having it’s cake and eating it, too. “We hate the lie, but love the liars”.

    I submit that there are people who’ve benefited from Strandlof’s lies, the Post among them. The intenet was chocked full of Strandlof interviews that the Post did with Strandlof which bolstered their anti-war opinions. Many of those articles have since disappeared or been buried in the search engines by the stolen valor stories.

    VoteVets never admitted their association with Strandlof, in fact, there’s a discussion on VetVoices when readers advised VoteVets to come clean and Brandon Friedman said they were just letting the story go away so they didn’t have to admit to being duped.

    Strandlof’s user name on VoteVets was USMCinCO.

    VetVoice’s JimStaro, less than a year ago hoped that you had forgotten about Duncan’s affiliation and called him a right-winger.

    IVAW has told us that he wasn’t really a member, even though he had a profile on their website and they rushed to take it down that night (but not before I got a screen cap of it).

    Anyway, you can see why liars have a vested interest in their lies being classified as “free speech”.

    As long as Strandlof-as-Duncan blamed Bush and Chaney for the deaths of his Marines, and as long as he’d admit that he served successfully as a gay Marine captain, the Post, VoteVets, IVAW and all of the rest were in love with him, up until Bush was out of office and Strandlof was exposed. Now, the Post realizes that without liars, they have no credible veterans to push their agenda, so with this editorial, they’re welcoming the liars back into the Post’s dog-crap stained pages.

    Given their history of litigation against bloggers, I wonder if the Post will consider republishing their entire editorial for the purpose of criticism, without a link is defended by the First Amendment. Let’s see shall we?

  • Is there a referendum I haven’t heard about?

    For some reason the United Press International felt the need to write an article about how repealing the 14th Amendment would hurt military recruiting. The part they’re referring to is the first line;

    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

    The UPI writes;

    Conservative activists have been pushing to supersede the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which among other things guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the United States, whatever their parents’ status.

    Margaret Stock, who practices law in Anchorage, Alaska, and is retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, said the number of potential recruits could drop by 8 percent to 10 percent, The Arizona Republic reported. Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute told the newspaper she estimates 8.1 percent of active military members have at least one immigrant parent

    As far as I know, it takes 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate and 3/5 of the States (in 50 separate referendums) to change the Constitution, and the process in this case hasn’t even begun yet, so why bother to write about a non-event when, if the process began today, is years in the future?

    I guess UPI is finding today to be a slow news day…like I am.

  • Evil employer lays off 900 employees

    I’m always hearing the Left complain that evil employers completely disregard the families, the children, their poor employees when they get laid-off from work purely for improving profits. I wonder how much traction those complaints would have against Arianna Huffington;

    As usual, Armstrong and Huffington are waxing on about investing in high-quality, original content produced by actual journalists. But AOL staffers have heard that one before, so the renewed pledge comes across as a little hollow, especially given that dozens of veteran journalists are being let go.

    It’s very difficult for Huffington to argue credibly that she plans to invest in original journalism at the very same time that she and Armstrong are giving dozens of veteran reporters the old heave-ho. Despite a few high-profile hires and her stable of well-publicized celebrity bloggers, HuffPo has always been focused on aggregation and voluminous content from unpaid writers.

    As New York Times executive editor Bill Keller pungently observed: “Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter.”

    And, oh, 700 of those jobs that were eliminated were in India. So Huffington was outsourcing overseas? Isn’t that one of the touchstone no-nos of the Left?

  • “You’re f***ing dead” is the new “Hi. Nice shoes.”

    Cortillaen and Old Trooper sent links from HotAir and Newsbusters to the report of a Wisconsin assemblyman turning to his female counterpart and telling her “You’re f***ing dead”

    “After the vote to engross, he turns to a female conservative Republican, who is also from the Oshkosh area, looks at her and says, ‘You are f—ing dead,’” Sykes said. “He didn’t say ‘f—ing,’ he said the whole thing. He says to a female colleague, ‘You are f—ing dead.’”

    No one actually heard him say it, but he did apologize for it, so it stands to reason. Of course, Gordon Hintz, the pussy who threatened his female colleague, Michelle Litjens, is under a lot of pressure since he was arrested the previous day for patronizing a “happy ending” massage parlor.

    And of course, the drive-by media completely ignores the incident in the post-Gabrielle Gifford new climate of civility. Well, you can’t really blame them what with Lindsey Lohan facing jail time and Charlie Sheen’s rants on Alex Jones’ show. I mean, it’s all so distracting for the serious media.

  • Rolling Stone accuses Caldwell of using brainwave deathray on Congress

    Yes, it’s actually news for the pot heads at the Rolling Stone that DoD tries to convince Congressmen to finance their projects. But, apparently the military has a secret mind-manipulation process that doesn’t work so well on detainees (see Tony Camerino posts) but is easily adapted to influencing congressmen.

    The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.

    “My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”

    Who did they target?

    John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Jack Reed, Al Franken and Carl Levin; Rep. Steve Israel of the House Appropriations Committee; Adm. Mike Mullen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts.

    Really? Al Franken? They could brainwash him with a used wet nap if they could find the BB-sized organ.

    How much convincing would it take for McCain, Lieberman and Mullen? Aren’t they all pro-victory in the first place?

    I wonder if Rolling Stone even suspects that they’ve just been the subjects of a counter-intelligence operation.

  • Rolling Stone writer wins award for McCrystal firing

    Out of all of the journalism that happened this year, who would have thought that the world of journalism would reward the POS Rolling Stone for the article that got General McCrystal fired based on what his staff told the reporter.

    Michael Hastings won the Polk Award for magazine reporting for his story that recounted how Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff made scornful comments about Obama administration officials. Obama removed the four-star general from his command in June, saying McChrystal’s comments undermined civilian control of the military.

    How intellectually vacant is the world of journalism if they think this is a laudatory event?

  • CBS’ Lara Logan sexually assaulted in Cairo

    Tman sends us a CBS News link to the revelation that South African-born Lara Logan was sexually assaulted for a prolonged period during the celebration of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation;

    “In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.”

    I’m not familiar with her work, but according to her bio at CBS News, she was the first journalist into Afghanistan after the 9-11 attacks and she was the only journalist from a US news organization in Baghdad on the eve of the US assault.

    Logan received an Emmy Award, an Overseas Press Club Award and a Murrow Award for “Ramadi: On the Front Line,” a powerful 2006 report on American troops under fire in Ramadi, Iraq, a piece Logan and her producer shot themselves while embedded with a U.S. military unit.

    We wish her the best. She sounds like the type of journalist we would admire if she worked for another network…one we actually watched.