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

Category: Media

  • Witness to the fix

    Yeah, we don’t have a state-controlled media. We have a media that trips over their own feet to be the mouthpiece of the White House. Ed Schultz witnessed the process last week and tells us about how it works. From The Radio Equalizer;

    SCHULTZ (08:12): So Mika starts looking at her Blackberry and so does Scarborough and obviously the White House is texting them or emailing them or whatever and they didn’t like the show. Because Arianna had been on there, I’m on there, Howard Dean had been on there and they wanted some balance.

    Now think about that – here’s the White House getting in contact with ‘Morning Joe’ because they’re afraid there’s too many lefties on the air! Now if that’s not sensitivity at its highest level, I don’t know what is! I told ya a few days ago they had rabbit ears! They don’t like anything that’s being said right now, they’re getting beat up!

    I’m guessing we’re paying some doofus in the White House who makes more money than you make, to watch the news programs all day and all night to alert Axelrod when opinion starts sliding away from the administration.

    Naw, that doesn’t scare me.

  • New Casey Porter trailer

    Since Casey Porter left IVAW, he’s been focusing on cars, and here’s a trailer for his latest video about SEMA 2009 in Vegas. Needs more scantily clad models;

    You’ll notice my criticisms are consistent.

  • Washington Times cuts back staff

    According to Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, the Washington Times is planning to draw down their staff and make some changes in subscriptions and purchase rates;

    Nearly three decades after its founding by officials of the Unification Church, the Times said Wednesday it is laying off at least 40 percent of its staff and shifting mainly to free distribution.

    In what amounts to a bid for survival, the company said the print edition will focus on its core strengths: politics, national security, investigative reporting and “cultural coverage based on traditional values.” That means the Times will end its run as a full-service newspaper, slashing its coverage of local news, sports and features.

    When I moved here over ten years ago, the first thing I did after we moved our furniture into the new apartment was walk down to the store to buy a Washington Times and I’ve done it every single day since – well, actually, I subscribed and had it delivered.

    You’ll notice that I source a lot of stuff to the Times these days because they’re the only newspaper in the country that’s reporting a lot of the news no one else is. In fact, they’ve been on fire since the last Presidential election. If you want to read White House press releases, get the Post. If you want the news, get the Times.

    To demonstrate how smart they are at the Times, they turned me down when I applied as a part time copy editor there about nine years ago. Shows you how brilliant the copy staff are there.

    The Washington Times reports that it will remain in business and adjust it’s business model to the changing economy and technology;

    The online edition of The Times will continue, with a greater focus on breaking news and updates. The local print edition will be distributed at no cost in some key areas, and offered for normal single sales through retailers and news boxes.

    The company plans to expand TheConservatives.com, its newly launched Web site that showcases op-eds, think pieces and other news of particular interest to conservatives. “America’s Morning News” — a daily national syndicated talk radio that is broadcast from a studio just steps from the Times newsroom — will also continue, and is thriving, Mr. Slevin said.

    The program, also billed as “Washington Times investigational radio,” has now expanded into 70 marketplaces across the country.

    I hope it works out for them because they filled a void in the market at a crucial time (1982) and we need the Times to continue.

  • Surge news

    So, happily, we can put behind us the tragedy of a rich golfer crashing his Cadillac into a fire hydrant and the deep mystery of how two attention whores sneaked into the White House when no Republicans cuoould get an invitation. Can we please discuss our national security? Please?

    How about we talk about General…er..Senator Barbara Boxer who thinks that the sides are too lop sided against the Taliban according to an AP report in the Miami Herald;

    “I support the President’s mission and exit strategy for Afghanistan, but I do not support adding more troops because there are now 200,000 American, NATO and Afghan forces fighting roughly 20,000 Taliban and less than 100 al Qaida,” Boxer said.

    Yeah, she’d like to be more like a Mexican standoff, I suppose.

    Much of the President’s plan includes additional forces from our allies – however the shine seems to have worn off of Obama’s overseas image according to the Washington Times;

    Conspicuously absent from recent pledges have been Germany and France, whose governments’ domestic political challenges complicate any war decisions. Still, diplomats said, both countries could boost their military presence after an international conference on Afghanistan in London in late January.

    How about giving another speech to moon-eyed Germans – it worked once.

    Biden and the Washington Post try to make the case that the president is using the plan that Biden presented earlier in the year;

    Biden sought, and ultimately got, a narrowed mission that shifted the focus of U.S. efforts away from aims such as extending the reach of the Afghan government to more remote regions of the country and fostering representative democracy. Now the focus is on reversing the Taliban’s momentum and transferring responsibility for security to Afghan forces as quickly as possible.

    Funny, but I didn’t hear the President mention ninja robots. It’s not like no one except Biden realized that the focus had to be in areas occupied the actual enemy – that’s kinda not new strategy, Joe.

    The Washington Post took the time ask a couple of hippies in Evanston, IL what they thought of the President’s decision;

    “When the speech was over, I turned to John and said, ‘What a terrible speech.’ Nothing in it made me happy,” Scarry said. “I asked myself: ‘He is a brilliant man — what is he thinking?’ ”

    But as Scarry pondered, he spotted a method in Obama’s strategy of sending more troops while setting a date to begin a U.S. withdrawal. The president grounded his policy in a collegial and moral approach to the world, he thought, and that struck him as sensible.

    “The initial reaction was, ‘We’re right, and he’s wrong.’ But feeling right is beside the point,” said Scarry, a Harvard graduate. “He had to find a position that people can unify around. I asked myself, ‘Can I endorse this position to unify us?’ My answer is yes.”

    What else would you expect from the “I love me some Obama” crowd?

  • Paying for war

    We’ve watched as government spending has increased over the last year at a rate which is the only thing that will never be described by this White House as unprecedented. The word “trillions” slides off the tongues of politicians like honey these days. Every where you turn, there are signs announcing the commencement of some new federal spending – a drive to western Maryland this weekend was punctuated with huge placards introducing me to the wonders of a federally funded guardrail replacement project.

    Now, after waiting 94 days for President Obama to make a decision on troop commitments to Afghanistan, Democrats are finally talking about tax increases – apparently because the administration has proposed something that actually falls into the responsibilities of government – defense. The main proponent of a “war tax” is David Obey;

    Obey criticized the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on economic grounds and recently proposed a war tax to pay for an escalated war in Afghanistan.

    Thought it’s impossible to know Obey’s motives, the tax seems to be less a serious policy proposal and more an effort to call out GOP deficit hawks who abandon their fiscal restraint when it comes to deficit-funded wars. (Obey has similarly called political bluffs in the past.)

    Oddly enough, Obey complains that Republicans are demanding that Congress pay for their social programs.

    The Hill reports that there is little support for a war tax;

    Most senators and representatives pointed to the recession, saying that a tax increase would be poorly timed because it could prolong the economic drought.

    “It’s not a good idea to raise taxes in the middle of an economic downturn,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). “I do think it needs to be paid for over some budget period. But I don’t like the idea of raising taxes now, at a time of economic weakness. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

    But the Washington Post wrings it’s hands over the prospect of an increase in troops without an increases in taxes;

    Obama’s proposal would place more than 200,000 troops altogether in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the troop level across both nations averages 75,000 through the next decade, the operations will cost an additional $867 billion — more than the $848 billion health-care legislation the Senate is considering.

    As if the Post’s readership doesn’t know that $867 billion is more than $848 billion. Thanks, Washington Post for clearing that up. I wonder if they’ve noticed that “health care” isn’t mentioned in the Preamble of the Constitution yet.

    It took minutes for Obey to run in circles and proclaim that the sky is falling;

    Minutes after Obama finished speaking, Obey issued a statement opposing the troop buildup and warning that the cost of the military efforts “could devour our ability to pay for the actions necessary to rebuild our own economy. We simply cannot afford to shortchange the crucial investments we need in education, job training, healthcare, and energy independence. The biggest threat to our long-term national security is a stunted economy.”

    Of course, no one is mentioning that there is a tax hike scheduled for next year, the year that the Bush tax cuts expire. So any increase the Congress imposes on us is in addition to a return to the Clinton tax era – which means that millions who pay no taxes now will get the surprise of their lives when they’re suddenly in a 15% tax bracket.

  • Hitchens to “Who Created Hasan”

    This past weekend, I read Robert Wright’s anti-intellectual piece in the New York Times entitled “Who Created Major Hasan?“. Of course, since it’s Robert Wright and the New York Times, you know his conclusion. It was us (or US, if you prefer)

    Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.

    So, clearly Wright is a proponent of sitting on our collective hands. Well, Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to knock down Wright’s straw house;

    For a start, did Hasan or [Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe, the Arkansas murderer] ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

    It’s clear to me who created Major Hasan – the cowardly imams and terror sponsors who are afraid of dying themselves, but have no aversion to sending their own children into the flames. Hasan handed out Korans to his neighbors – what if one of us handed out the Bible to our neighbors in the Middle East? Tell me we’re the violent ones in this fight.

    Yeah, just once I’d like to see someone on the Left, the non-racist, defenders of human rights Left, someone besides Hitchens, admit that the war is worthy of our commitment. The only reason these cretins think that they have any chance at all of winning this war is because they have pathetically ignorant pea-wits like Wright defending them and the New York Times to give the pathetically ignorant pea-wits a forum.

  • The veil slips

    So all of this talk about how Obama was going to get us the respect that the world lost for us during those eight dark Bush years seems to have waned and reality is gob-smacking the media. Newsbuster’s Noel Sheppard marvels at Chris Matthews comparisons of Obama to Jimmy Carter (where ya been Chris – we were making the comparison in 2007).

    Laura W. at Ace of Spades takes a look at the awakening in Maureen Dowd who seems less enthusiastic about Obama these days. Also at Ace of Spades, Uncle Jimbo brings up the Saturday Night Live video from last weekend. Suddenly Obama can be the butt of jokes.

    Der Speigel Online’s Gabor Stiengart writes that “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage” – so much for impressing Europe. I guess Obama now realizes that those Germans weren’t cheering for him in Berlin, they were panhandling.

    Claymore wrote to remind us that it’s been 86 days since General McCrystal asked the President for more troops – not to worry, Mr. Decisive is planning to meet more advisors on the subject later today;

    The White House said Obama would meet with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other officials at an 8 p.m. EST/0100 GMT Tuesday meeting in the Situation Room.

    It will be the ninth such meeting as Obama nears a decision on whether to add as many as 40,000 troops to an eight-year-old war that was started after the September 11 attacks and that has begun to try the patience of the American people.

    Wow! Nine whole meeting! That’s almost one meeting every ten days – focused like a laser on our national security. Like a laser.

    Can you imagine what would happen if something requiring immediate attention would happen? Well, by immediate attention, I mean that dithering would cost the lives of Am…, oh.

    Well, we can always investigate those milbloggers for something to distract everybody.

  • Dionne: moderates are bad except when they’re good

    Remember the good old days of the Bush Administration when moderate Republicans were praised by the media for holding the line against Bush extremism and a rubberstamp Congress? It seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it? Well, suddenly, Democrat moderates are blocking a rubberstamp Congress and Washington Post’s EJ Dionne doesn’t like it one bit;

    Last year, the voters gave [President Obama] the largest popular-vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.

    Obama didn’t just offer bromides about hope and change. He made specific pledges. You’d think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.

    But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the new year.

    Imagine that! Democrats who don’t want to rubberstamp Obama’s agenda. I’ve used the word “rubberstamp” three times because I listened to that term every-damn-day from some stupid media source in regards to the Republican Congress – oddly enough, I don’t hear it these days, so I thought I’d bring the usage back.

    But, anyway, remember how praiseworthy it was for Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins to stand against the Republican steamroller in those dark days of Darth Cheney and Tom The Hammer Delay? Well, it’s not so praiseworthy these days;

    The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.

    Um, EJ…the rules have stayed the same – it’s the parties that changed. I wonder if lisping EJ Dionne detects the irony in those last few lines.