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

Category: Media

  • Falling into the media’s trap

    CBS News has published a new poll that declares Sarah Palin radioactive for Republicans. According to them, only 1 in 4 Americans view Sarah Palin favorably;

    Just 23 percent of those surveyed in a new CBS News poll have a favorable view of the former Alaska governor. That matches her favorable rating in July, when Palin announced she was resigning from her job as governor.

    Thirty-eight percent, meanwhile, have an unfavorable view of Palin — also roughly matching her July rating. Another 37 percent say they are undecided or haven’t heard enough, despite the spotlight on Palin in recent days tied to the imminent publication of her memoir, “Going Rogue.”

    I’m pretty sure Ronald Reagan polled about the same way in 1977. The media pounded him pretty badly in the Republican primaries and treated him like a crank through Carter’s rush to give away the Panama Canal and reward draft dodgers with amnesty. Three years later, the American voter was tired of being blamed for our national problems constantly, being told how to dress in our own homes, being scolded for spending more time on our families than being part of the community and our national malaise.

    Now, the media is trying to prevent Sarah Palin from stealing our attention from the President’s wildly successful presidency the same way they did Reagan. He was able to overcome the media bias against him with only Commentary magazine and The National Review as a megaphone.

    The LA Times notices how scared the Democrats seem to be of Palin;

    Every few minutes another note from Democratic National Committee operatives and others dropped into electronic mailboxes across the media-verse, helpfully passing on even the tiniest tidbit of negative news about Palin.

    You know how sometimes a friend tells you how much he/she doesn’t really care about….

    …someone else. Really doesn’t! And repeats it a sufficient number of times that you become convinced of precisely the opposite?

    So here we are nearly three years away from the next election, at about the same point that Obama began his run at the 2008 election, and the media is trying to convince us that Palin doesn’t have a chance to win. I wonder why?

  • Hungry, hungry hippos

    The Washington Post has an article in today’s paper entitled “Report: More Americans going hungry” – it’s a headline right out of the battle for Lyndon Johnson’s war against poverty;

    In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

    Among people of of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.

    Taken together, the findings provide the latest glimpse into the toll that the weak economy has taken on the well-being of the nation’s residents.

    Yeah, a weak economy did it. I wonder if they also surveyed the same households which didn’t have “adequate food” for the presence of an X-box, cable and a big screen TV.

    Poverty and food shortages are linked but not the same thing, according to the report. Just half the households in which food is scarce have incomes at or below the official poverty level, the data show, while most of the rest have slightly less than twice the poverty level.

    In other words, it’s not that people are too poor to buy food – they’re too stupid to buy food. So what’s the President going to do? Send us some groceries and cooks to prepare our food for us? There are so many government programs and not-for-profit organizations in this country that are set up for feeding people, how can anyone be hungry?

    I’ll tell you who the hungry families are – the same people that are waiting for you to buy their healthcare. Waiting on their sofas, game controller in their greasy oversized paw.

  • The two faces of Matthew Alexander

    Matthew Alexander published his book last year entitled “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq”. The book has it’s roots in a Mark Bowden article in the Atlantic. Alexander parlayed the Atlantic article into a book deal. After he wrote it, with some help from a renowned co-author, he went on a book tour making the rounds of all of the farthest Left news programs that would have him. Alexander didn’t use his real name to author the book or do his book tour. According to Alexander, his name was sealed in a court order for his protection. Of course, a puny DC District court order doesn’t affect the crack research staff of This Ain’t Hell. Here’s his DD214;
    (more…)

  • Voting “present” on climate treaty

    Can you imagine the furor in the media if you substituted “President Obama” with “President [insert any Republican name in this space]” in this paragraph from the New York Times?

    President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

    At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

    If it were still Bush, the media would say that he bullied the rest of the world into capitulating to his capitalist whims. Instead, the New York Times makes excuses for him. Funny how that works, huh?

    The current president is doing his level best to keep his accomplishments at “zero” – which is fine with me, except everything he doesn’t get done this year will all become “issues” that the Democrats will prostitute in the next election. Then they only have to drag out the same old bumperstickers we’ve been reading for decades.

  • The PTSD foregone conclusion

    One of our readers, Jerry, sends along a link to an ABC article about Post Tramatic Stress Disorder;

    abc-ptsd

    Now, I’m all in favor of anything that puts “the spotlight” on PTSD in our military community, but there’s absolutely no evidence that the Fort Hood incident had anything to do with PTSD, but ABC is bound and determine to make it a foregone conclusion in the discussion;

    In the wake of the shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, Nov. 5, that left 13 people dead, allegedly at the hands of a fellow soldier, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, soldiers who struggle with stress like Swain, have come back into the spotlight.

    I cannot understand why it’s so hard to say the words that Hasan is another jihadist, or that Hasan is another disgruntled employee, or that Hasan wasn’t wired correctly. There is mounting evidence that he was influenced in this endeavor by his culture and there is absolutely no evidence he suffered from PTSD.

    My guess is that the media has decided that Hasan suffered from PTSD because they still blame it on Bush, and it avoids the glaring fact that all of this crap about our fear of racial profiling is absolutely wrong-headed.

  • Confusing headline

    With a headline like this, you know you have to read the story;

    milf-headline

    Who lets these terrorists name themselves just anything they want?

  • Another PTSD cooties case?

    A gun man holding an assistant principle principal hostage in Pine Plains, New York has been arrested. Of course, the Fox News correspondent, Laura Ingle, points out that the 40 year old man who was disgruntled over “the government” had a son in the military. No links yet.

    Apparently, everyone has a built-in excuse to suffer from PTSD resulting in bad behavior from our war against terror as long as they have a relationship, no matter how tenuous, to a member of the military.

  • When the facts don’t fit the politics

    Both Greyhawk of Mudville Gazaette and Dave in Texas of Ace of Spades noticed some creative editing from CNN’s online staff in regards to some eyewitness interviews about the events at the shooting last week in Fort Hood.

    Pvt Joseph Foster is yet another soldier reporting that Nidal Hasan shouted “Allah Akbar” when he began firing last week – but Foster made the mistake of saying it on CNN:

    Roberts: So the first moments of Thursday afternoon, can you tell our viewers, you know, where you were, what happened, how it all unfolded?

    Foster: I was sitting in what they call station 13, it’s where we get, basically, our final outs of our RSP (ph) system and I was sitting in about the second row back when the assailant stood up, screamed and yelled Allah Akbar (ph) in Arabic and he opened fire.

    Foster was not only there, not only sitting in the second row – he was one of those wounded in the attack. But two minutes later in the interview, Foster would try to downplay Roberts’ implication that he was a hero:

    ROBERTS: So you were acting like a soldier. You were acting heroically. We should point out that you’re with the 20th Engineer Battalion and despite your best efforts and I guess the efforts of your comrades, as well, four members of the battalion were killed, 10 others were injured. And you were shot in the hip and you didn’t realize it at the time?

    Foster: I had realized it at first, but with that much adrenaline, you tend to forget things.

    Greyhawk mentions that CNN has since removed the article and replaced it, but the facts remain. The media would rather that this be about the “nutty GI” than the “nutty jihadist” and they’ll rearrange the facts to arrive at that conclusion.

    I stand by my “pussy pogue” theory, but even to accept that theory, a person has to accept the cultural influences that pushed Hasan to his dastardly deed.

    The media influences on this story have been apparent since it broke and that’s why TAH posted Hasan’s ORB – the media was pushing the “mutliple tours” story, and we decided that we needed to nip that in the bud. Within five minutes after I emailed it to the Fox News director, Shep Smith quit pushing it.