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

Category: Media

  • My perfect records stands

    I had to stop watching NY Giants football games years ago because every time I watched, the Giants would lose. I’m beginning to think I have the same effect on elections. If no one noticed, my perfect record of not being able to call elections remains intact with Hoffman’s loss in NY23. Sorry, Doug, I should have known better.

    Our buddy, DanNY at GOE New York calls it “A Victory Delayed“.

    But there are some lessons here for Conservatives – the tactics that worked so well in the march on the Capitol a few months back and the town hall meetings over the summer, probably won’t swing many voters to our side in local elections. I was reading about police being called to polling stations yesterday and cringing at the thought of out-of-staters bullying New Yorkers. That kind of stuff doesn’t win us any supporters.

    Everything our side does is seen under a microscope of media scrutiny – and nothing done for Democrats is even noticed, so we’re not able to get away with stuff like them. Let’s take that lesson to our hearts before the next election begins at noon today.

  • A world of change in 287 days

    Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson took time away from playing with his Barack and Michelle action figures to pen the most ridiculous column ever to grace the pages of the Post entitled “A world of change in 287 days“.

    You’re going to have to click over and read Robinson’s fantasies of grandeur…I just can’t bring myself to copy and paste excerpts here, except the last line. Robinson goes through each nonaccomplishment of the current administration and after admitting that each hasn’t happened yet, he exclaims that all of these things that haven’t happened, haven’t happened faster than we could ever hope.

    Quite a record for 287 days: All that, and a Nobel Peace Prize, too.

    Yes, that’s the kind of cutting-edge, outside-the-box, pushing the envelope journalism that won Robinson the Pulitzer last year. I hope he showers before he goes home at night – I’m sure his wife doesn’t appreciate combing all of that dickcheese out of his mustache.

  • Scozzafava to NY23: Vote for the establishment

    Yeah, I kinda figured that Dede would be that sort of prick who is vindictive rather than the bigger person. Apparently, her decision to drop out of the New York’s 23rd District race was selfish – if she couldn’t win, she didn’t want to lose – so she decided to throw her voters to Bill Owens the Democrat candidate. That demonstrates to me that she wasn’t fit to represent conservatives of the district in the first place.

    Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times yesterday that “The GOP Stalinists invade New York“;

    Last week it turned out that Hoffman’s prime attribute to the radical right — as a take-no-prisoners fiscal conservative — was bogus. In fact he’s on the finance committee of a hospital that happily helped itself to a $479,000 federal earmark. Then again, without the federal government largess that the tea party crowd so deplores, New York’s 23rd would be a Siberia of joblessness. The biggest local employer is the pork-dependent military base, Fort Drum.

    Yup, Jefferson County’s largest employer is Fort Drum – no dispute here. In fact, John McHugh stayed in office for decades because he preserved the sprawling military base’s presence in the North Country. Before Mario Cuomo decimated the business climate in Upstate New York, it was home to sprawling family farms and now-dormant factories. In fact, most of Upstate New York still remembers what it was like to not depend on the whims of government largess for their future – that’s why they’re Republicans.

    EJ Dionne, in the Washington Post, tries to dispute the grassroots aspect of Hoffman’s success thus far;

    But the truth is that it was national money (notably from the conservative Club for Growth) and national muscle (from former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, among others) that prevented Scozzafava from ever having a chance.

    Yeah, except neither Armey nor Palin are elected officials anymore – like Joe Biden who is in Watertown tomorrow to campaign for Owens tomorrow. They oppose the party machine – that makes them grassroots. And I suppose that Rich wouldn’t see anything wrong with “Organizing for America” trying to convince a resident of Maryland to influence a local race in Virginia. How is that different?

    Gingrich was being the true conservative here, arguing that local party people ought to be able to choose candidates in their own jurisdictions, even if national conservatives don’t like how the locals choose. This is at least as much a victory for the inside-the-Beltway conservative machine as for grass roots conservatives.

    I guess Dionne thinks that to be a “true conservative” we have to follow the party’s instructions and vote for their choice, no matter how contrary to our views they intend to vote. Party machines in Upstate New York are the folks who inflicted Eric Massa on them. Eric Massa is the Democrat who told his voters that “I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful. I will vote against their opinion if I actually believe it will help them.”

    That’s the type of pompous, elitist representation New York’s 23rd District would’ve had from Scozzafava. So because she’s petty prick, she throws her voters to Owens – in favor of the establishment and the political machine. That’s the way the Inside-the-Beltway folks like ’em.

    Added: Gateway Pundit says she took the advice of Chuckie Schumer. Any more speculation on why she was forced out?

  • Quite possibly the stupidest article NYT ever published

    I can’t believe I read the whole thing. The New York Times has an article entitled “In Pain, Women Soldiers May Be Tougher” about a research program on whether men or women in the military report more pain.

    In a review of the records of veterans of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Connecticut Health Care System found that women were less likely than men to report any pain, 38.1 percent to 44 percent.

    By a smaller margin, 18 percent to 21.2 percent, the women veterans were also less likely than the men to report having persistent pain.

    Um, think maybe it can depend on whether men or women HAVE more pain? No, of course not;

    “The findings were surprising to us,” said Dr. Sally Haskell, an associate professor of medicine at Yale who was the lead investigator.

    What findings? Where? Why don’t they do a study to see if people who live in cities or rural areas report more automobile accidents and then announce that people in the city are compassionate than rural denizens because they report more accidents per capita.

    “There is a lot more work to do,” she said. “This is the tip of the iceberg.”

    As far as work goes, Sally, it’s the tip of the polar ice cap.

  • Why AP doesn’t fight our wars

    The Associated Press, in trying to show how smart they are and how incompetent the US military points out;

    There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn’t led to anything close to victory.

    What AP hasn’t noticed is that the Taliban knows where they are and they know where the US troops are, generally. That’s kind of an advantage – especially since COIN requires that we protect civilians and create an environment of security for them, and the Taliban isn’t required by doctrine or international opinion to provide a measure of security for anyone – except themselves.

    I guess AP envisions some sort of man-to-man defense.

    Of course, you have to read almost to the end to read where AP admits it’s 12-1 ratio is a bit misleading;

    The 12-1 ratio may be misleading because two-thirds of the Allied force is made up of Afghans, who lack the training and experience. The Taliban usually fight in small, cohesive units made up of friends and fellow clansmen. A more meaningful ratio, then, might be 4-1 or 5-1.

    Historically in guerrilla wars, security forces have usually had at least a 3-1 advantage.

    At the height of the U.S. ground involvement in South Vietnam in 1968, the 1.2 million American troops and their allies outnumbered the Communist guerrillas by about 4-1. French forces in the 1945-54 Indochina war numbered about 400,000 men, only a slight numerical advantage against the rebels.

    In a more recent campaign, Russia’s Chechen war in 1999-2000, Russian troops held a 4-1 advantage over the insurgents.

    But 5-1 doesn’t make good headlines like 12-1 does. I guess they’re lobbying the Obama Administration to keep our presence in Afghanistan lower. That won’t encourage the Taliban, will it? If you read even further, you’ll notice they admit that they don’t even know the number of Taliban that they use in their ratio anyway.

    Why did they even bother to write the article?

  • Karzai questions US reliability

    The Agency France-Presse and the Washington Times report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai wondered aloud to CNN if the US is a reliable partner. Of course, he says that to deflect criticism from the alleged corruption in recent Afghan elections, but he’d have no point if the Obama Administration hadn’t left him an opening;

    “Is the United States a reliable partner with Afghanistan? Is the West a reliable partner with Afghanistan?” Mr. Karzai asked. “Have we received the commitments that we were given? Have we been treated like a partner?”

    Mr. Karzai said a partnership to him was “where the Afghan lives are respected, where Afghan property is respected, where the Afghan traditions are respected, where we know the direction we are moving to.”

    The comments appeared to allude to Mr. Karzai’s longstanding criticism of civilian deaths in U.S. air strikes, and to President Obama’s still-unresolved review of U.S. strategy and a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for up to 40,000 more troops.

    Weeks after General McChrystal made his request, we’re still waiting for an answer. The head of the largest information-gathering organization in the world can’t translate that information into action. And the answer is so simple; can we afford to lose Afghanistan? Can we afford to walk away again like we did in 1988? Has Joe Biden ever offered a solution that wasn’t hare-brained?

    Even a cursory examination of the facts related to those questions yields a resounding “no” to each. So what’s the delay?

    More disturbing? Aside from the Washington Times and Breitbart, no other US news source is running the story. Do a Yahoo search on the title of the article and see for yourself.

  • Obama’s “Cold Shoulder War” with Fox heats up

    You know when the Washington Post’s op/ed pages turn against President Obama, it’s looking bad. This morning, that’s what happens – Ruth Marcus takes shots at the administration;

    The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

    Of course, so as not to shock the headline readers at Washington Post, they ad Jo-Ann Armao’s “Fox should stop whining” as a counter-balance;

    The last time I checked the First Amendment, there was nothing in it compelling officials to talk to certain journalists. Certainly, there are legal requirements about what information should be made public, but no one — not the man on the street, your local council member or even the president of the United States — is obligated to cooperate with reporters they think are unfair or who, for whatever reason, they dislike.

    That quote is a keeper – I’m sure we’ll be able to throw that back in WaPo’s face four years from now.

    The latest furor over Fox was ignited when Glen Beck dragged out some video of White House communications director Anita Dunn admitting that they used the media like an old T-shirt last year in the campaign – and the media did what it was told to do;

    “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

    “Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” Dunn said, admitting that the strategy “did not always make us popular in the press.”

    O’Reilly and Brit Hume discuss the White House strategy;

    Of course, no reading of the morning’s news on the subject is complete without Scrappleface’s Scott Ott;

    Clinton hopes to strike a much more conciliatory tone, in a fashion reminiscent of the administration’s approach to dealing with Iran and North Korea.

    “We need to be willing to talk with our enemies,” Clinton said. “While we can’t surrender the high ground when it comes to this fact-checking business, there may be other areas where we can find common ground.”

  • Conflicted

    Claymore sent us this link from the Las Vegas Review Journal which profiles the Oath Keepers;

    Launched in March by Las Vegan Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers bills itself as a nonpartisan group of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who vow to fulfill their oaths to the Constitution.

    More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful, including directives to disarm the American people and to blockade American cities. By refusing the latter order, the Oath Keepers hope to prevent cities from becoming “giant concentration camps,” a scenario the 44-year-old Rhodes says he can envision happening in the coming years.

    It’s a Cold War-era nightmare vision with a major twist: The occupying forces in this imagined future are American, not Soviet.

    “The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here,” Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-trained lawyer, said in an interview with the Review-Journal. “My focus is on the guys with the guns, because they can’t do it without them.

    I guess this is just Rhodes’ way of justifying the Department of Homeland Security’s report about right wing terrorists. My personal conflict is that the only person the Review Journal could find to comment against Oath Keepers is my old friend Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who happens to see hate groups around every corner;

    “I’m not accusing Stewart Rhodes or any member of his group of being Timothy McVeigh or a future Timothy McVeigh,” law center spokesman Mark Potok said. “But these kinds of conspiracy theories are what drive a small number of people to criminal violence. … What’s troubling about Oath Keepers is the idea that men and women armed and ordered to protect the public in this country are clearly being drawn into a world of false conspiracy theory.”

    Yeah, whenever Potok says “I’m not accusing…” that’s exactly what he’s doing. Why else would he be writing in a column he calls “Hate Watch”? Stuart Rhodes is a former Ron Paul staffer, and we saw how quickly the Ron Paul movement petered out last year. They became an annoyance, but they’re certainly not dangerous – unless Stuart Rhodes doesn’t tone down the rhetoric.

    On the other hand, SPLC, in perpetual search of hate groups doesn’t do the discourse any favors by amping up the hate talk.

    According to the law center, militia groups are re-emerging in this country partly as a result of racial animosity toward Obama.

    It’s the “cross-pollinating” of extremist groups — some racist, some not — that is of concern, Potok said. As evidence that the danger is real, he points to several recent murders committed by men with anti-government or racist views.

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached a similar conclusion in a report earlier this year about the rise of right-wing extremism. The report said the nation’s economic downturn and Obama’s race are “unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment.”

    The homeland security report added that “disgruntled military veterans” might be vulnerable to recruitment by right-wing extremist groups.

    That warning was enough to make Rhodes feel paranoid.

    It would have been nice of the Review Journal to mention that the DHS report leaned heavily on the SPLC’s own “research”. So quoting the DHS report is the same as quoting Mark Potok – and includes his intellectually-vacant rhetoric.

    So you see how I’m conflicted – two organizations who are equally distasteful engaged in equally harmful verbal warfare. I don’t know for whom to root – I guess the best I can hope for is mutual annihilation.