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

Category: Media

  • No, it’s not him

    In headier and news-starved times, everyone convinced themselves that the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq had been captured, but US officials in Iraq deny that it’s true (Fox News/Associated Press link);

    The U.S. military denied Friday that the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq — Abu Ayyub al-Masri — had been captured, saying instead that a man with a similar name was arrested in the northern city of Mosul.

    Iraqi authorities on Thursday said Iraqi police commandos captured the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq in a raid in the northern city of Mosul.

    “Neither coalition forces nor Iraqi security forces detained or killed Abu Ayyub al-Masri. This guy had a similar name,” said Maj. Peggy Kageleiry, a U.S. military spokeswoman in northern Iraq.

    The story goes on to recount that numerous phone calls to Iraqi officials confirmed that it was indeed al-Masri, however that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

    “We called the commander of Ninevah operations 10 times and every time he insisted it was Abu Hamza al-Muhajir because when they caught him, they asked him whether his name was Abu Hamza al-Muhajir and he said yes,” al-Askari told the Associated Press by phone.

    He added that the commander repeatedly “insisted that it was him, how can we deny him then.”

    There had been false alarms in the past about al-Masri. At least twice — in 2006 and May 2007 — reports circulated that he was dead, but they were later proved wrong.

    How many times has the Associated Press used this same excuse for broadcasting news that isn’t true, with even less reliable sources than the Iraq military and police?

  • Civil War in Lebanon

    I guess Hezbollah decided that attacking Israel head-to-head is too costly, and seein’s how they’re just bloodthirsty thugs that need to kill, they’ve decided to declare war on the Lebanese Army – an army they’re reasonably certain they can beat, cowardly pussies that they are (from Gateway Pundit – the best resource on the war, by the way);

    Hezbollah rockets hit the home of majority leader Saad Hariri on Friday.
    ABC News Australia reported:

    A rocket has hit the outer wall of the house of Lebanon’s majority leader Saad Hariri, as fighting continues for a third day in the country’s capital Beirut.

    A source close to the Sunni politician says no one was injured by the attack on the leader’s west Beirut residence.

    The attack comes as several Sunni neighbourhoods in west Beirut, considered strongholds of Lebanon’s ruling coalition, have fallen under the control of rival Hezbollah-led militants.

    Hezbollah also forced the closure of pro-government media and took control of a pro-government TV station. Hariri’s Future TV is off the air after being threatened by the Hizbullah militia. Hezbollah also set fire to the al-Mustaqbal newspaper building.

    Yesterday Gateway Pundit also pointed to Talisman Gate who explains how the situation in Sadr City influenced the clashes in Lebanon;

    Ostensibly, Hezbollah is responding to the Lebanese government’s decision to sack the security chief of Beirut’s international airport, and to dismantle Hezbollah’s secure landline-based communications network that had been expanded recently.

    What could have spurred-on this over-reaction on Hezbollah’s part, which has been manifested so far with flexing its muscles in the Sunni area of Beirut, seemingly showing-up the government as weak and vulnerable?

    I believe Iran needed to show the United States and its Arab allies that it can humiliate them by overrunning the government they back in Beirut and that they’d be unable to do anything about it, and I believe that Iran needed to make this point now because the Mahdi Army in Iraq has collapsed.

    The Associated Press in the Wall Street Journal concurs;

    The clashes are the latest turn in a test of wills between the Hezbollah-led opposition and the government of Mr. Saniora. The U.S.-backed government has only a slim majority in Parliament, and the two sides have been locked in a 17-month power struggle that has kept government at a standstill.

    The fight could have implications for the entire Middle East at a time when Sunni-Shiite tensions are high. The tensions are fueled in part by the rivalry between predominantly Shiite Iran, which sponsors Hezbollah, and Sunni Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

    The leaders of Qatar and Syria held talks on Lebanon in Damascus, which wields influence with Hezbollah and has close relations with Iran. Syria’s official news agency said the two sides agreed the conflict in Lebanon was an internal affair and expressed hope the feuding parties would find a solution through dialogue.

    I’m not sure why the Associated Press continues to call this the “US-backed government” since there are a lot of nations that back the constitutionally-elected government of Lebanon.

    Gateway Pundit also writes that the Hezbollah thugs mark their territory with pictures of Syria’s president Assad. So we can expect the UN to condemn Iran’s and Syria’s support of these anti-government thugs any minute now. Associated Press reports that Arab nations have called for an “emergency” meeting – in two days. Some emergency meeting.

    Will we see Nancy Pelosi talk her good pal Assad into leaving the Lebanese alone? Will Obama take some time and talk to Ahmadinejad?

  • We’re not sure how you hicks will vote

    Reader Jason passes on this link from Newsbusters;

    On the syndicated, “The Chris Matthews Show,” Kim Genardo, a political reporter for NBC Raleigh, North Carolina affilate WNCN, predicted that “smart, educated” North Carolina primary voters wouldn’t be swayed by Jeremiah Wright but was unsure how “conservative, white, rural voters” would vote as she admitted she’s not, “in touch with them.”

    You damn right you ain’t in touch with them, you cow. That’s how the Left has controlled the vote for years – calling conservative people stupid and making the brainless sheep feel like they’re smart for following the herd. It’s how the good Reverend Wright soaked his congregation, it’s how Bill Clinton stayed in office for eight years. It’s how the “smart, educated” Democrats ended up with two candidates who can’t summon enough common sense to answer truthfully – or even the same way twice.

    It’s how the Democrats ended up with two candidates neither of whom they can justify voting against because of purely superficial reasons.

    It reminds me of the piece that Aunt Agatha at Bloodthirsty Liberal wrote yesterday about the professor who decided she’d sue her students because “My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful,” she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. “They’d argue with your ideas.” This caused “subversiveness.” (as quoted in the Wall Street Journal).

    I’m glad I’m not smart if that’s what smart is.

  • Rockets and the media

    Jackson Diehl, a columnist at the Washington Post writes today a piece entitled “War of Rockets“, in which he draws a comparison between what the Israelis are facing in Gaza and the US in Sadr City;

    Last Tuesday, Israel faced the fallout from a Palestinian family of five perishing in the Gaza Strip during an Israeli strike against militants firing rockets at an Israeli town. On Wednesday, the Bush administration woke to a front-page picture in The Post of a 2-year-old Iraqi boy killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad aimed at Shiite militiamen launching rockets at the city’s Green Zone. The similarity of these tragic and politically costly episodes was anything but a coincidence.

    First, I’d point out to Mr. Deihl that on Saturday the New York Times reported that incident in Gaza was not the fault of the Israeli Army, but rather the fault of exploding Hamas terrorists;

    Palestinian witnesses had said they believed that an Israeli tank shell or a missile from a drone had struck the family’s house in Beit Hanoun, killing the five.

    The military said it had fired two missiles from the air that hit their target — two Palestinian gunmen operating near the house. The gunmen were carrying backpacks loaded with ammunition, the army said, leading to secondary, bigger explosions.

    The military concluded the family was hit “during the explosion of the second missile that ignited the secondary explosions” or by “objects that had flown towards them from the strength of the explosion.” It ruled out a direct Israeli hit on the house.

    The backstory on the US incident as reported by ABC News;

    Stover said 28 militiamen were killed when U.S. forces hit back with rockets.

    Officials at two local hospitals said about 25 people had died and several dozen were wounded — most civilians. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to release the information.

    Associated Press photos showed men pulling the dust-covered body of a 2-year-old boy, Ali Hussein, from the rubble of one building.

    U.S. officials said all precautions are taken to prevent civilian casualties, but blamed the militiamen for taking cover among their neighbors and families.

    “The enemy continues to show little regard for innocent civilians, as they fire their weapons from within houses, alleyways and rooftops upon our soldiers,” said Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff for the 4th Infantry Division in Baghdad.

    Funny how AP always gets these pictures of two-year-olds pulled from the wreckage. But that’s what the Iranians want – dead children turn the Arab world against the US and Israel. It’s funny how AP can never find any dead children after terrorist attacks against the US and Israel. But this all covered in Michael Yon’s book “Moment of Truth in Iraq” – it’s not just a war of rockets and bullets, but also a war of cameras.

    Like I said, whenever an Israeli child is killed by a Hamas rocket, or an Iraqi child is murdered by an al Sadr-inspired attack or an al-Qeada attack, there never seems to be any of the mainstream photographers near. But let someone pull a body out of the wreckage after a US or Israeli attack, it’s like a Paris Hilton traffic stop. That’s why ya’all need to go to Amazon and buy Michael Yon‘s book – if for no other reason than to keep him over there and taking the pictures no one else will take.

  • Why Democrats hate Fox News

    Howard Dean is the latest Democrat to venture into the Fox News studio at 400 North Capitol Street. And straight off, Chris Wallace pins up for the dishonest commercial the DNC is running claiming McCain wants to fight the war in Iraq for 100 years;

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    Howard begins his answer insinuating that the Republican Party funds Fox News (Transcript from Gateway Pundit);

    Chris Wallace: “Governor, why are you distorting what McCain actually said?”

    DNC Chairman Howard Dean: “Well I’m not. I actually have what he actually said and if the Republican National Committee would like to pay for the whole six minutes I would be happy to do it.

    Yuh, nice try, Howard. As Wallace mentions, independent organization, FactChecker.org did their own research (h/t Fausta’s Blog) ;

    That of course is a serious distortion of what McCain actually said to a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire back on Jan. 3. His actual words are posted in a video on YouTube. Far from advocating “endless war,” he said the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq would be “fine with me” provided that they’re not being killed or wounded. Here’s the full quote:

    McCain, Jan. 3: Make it a hundred. … We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as American, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

    It should be noted that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, despite their frequent talk of withdrawing from Iraq, have said repeatedly that they would maintain at least some troops in a combat role in Iraq for some time, possibly their entire term of office.

    Then we’ve got Marty Parish, the fellow that asked John McCain about an embarrassing unsourced quote, who claimed he was a Baptist minister on John Gibson’s radio show (from Johnny Dollar’s Place)

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    Well, the Gateway Pundit has the dirt on Marty Parish – seems he’s really not a Baptist minister. He’s just a HuffPo hack…he’s probably a pretend hack, too. The First Baptist Church of West Memphis, Arkansas had to put a message on the header of their website;

     Response to the John McCain Town Hall Meeting involving “Baptist minister Marty Parrish.” Marty Parrish is an inactive member of our church. He is not a minister of this church or any other church.

    That’s just the first week of Democrats meet Fox News. Apparently, Democrats thought they had taught Fox a lesson by boycotting them last year. I guess it didn’t work out the way Democrats had hoped.

  • America ain’t not free

    The Washington Times writes that the Freedom House has decided that the US is not quite as free as we think. Who’s Freedom House? Well, in their own words;

    Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom.

    Now, I think it’s odd that an organization dedicated to “democracy and freedom” would waste their donor’s dollars looking at the United States while there are pressmen in Canada being silenced by the government, when Bridgette Bardot is facing another trial and fine in france for writing her thoughts in a book. When Christians in Muslim countries are repressed and forbidden to worship as they please. The Zimbabwean government won’t release the results of their election a few weeks ago so Robert Mugabe can stay in power. Evo Morales in Bolivia has unilaterally decided he’ll rewrite constitution. Hugo Chavez is nationalizing every major industry in Venezuela and taking land from farmers and enriching his family with land.

    With all of that going on in the world, what could possibly distract the Freedom House in the US. Well, the usual class warfare crap that brings in the self-hating, guilt-ridden limosine liberals’ dollars;

    The United States gets mixed reviews, for example, when looking at the situation of African-Americans and minorities in general.

    The report notes that over the decades the government has undertaken steps to expunge racism from the law, public institutions, economic life and popular culture. It has mandated affirmative action and adopted policies to encourage political and educational participation.

    “These measures have changed America in fundamental ways. But they have not contributed significantly to an improvement in the state of the inner-city poor,” the report concludes.

    Freedom House finds that U.S. incarceration rates are “jarring,” rising by more than 300 percent since 1980.

    Apparently the Freedom House thinks that our inner-city poor having more free money will somehow make them freer. I’d like an explanation for that. Like Sharon Jasper who gets dragged out in front of the cameras every time someone mentions the urban poor in New Orleans – what with her ample frame, 60″ TV and microwave. That’s how poorly we treat our poverty-stricken inner city dwellers. Shameful, ain’t it?

    121907_housing1.jpg

    No one can deny that fewer people in prison would make us freer – well, except for all of us hard-working innocent people who’ll spend more time looking over our shoulder for those criminals that’ll be running the streets instead of being in prison. Maybe that’s the fault of a culture that glorifies criminal behavior, not the government.

    Maybe we’ve surrendered all of our freedoms to a government which taken it upon itself to regulate every aspect of our lives. If you look in the Code of Federal Regulations, you’ll see how much of your life is regulated and you don’t even realize it. I’ve even seen where they regulate the size of your theater seats.

    OK, so the report isn’t that bad – but how can you make it seem bad to attract those limosine liberal dollars? Easy, find the most rabidly anti-Bush presenters available;

    Veteran journalists Helen Thomas and Bob Edwards—will appear as guest commentators at the event.

    But they have their work cut out for them;

    Mr. Melia said many of the authors originally focused on the post-Sept. 11 limitations on civil liberties in the country. However, it became clear in the editing process that the prison camp holding terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and monitoring of individuals under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, don’t impact as many Americans as the political process, the criminal justice system and religious freedoms.

    Geez, all of the Bush-related issues aren’t that bad, but I’m sure Helen Thomas can make a few popular-culture, anti-Bush jokes with no basis in reality to get the audience a-tittering.

  • Unemployment rate falls, crickets chirp

    This morning, all of the regular idiots at CNBC were giddy with pleasure that the unemployment rate was expected to rise as the Bureau of Labor Statistics were scheduled to to release it’s weekly report. How terrible they must feel that unemployment fell back instead;

    Employers cut far fewer jobs in April than in recent months and the unemployment rate dropped to 5 percent, a better-than-expected showing that nonetheless reveals strains in the nation’s labor market.

    For the fourth month in a row, the economy lost jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday. But in April the losses totaled 20,000, an improvement from the 81,000 reductions in payrolls logged in March. Job losses for both February and March turned out to be a bit deeper than previously reported.

    So, let’s recap – as late as last week, all of the “experts” were saying we’re in the middle of a recession (which is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth), yet the GDP actually increased .6% last quarter (even though growth was anemic, it was still growth) and the unemployment rate falls by .2%. Oh, did I mention that the dollar got stronger yesterday and that oil prices fell (actually, oil prices fell because the dollar got stronger)?

    I wonder what they’re saying on CNBC now?

  • AP rushes out grim milestone

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    Iraqi girls look a a damaged school building after an airstrike in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq on Wednesday, April 30, 2008. Health officials said two were killed and 16 wounded in the strike, which occurred Tuesday evening.

    The AP could barely contain their glee as the rushed out the report that “US troop deaths hit 7-month high in Iraq“;

    The killings of three U.S. soldiers in separate attacks in Baghdad pushed the American death toll for April up to 47, making it the deadliest month since September.

    One soldier died when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb. The other died of wounds sustained when he was attacked by small-arms fire, the military said Wednesday. Both incidents occurred Tuesday in northwestern Baghdad.

    A third soldier died in a roadside bombing Tuesday night in the east of the capital, the military said.

    The statement did not give a more specific location. But the eastern half of Baghdad includes embattled Sadr City and other neighborhoods that have been the focus of intense combat between Shiite militants and U.S.-Iraqi troops for more than a month.

    Of course they might have a smidgen of credibility if they’d reported that there were record lows last year, if they’d reported the overall success of the troops in the last six months. they did mention that operations had increased to destroy the militias in Iraq, but they’ve been  quiet on the successful operations in Basra and in 90% of the country.And they still rely on their unnamed sources;

    The Sadr City violence continued overnight with the destruction of a school in the district. AP Television News footage showed that parts of the two-floor Baghdad Girls’ School had pancaked as the result of an explosion. Desks were hanging down from the slanting classrooms where the outer walls were blown out by the blast.

    Local officials said the school was the target of an airstrike on Tuesday evening.

    An official at the local hospital, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to release the information, said two people were killed and 16 wounded overnight in Sadr City. He said this brought the death toll in the district since Tuesday to 31, with 107 wounded.

    How many schools have the US troops built in Iraq that don’t get reported in the AP, but blow one up and it gets graphic descriptions of the slanted walls and mangled school furniture. I guess those 31 dead and 107 wounded were all attending night school when the evil Americans struck? This is reminiscent of the Winter Soldier testimony that detailed US troops’  cruelty towards innocent buildings.