Martha Stewart

  I had to, just had to, link to this incredible display of narcissism. If you had any doubts that Martha Stewart was an egomaniac who is in jail because she thought she was above the law and immune to the normal restraints, you only need read her latest post.

I beseech you all to think about these women -- to encourage the American people to ask for reforms, both in sentencing guidelines, in length of incarceration for nonviolent first-time offenders, and for those involved in drug-taking. They would be much better served in a true rehabilitation center than in prison where there is no real help, no real programs to rehabilitate, no programs to educate, no way to be prepared for life "out there" where each person will ultimately find herself, many with no skills and no preparation for living.

In green, no less, doubtless to coordinate with the money Martha Stewart got from using insider information to sell stocks. She writes like a woman assured, positively convinced of her own perfection. She must be a publicist's nightmare as they struggle to cover up her wretched personality. I am willing to bet, though, that Viacom (CBS) will give her another contract for a show after she is released from jail. And, why not? They tolerated Dan Rather for decades.

U.N. fiasco

Okay for me, but not for thee. The U.N. champions the rights of women, holding conferences every year - dozens of them it seems at times. They are all for women except for those working for the U.N. Dileep Nair was accused of sexual harassment and the usual U.N. investigation ensued. With one minor catch. Dileep Nair was a U.N. official. So once the investigation was completed with a recommendation of wrondoing, Kofi Annan promptly dismissed the case. Nothing more needed to be done. The tiny glitch then was that the U.S. demanded some accountability and the union that covers U.N. staffers finally stepped up and are threatening a no confidence vote.

Agence France-Presse is reporting that Annan is under pressure to *gasp * resign. Would you know this from our American media?

Annan could not be reached for immediate comment. He is currently in Africa on a mission aimed at ending the long-running civil war in Sudan.

But he faces unprecedented calls to resign over the burgeoning scandal about "oil-for-food," a UN aid scheme that US investigators say allowed Saddam to siphon off billions of dollars.

Bolding mine.
Funny, haven't heard Jimmy Carter pipe up about corruption. And I don't recall the New York Times becoming indignant. Come to think of it, except for this story, has anyone heard of calls for Annan to resign? Does anyone remember Jimmy Carter's indignation over 800,000 dead blacks in Rwanda or indignation and moral outrage over the killing in Sudan? I havent' heard any anger from Clinton either or anyone in his administration.

"'What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred education system which tells people they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.It is a result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history.

Note from Prince Charles misrepresented by the British Press. Melanie Phillips has the story in context.

Blogger Junkyard dog: "The Press Is Hiding the Slaughterhouses of Fallujah".
Good question.

Good news story of the day

A longtime producer of "money-losing" Nightline is being axed. Well, more accurately, his contract is not being renewed. Same thing. WSJ reporte that the show itself is on a death watch. The longtime producer was the brains behind Koppel reading the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Iraq.

FOX going to Canada

Impartiality from Canada's Globe & Mail in this story headline: "CRTC likely to approve abrasive Fox News"

Fox News, the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right, will come to Canadian ...

AND

He used his much-watched The O'Reilly Factor program as a launching pad for feuds with The Globe and Mail's John Doyle and Heather Mallick, and attacked, variously, Canadian teens (for being "ignorant"), the CRTC (for "banning" Fox), former prime minister Jean Chr�tien (for being "a bum"), The Globe and Mail ("a far-left newspaper"), Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell (for being soft on heroin users) and Canadian health care ("socialist").

So???

UPDATE: No longer a "maybe." It has been approved.

Gagliano, a Gangster??

BIG WAVE in Canada. Link

The allegation that former cabinet minister Alfonso Gagliano was a member of the mafia is “highly serious” and should be treated with caution, Prime Minister Paul Martin said Thursday.

The story first appeared in New York Daily News. Canadian conservatives claim that the U.S. FBI say Gagliano was a member of the Bonanno crime family. It wouldn't surprise anyone, considering the flagrant corruption in Canada's Liberal party.

European Roundup

GERMANY
Does this sound logical to you? A 15-month old baby starved to death because his vegan parents purportedly did not approve of dairy products. They were given suspended sentences of 15 months each. The woman is an unemployed nurse. She did, however, notice he was ill two weeks before he died and gave him rubs with natural oils.

What kind of idiot court believes that story and allows the couple to keep three other children?

NETHERLANDS
More parenting idiocy. Sheeze. Radio Netherlands writer Andy Sennitt worries what four more years of Bush will do to electronic media.

Media fiction

This is why most of us think the Associated Press and the MSM that own them are such incorrigible liars that they will never reform themselves. Mark Sherman, AP writer, on Tom Daschle bidding Democrats goodbye, is a maudlin story with almost no truth.

Daschle is "classy" and "generally unassuming." I guess he missed all those C-SPAN conferences that Daschle held with the press almost daily where he belligerently preened before fawning reporters who dutifully posed with open reporter pads. They were meant as rally-the-troops talks but were reminiscent of Pat Boone singing the stirring lyrics of "Exodus." The voice was shrill and weak and there were no ideas, no great strategies, no focus. Just meanness.

Sherman also fawningly reports this which has got to make you laugh outloud:

Daschle talked about campaign stops where he met people whose problems reminded him of why he first came to Congress 25 years ago, said a Democratic aide. One 75-year-old woman he met wakes up every day at 4:30 a.m. for a job at McDonald's, he said; she needs the extra money because she spends most of her Social Security check on prescription medicines.

I guess that's why Daschle, along with his fellow Democrats, voted to increase the tax on Social Security income, penalizing those senior citizens who elected to supplement their income with part-time jobs, jobs they had to give up or give up even more in social security. At a local nursing home, they lost most of their part-time help, women who worked in the gift shop three mornings a week, two women who worked in the office who helped in filing and in processing paperwork. It was money they needed.

But the Associated Press writer wasn't assigned the task of telling the truth, admitting a humiliating defeat of the Democrat minority leader, nor pull up Lexus-Nexus stories about the registration on the Indian reservations tied directly to the Democrat party, look none too closely at Dasche's chumminess with the Argus Leader or with a friendly judge who attempted to intervene in the election.

All stories kept in our common memory by -- Google and bloggers.

It's a conclusion we have all have been coming to for a while. Janet Daley in the London Telegraph nails it perfectly. The reason for the great divide between Europe and the U.S.

The European Union is creating what it hopes will be a benign oligarchy. Real political power will reside once again within elite circles (as it does already in France) which will conduct their business in the corridors rather than in the assemblies.

Meanwhile, the United States will persevere with the belief, which Europe regards as crass, that giving ordinary people power over their governing class is the only hope for peace and security. Democracy, and what it entails, is not what unites us, Mr Blair. It is what divides us.

Europe doesn't believe in democracy.

It may sound apocalyptic, but I do believe that the democratic experiment in continental Europe, begun just over 200 years or so ago, is coming to a close.

Well worth the read and some thought.

My view is that if democracy has been betrayed in Europe, and I believe it has, it was more through the machinations of the political and intellectual classes than the weak will of people. In that respect, we see the same thing here as Democrats chase their dreams of oligarchy in the U.S. That is the thing that binds John Kerry and the worn intellectuals and shabby mainstream media and their European fans - their base belief that citizens are incapable to self-rule and must be guided by others more worthy of the task. People who are more nuanced and reality grasping.

It's an European conceit that has led to two world wars and one our mainstream media would import here if they could in order to elevate their own position in the scheme. You hear that smugness expressed daily by the Liberal American elites - the journalists, the editorialists, academia - in their contempt for the Red States, disdain for our religion, dismissal of our values, and the daily assault on our beliefs and traditions. You see it in the continued legal assault on the symbols of our religion by the ACLU and the battle against our children, providing our children with abortion on demand without parental notification or input, sex education that includes lessons in sadomasochism and fisting, the endless battle against the Boy Scouts. We turn it off daily: ABC's steamy sex sitcoms, CBS's idea of journalism that embraces fraud and deceit, MTV's sexualization of pre-pubescent teens. These are cultural attacks on our families, our children, our future.

Its realpolitik - politics based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations. These are European terms, along with "Balance of Power" -- the shabby raw power grabs and shady deals that led to two world wars and the decline of Europe. All led, of course, by France, with help from Germany. All facilitated by mass media. When immigrants left Europe, it was because they yearned for self-reliance and freedom. Those who found no inner strength or virtues of hard work and ambition or core belief in themselves, were the ones who returned to Europe, much chastised for their adventure. They are today the Perfect Passives who embrace European socialism. For the rest, the decline in a standard of living, mass immigration with unassimilated millions, and lingering recession with fewer and fewer jobs will bring a well-needed reality check. THEN, the Elites should watch their backs. Carefully.

More dirt from Disney

ABC apologized for steamy (read: tasteless) introduction to Monday night football. These are are the same folks who bring you Disney toys and books, Family Fun magazine, toysmart.com (educational games), family.com and Toon Disney and a lot of other stuff. Maybe you should consider that when buying your Christmas gifts this year for the kids.

This good news story from the BBC on the deline of the U.S. dollar.

Nicolas Sarkozy of France said he and his colleagues were unanimous in their worry that the decline of the dollar would hit Europe's economies by eating into their exports

Sounds good to me.

Lacking cheap under-the-counter smuggled oil from Iraq and the end to billions from construction contracts for palaces and grandiose unneeded airports while the Iraqi people were held captive by a madman and his nutcase sons, poor France and Germany are now suffering horribly. Added to that, the terorists they have cheerfully funded for decades and allowed to immigrate are suddenly not so friendly, and you have the makings of one giant European headache.

Memory Lane

Sometimes it is worth a trip down memory lane. Remember the 1999 reprieves and pardons granted by Bill Clinton to 16 Puerto Rican terrorists for 130 bombings in the late 70s? They killed 6 people and injured seventy. Clinton pardoned them without FBI review, Justice department approval or formal requests by the terorists.

Funny, our media forgot, too.

Newday circulation woes tip of iceberg

Editor & Publisher is spinning the Newsday circulation audit restatement. It was shockingly only 17% 16.9% and the tallies " come close to the range that Tribune Co. estimated in September (daily circ at 480,000-490,000 and Sunday circ between 570,000 and 580,000)."

To their immense credit, Newsday has been upfront on the story, more so than Editor & Publisher, "America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry". What the misstatement represents is

Weekday circulation fraud 97,783 copies
Sunday circulation fraud 97,739 copies

To see the scale, however, these are their revised figures
481,816 daily, 392,649 Saturday and 574,081 Sunday.
(Down from a circulation of 706,954 M-F and 790,187 Sun circulation in 1994. -- see graphic to right of the article.)

But look at the figures the Newspaper Association of America is still showing at their site.

Newsday - - - 574,941 (m)
Houston Chronicle - - - 542,414 (m)
The Dallas Morning News - - - 490,249 (m)
Chicago Sun-Times - - - 468,170 (m)
The Boston Globe - - - 462,850 (m)
San Francisco Chronicle- - - 456,742 (m)
New York Post- - - 438,158 (m)

But outright fraud with drivers backing up to dumpsters, charging distributers for papers they can't sell, delivering to people who cancelled ages ago or people who never wanted the paper, is only part of the problem. One of the biggest scandals in the industry is the definition of "paid circulation" as this 1999 MediaLife story demonstrates. Jack Shafer in Slate wrote a whole article on the Ghost Readers and the convenient 2001 ABC auditing that allows "paid circulation" to include papers discounted by 75%. Thanks to ABC rules, the newspapers can even count newspapers they give away to their employees. Nevertheless, newspapers like USA Today give away their papers at "bulk rates" that are ridiculously discounted and USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review spends hours agonizing over the Wall Street Journal discounted subscription rate that even charges regular subscribers $39 for online subscription. Compare that to the cost of USA freebies at hotels, airports, and restaurants.

And you wonder why they hate Bush when the Justice Department is investigating their circulation figures and when the New York Attorney General is investigating and an attorney for a group of advertisers is alleging racketeering and talking about $600 million in damages?

Joint operating agreements

This is one of the dirty secrets in the newspaper wars -- the Joint Operating Agreements where rival newspapers continue to publish and share advertising revenue. The theory behind it is that the public benefits from having more than one newspaper in a city. The actuality is that the free market determines should what the public wants. They don't, for instance, want the Denver Post, hence a JOA with the Rocky Mountain News. The same with the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The JOA concept is a little flawed. For one, it effectively excudes real competition in advertising rates and ensures a monopoly for the two papers, excluding any rivals from starting up. At worse, it guarantees that neither newspaper is responsive to their audience. Newspaper labor unions, of course, have a vested interest in supporting JOAs in order to maintain jobs. The biggest loser, however, is the public. They dont' get two newspapers: they get one Soviet-style subsidized rag and one they really want to read and support. And the unions throw in free strikes to try to cripple those with whom they aren't ideologically aligned. That's an added inducement to join a JOA, too.

JOAs in 2000. In 2003. And in 2004. In January 2004 the Cincinnati Post announced they would end the cozy Joint Operating Agreement that has made Cincinnati into a ghetto where every policeman is a despised "cop" and there are daily accusations of racism to feed the paranoia of the city captives, culminating in media-induced racial riots on a regular basis.

In Denver, amid much ado, the Rocky Mountain News concluded in an article about their JOA,

Neither newspaper nor owner enjoys a financial advantage as a result of the JOA. Scripps and MediaNews each receive 50 percent of the JOA's profits.

To which we might add, whether they deserved it or not.

Hearst gets faith

Seventeen magazine gets a faith forum in September. Honestly, these people are utterly laughable. I suppose next we can expect them to become patriotic. Nah, that's probably going too far for our lamestream media.

Scams

What a surprise. Saddam Hussein skimmed $21 billion through surcharges, smuggling and kickbacks. No word yet on how much the United Nations, France, Germany and Russia profited from the cozy relationship.

Europe Watch

This is how the EU stifles dissent. In Belgium, the Vlaams Blok party was declared a racist organization by a court because of their opposition to mass immigration and their desire for Flemish identity. The party is the most popular in Flemish Belgium, securing 24.1% of the vote in the last election. Labeled a "Flemish xenophopian and separatist party," the governing coalition members have a "cordon sanitaire" agreement that among themselves that no party will include them in any coalition, an action that effectively excludes the party and their voters from any government despite their success at the polls.

When the EU criticizes and wants to be involved in elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, those governments ought to tell em to go take a leap. In the meantime, the Vlaams Blok party has renamed itself and will continue to gain support at the polls.

Liberal Lefties List

To be a good American lefty list via DANEgerus.

1). You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.

2). You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.

3). You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-bidding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists.

4). You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.

5). You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.

6) You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.

7). You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.

There's more.

MSM - ignored, irrelevant, still lying

Liz Halloran, Hartford Courant, on whether the MSM is ignored and irrelevant quotes PressThink's Jay Rosen.

He says the Bush administration has effectively stripped the mainstream press - and in particular the White House press corps - of its relevancy by largely ignoring it and delivering its message through other media.

Previously, 'the White House press and the president needed each other,' Rosen said. 'The relationship was assumed to be of common interest.

It's a rare admission from the MSM and good for GW. It's the only piece of reporting in the piece. The rest is typical, "we are the good guys" and we are the "honest brokers" and Brownstein (Los Angeles Times) claiming "major newspapers very quickly published detailed accounts undermining the [Swift Boat veterans] claims" and so the story should have gone away. Typical of the agenda-driven Brownstein - who works more on behalf of the Democrat party than just about any journalist - to claim that kind of power. Most of us are still very grateful that the Swift Boat Veterans had an opportunity to tell their story, an opporunity that the left-of-Lenin Los Angeles Times would never provide. Undermined? I dont' think so. The book was a bestseller, John O'Neill is still giving interviews, and the consensus seems to be that the Veterans are more credible than say, John Kerry or, say, Ron Brownstein.

That's the problem with journalism's introspection. They might acknowledge their faults in private, although that's not a given, but they sure as heck would never admit their irrelevancy in print. Take such stories for what they are - pep rallies for their dwindling number of readers who still believe such total BS.

Ownership notes: Chicago Tribune owns both the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant.

C.I.A. reform

More reasons for CIA reform from David Brooks as noted in Powerline The CIA's War Against President Bush.

Good essay

"Call it guilt by a lack of disassociation" -- the Democrat party for failing to dissassociate itself from Michael Moore, movie stars and Barney Frank is just one of the reasons the Liberals lost according to Selwyn Duke, writing at the American Thinker.

No, it certainly isn’t your father’s Democratic Party. It has become a soulless organization whose only immutable principle is self-preservation, only source of passion is hatred, and only method for achieving success is opportunism.

Not that the Democrats will pay any heed, mind you. They are busy inventing excuses why they lost this election so they can blame anyone but the lamestream media who drive them.

Barbarians at the gate

Melanie Phillips on the Moral sickness of the world.

The reaction of the free world to Arafat's death, along with the opprobium heaped daily upon his victims in Israel, illustrates the decadence that now rewards evil and punishes those whom it terrorises. It is a horrifying indication of a world that has simply lost its fundamental understanding of right and wrong.

She is such a good writer.

Perhaps because we have forgotten past battles and sacrifices for our civilizations we are so suprised that these are battles we must fight again and again, not every generation, but every few generations. Barbarians always wait at the gates. They amass to pillage and destroy for no reason other than their strength in numbers and their love of battle, their embrace of destruction. Whether in the newsroom or the Disney factory, Hollywood or the Elite salons of pseudo-intellectuals, the decayed academia of the Universities or the anti-cultural elites ghettoed in the Northeast and Pacific states, they assault us daily. Anti-western, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-everything: our families, our church, our homes, our children, our values, our hopes, our dreams. They hold everything we believe in contempt. You might ask for what reason, but they have no answers, no grand plans, no ideals they cherish, no substitute culture to propose. They are Visigoths. They bring destruction. That's what Barbarians do.

1st Lt. Joshua Palmer

If you read only one posting this Veteran's Day, go to Hugh Hewitt to read about 1st Lt. Joshua Palmer who died April 8, 2004 in Fallujah, Iraq.

Quivering Lip

The British stiff upper lip, alas, is a thing of the past, as Theodore Dalrymple notes.

More *sigh* Democrat soul searching

This is the self-delusion of the Democrats as a consultant tells them what they should do to win elections. It comes down to pretending to be all the things they aren't. But the best part is their "Closing the God Gap."

It simply means that, as Bill Clinton did, we should show respect for the central role religion plays in the lives of the majority of Americans.

They actually believe that Bill Clinton's lip service to religion, showing up for church service with a five-pound Bible and returning on Easter to the Oval Office to be serviced by an intern is showing respect for religion. Democrats and their consultants actually believe we are so stupid we think their sudden pretense of tolerance toward average Americans means anything. Democrats allow their fringe groups to victimize the Boy Scouts, throwing our children out of schools and public buildings and parks, denying them funding because of their Christian beliefs, in effect persecuting them, and they actually hire twits to tell them that there's a God Gap.

Democrats embrace the NAACP who slander all Americans with outrageous charges and declare anyone who disagrees with them racist. Democrats encourage and embrace the ACLU as it seeks to erase any evidence of God from the public sphere to replace it with what? Socialism? Nihilism? There's isn't a God Gap. The Democrats are suffering from a morality deficit. They think lack of decency can be cosmetically covered up with a grand politicial plan devised by some paid political consultant. At least the consultants tell em that's so. But, then, they've been listening too those consultants too long already.

R.l.P. (Roast in Purgatory), you bloody terrorist

Yasser Arafat, the United Nation's Personal Terrorist, died at age 75. That's roughly 50 years longer than most of the men he murdered or he ordered to be killed to maintain leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. They were not good men, just rivals, wannabe terrorists in their own right, men like him, men who would kill as easily as he would. Only Arafat prevailed, with much assistance from his European salon friends. He was the Designated Terrorist much beloved by Internationalists who wish to ride roughshod over the laws created by democratically elected representatives while totally ignoring any wishes of the ruled. Arafat was publicly embraced by a fawning Nobel Peace committee, rewarded recognition by the U.N. in his capacity as a Permanent Observer. European governments, mostly Old Europe, used the pretext of the PLO cause to skim money from their own coffers and their own citizens, billions to wage a proxy war with the U.S., billions more padding the bank accounts of European politicians.

Some future time historians will write of the fall of the Old Europe and they will start the narrative in the 1960s when Europe embraced the terrorist strategy as a way to circumvent international laws and demonstrate how European politics, once again, trumps human decency. Making use of German terrorists, providing refuge for celebrity terrorists like the Jackal, the wholly amoral Europeans allowed the extranational terrorists to promote Internationalism that was no different than the dreams of the Comintern albeit without the Russian language, no less lethal than any of the European isms that are the filth of the 20th century. Fascism, Communism, Socialism. The Isms that killed millions upon millions of their own as they struggled for power against each other at least until the 1960s when they moved the battleground elsewhere for their amusement and lucrative armaments deals, propping up their governments with illicit deals with every despot from Africa to Asia.

The New York Times embraced Arafat. He was, as they called him, a Romantic Revolutionary. Never mind the innocents he killed, the families at pizza parlors, the people in those buses, the children and adults permanently maimed by bomb fragments tainted by rat poison. The people who did not die but were crippled or blinded, hideously scarred. Nevermind the pitiful plight of Palestinians raised with hatred instead of hope, carefully nurtured on hatred like Pol Pot's tiny murderous brigades. Nevermind Palestinian children encouraged to throw rocks at guns and strap bombs to their young bodies. Nevermind the women deprived of the stability of homes and the luxury of having their children grow to adulthood. They were all fodder for political folly, like a generation of German youth who had been sacrificed to delusions of power and grosser immorality.

Yasser Arafat was a monster embraced by evil men, including most of what we think of as the mainstream media in this country and most of the world press. May he rot in hell. And may those who help obscure his past find the same hell themselves.

For a much more eloquent denounciation that nails this miserable sod, see Max Boot's "How Arafat Got Away With It."

Requiem for a party

I missed this Economist article written two days after the U.S. election.

The Democrats certainly need to engage in a vigorous debate about the future of a party that has been in relentless decline for the past 50 years. A machine that once enjoyed a huge advantage in voter registration is almost at parity with Republicans; a party that once lorded it over Capitol Hill is now a minority in both houses of Congress, as well as being locked out of the White House. Worse, the defection of the white working class to the Republicans has left behind an awkward alliance of the upscale and the downscale - of educated elites (with a few billionaires thrown in) and ethnic minorities.

That's certainly blunt. I doubt most Democrats and no one in our Vichy Old Media can bring themselves to be so honest. The Economist is rooting for Hillary Clinton but only because, as the subtitle says, "Hillary may not be the best person to put her party together again. But she is better than the rabid left."

In my view, if the Democrat party wants to purge the rabid Left from their ranks, they're gonna have to start with the Vichy Old Media.

Election Monitors

What did those international election observers think of American elections? (Second from the bottom) Der Spiegel says "not bad, but still not up to par with Venezuela and not even as good as Serbia." I guess because Venezuela had Jimmah Carter to watch em.

A more realistic view of the Venezuelan elections can be found at the American Thinker.

Tim Blair: Enjoy the Goodness

Tim Blair and Goodness that would flow if Kerry had been elected.

Dead French parrot

The headline on this Independent story is nuanced: "Arafat is alive but condition is 'very complex', say French" Translation: We are still looking for the Swiss bank account number.

Years ago there was a running Saturday Night Live joke (when SNL was actually funny) about Franco still being dead. If they were still funny they would have an Arafat Still Alive segment with John Cleese as a desperate French politician trying to revive the dead long enough to convince a Swiss banker who slams the corpse against a counter insisting,

'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased
to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft
of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be
pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off
the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run
down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

Old terrorists never die, apparently, but they do fall of their perches.

See Romantic Revolutionary

Sissy Leftists

Hysteria from The Guardian on our election results. Do you get the feeling that these people dress in purple and have nervous dispositions and shriek a lot in falsetto voices?

The drafters of the constitution understood that the tyranny of the majority could be more fearsome and destructive than the rule of an autocratic despot. Now, the majority rules, absolutely. There is no room for the dignity of those who fought on the other side.

It's got to be an excess of hormones. Atlantic Blog wonders about the hysterical intellectuals. Personally, I think the problem is the hormones and lack of self discipline. It is always possible, though, that this kind of thinking is what really worries our Lefty friends.

As for our opponents on these shores, some of them really make you understand the word disloyal. When you start rooting for America's enemies, you have a screw loose. As much as I disagree with Liberals and Leftists, I wouldn't wish for the death of American soldiers to bolster my resentments nor would I cheer America's enemies on. He may be, in his own mind, magnanimous, but it is only because his side lost the election that he was forced to consider his position. Where did so many people who think of themselves as magnanimous and free spirited learn to hate so much?

Over my dead body

The French are, apparently, calling for closer relations with the U.S., as French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier "told Americans" in a letter in the Wall Street Journal, according to this Expatica article.

The problem is France is NOT a friend of the United States. The French are pathologically self-centered and terminally corrupt and any friendship would be to their advantage. In many ways, it is the Cold War all over again. Whenever the French offer to deal, it is to their advantage and to our ultimate pain. The French influence on the United Nations has resulted in a UN Human Rights Commission with China, Libya, and the Sudan, a Food for Oil program that enriched Europe at the expense of Iraqi lives, and a distressing rise in worldwide corruption, and 800,000 dead Rwandans. Now they have this brilliant idea of "a high-level group of independent figures from both sides to explore ways to deepen political cooperation across the Atlantic." Read: leftwing Democrats, leftwing American academics, and leftwing American business leaders, no doubt led by an equally flawed Bill Clinton or a halfwitted cracker like Jimmy Carter. Meanwhile France will continue to supply nuclear weapons to every crackpot in the world as they urge us to consider closer relations. Yeah. Right.

Newspaper criculation scandals continue

One of the big reasons Old Media hates, absolutely hates, GW Bush is the Federal investigation of some Old Media favorite corporations - Time Warner, for example, as well as Enron and WorldCom, all highflyers during the Clinton years of misstated earnings and collusion with their auditing firms, as well as union investments in dubious corporations. Old Media has another reason to grit their teeth over a Federal investigation of their newspaper circulation figures as well.

On Sunday, Newsday (Chicago Tribune-owned, acquired when they bought the Los Angeles Times) fired their "seventh circulation employee." These are the people who demand - I SAY DEMAND - accountability from everyone else, with the exception of any Liberal, leftwing, or Liberal-leftwing-supporting group, company, or individual. And they have cheated their advertisers for years as well as deceiving the public on their success.

Hopefully, the Bush administration will also call for a complete investigation into Neilsen ratings for television.

Circulation fraud stories, here and here.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is simply brilliant. Writing in the London Telegraph on our elections, he has this wonderful insight:

In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.

Every word is worth needlepointing.

Common Folk

For sheer distortion of reality, the New York Times is mandatory reading daily, but this Thomas Frank piece is a winner.

"Democrats", he intones in the title, "forgot the common folk." Not - the media elites forgot the common folk. Frank likes to pretend that the New York Times and other leftist media who drive the Democrat party, and have for years, are bystanders instead of architects that are driving the Democrat party, as they have newspapers, to near destruction.

Frank has this wonderful advice (mind you, advice from major media that has thus far managed to destroy their own credibility and the credibility of the Democrat Party):

Yet this would have been a perfect year to give the Republicans a Trumanesque spanking for the many corporate scandals that they have countenanced and, in some ways, enabled. Taking such a stand would also have provided Democrats with a way to address and maybe even defeat the angry populism that informs the "values" issues while simultaneously mobilizing their base.

Excuuuuuuse me, but weren't the corporations that grew spectactularly and completely unregulated and without scrunity, under the Clinton watch?? And wasn't the SEC under Clinton responsible for the misstatement of earnings, the corruption and collusion of auditing firms in this fraud? And wasn't it the SEC under Bush who found this fraud and has pursued the criminals?

Don't count on the New York Times for truth, folks. They are in the Spin business - trying daily to find some excuse - any - that could be used to rally the party they own and control and direct.

Election Perspective

Count on Tim Blair for perspective on our election:

• Number of people who voted for Bush: 59,651,262
• Number of people who live in Britain: 59,600,000
- From Quentin George, one of his readers.

Tim Blair did a little research of his own, too, and a reader is starting a toothbrush drive for the British to demonstrate American compassion.

Various bloggers are posting world reaction to our election. Since most of the world also supports the U.N. and their idea of human dignity with Sudan, China, and Libya on the the Human Rights Commission, you can predict the reaction. Iberian Notes translates from a Spanish bulletin board. No Watermelons (crediting The Corner) has a unsigned Mirror item. What is instructive, though, is all the venom and hatred toward the U.S. is a media creation, shared by, if not generated, by our own media foremost. Our media just hide it most of the time, disguising their hatred of the United States by substituting an anti-war, anti-Bush screed 24/7. It would be more worrisome except that the decline in the influence of American media makes it entertaining to watch their self destruction as they are engulfed in circulation scandals and their pet Stepford journalists are Fisked regularly and satisfyingly by the Blogosphere.

And, let's face it, the U.S. is performing a public service of sorts. The kind of people the international and American media appeal to would be screaming for death to Jews if we weren't handy substitutes for their venom. It's that kind of mentality - mindless hatred - the kind that 60 years ago energized the European continent into the last world war, egging on the bullies who need to hate to feel anything.

Tell us Bubba

For a lecture on morality and values, there's always Bill Clinton, explaining to the Financial Times why the Democrats lost the election.

John Kerry lost the election because Democrats were seen in middle America as “two-dimensional aliens”, Bill Clinton said on Friday.

The party had been “crazy” not to engage voters in the American heartland in a conversation about religion and morality, the former president and party favourite said.

Only a Leftwing publication would think to ask a disgraced and impeached former U.S. President about morals. And only a shameless twit like Clinton who enjoyed BJs from a 21-year-old girl in the Oval Office while talking on the phone would respond.

Wanna know the problem with the Democrat party? You just read it.

New York Times' owned IHT calling the media "marginal"?!!

Still, Rather insisted, there really did seem to be problems with Bush's Guard record; if the memos were fake, they reflected reality. The whole messy affair probably changed few voters' minds in this discouragingly sordid political year. It did, however, cast light on the growing political role of the sometimes marginal media that helped humble Rather. Foremost among these are Internet blogs - Web logs, or online journals - and broadcast talk shows.

Rather Irrelevant (washingtonpost.com)

Rather Irrelevant (washingtonpost.com)

Media idiot

Peter Clark, Senior Scholar, Poynter Institute on televising hearings on CBS Rathergate.

It's time for public hearings again. What did CBS people know, and when did they know it?

Transparency is the word of the day in journalism standards and practices, and what could be more transparent than testimony taken in public? Televised hearings, it will be argued, would produce posturing and preening aplenty, distorting the details of empirical investigation. Look what happens to big time defense attorneys when they get to work the cameras."

Oh yes. Would be great. Media-appointed investigators questioning media about media misdeeds.

Where do they find these kinds of idiots?

Media idiot

Peter Clark, Senior Scholar, Poynter Institute on televising hearings on CBS Rathergate.

It's time for public hearings again. What did CBS people know, and when did they know it?

Transparency is the word of the day in journalism standards and practices, and what could be more transparent than testimony taken in public? Televised hearings, it will be argued, would produce posturing and preening aplenty, distorting the details of empirical investigation. Look what happens to big time defense attorneys when they get to work the cameras."

Oh yes. Would be great. Media-appointed investigators questioning media about media misdeeds.

Where do they find these kinds of idiots?

ITEM:

BRUSSELS - Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht on Wednesday hit out at the speech given by US President George W Bush to the United Nations where he defended the war in Iraq.
'I hope that in reality he thinks differently to what he was saying,' said De Gucht on Wednesday, adding that he did not believe the optimistic picture given by Bush reflected the true situation. 'If not, then we have a real problem,' he added. 'For Europeans his declarations appear to show he is not living on the same planet.' 'Even the average British politician does not believe these things any more.'

But De Gucht conceded that the reconstruction of Iraq was important and that the UN still had a role to play.

Melanie Phillips is a journalist and she has come to the same conclusion I came to and has titled her essay, The media war against the west.

Dumber than Gore

The National Post has a new blog for their editorial board writers. This one by Lorne Gunter is a gem. (All the ones by Gunter seem very good.)
A friend and fellow journalist discovered the story about the memos, especially the fact that a "third-grader could spot those as fakes."

Michael Berg

Blogger INDC June 4, 2004 INDC Journal Interviews Michael Berg
Citizen Smash on Fellow traveler GILLIAN RUSSOM and friends.
June 5, 2004 (Video) Michael Berg Speaks.
Sept 16, 2004 Berg's father speaks for Kerry

It is incomprehensible to most of us that politics should be so pervasive to a human being that it trumps human decency. The problem with being a True Believer is that it becomes the purpose for living, a fantatical adherence to a cause, whether it is politics or religion.

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves - and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole. - Eric Hoffer

This is why mass movements never achieve solutions. They aren't meant to solve problems. They exist to celebrate the disenchantment with society itself, to create a class of the disaffected who are powerless to achieve anything but serve as rabble to bolster the cause of those who organize them. Hoffer was a self-educated longshoreman. True Believer is a classic that helps the reader understand the mass movements that have convulsed Europe with communism, socialism, fascism in the 20th century. You can reread the book fifty times and walk away with new understanding every time.

OTHER BOOKS THAT ADD TO UNDERSTANDING
Psychologist and philosopher Victor Frankl experienced the horrors of national socialism in a concentration camp and came away with a philosophy for our times. Man's Search for Meaning is a slim volume that is readable and inspiring, a gift of life from a truly wonderful man.

Christopher Lasch was a keen observer of cultural. Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy was published after his death and suffers somewhat from lack of his precision editing. The online review by Caroline Miranda sums it up nicely, if Lasch can be summed up. He's more to be savored.

Libertarian nonsense

Blubbering libertarianism from Cathy Young, editor at Reason, writing in the Boston Globe.

As I tried to follow the early debate on the CBS memos, I was utterly confused by the cacophony of agenda-driven charges and countercharges, insults, and clashing pronouncements by self-styled experts whose credentials had to be taken on faith. The pro-Bush blogs shrieked that the incriminating documents were obvious computer-created fakes; the anti-Bush blogs shrieked that, beyond any doubt, typewriters capable of producing these memos were available in the 1970s. No offense to the upstart blogs, but what finally settled my doubts was reporting by mainstream media such as ABC News and The Washington Post.

And this silliness:

In the past, the danger was that the "big media" with their unspoken biases could exert too much unchecked and unbalanced influence over public opinion. Today, the danger is that some people will choke on the overabundance of facts and interpretations, while others will withdraw into a comfortable niche, exposing themselves only to journalism that feeds their prejudices.

Apparently, Cathy can't form an opinion unless it is validated by MSM. If such transparent forgeries can't convince Cathy without waiting for the WashPo to figure it out for her, you wonder if she is capable of any judgement whatsoever. It's why she's Libertarian, I guess.

P.S. Note to Cathy. It isn't old media vs. new media. It's discovering the truth wherever it leads you.

WSJ Opinion Journal raises questions of whether CBS was a "vessel for, if not a willing participant in, a partisan dirty trick" in the Bush bushwacking story. [bolding mine]

And we know that the day after Mr. Rather's report aired, the Democrats unveiled 'Operation Fortunate Son,' a campaign video about Mr. Bush's National Guard service that incorporated footage from '60 Minutes.'

Pretty hard to disagree with that conclusion nor walk away unconvinced after reading this by Balloon Juice.

Right now, they merely appear incompetent, and they have determined incompetence is better than complicit.

Read the whole thing. It's a great article. And Roger L. Simon's take on it is good, too.

Voice of the Left. Whenever anyone quotes Jim Muller and calls him "a physician who battled nuclear weapons," they are being as disingenuous about his leftwing history as he is himself in claiming his "Voice of the Faithful" is a grassroots organization dedicated to reforming the Catholic Church.

This hack job leftwing group is a successor to the anti-war, anti-bomb, ant-west groups of the 1980s. If you needed no more evidence, his interview with the Cinncinnati Enquirer is a media/leftwing collaborative effort. The Enquirer gave the VOTF Cincinnati chairperson a guest column because of the great support of the population -- all 15 of em.

Nice News story

Home Depot is working with the government to hire more veterans, and active duty service members about to be discharged and the military spouses. Good for Home Depot.

CBC squealers

CBC TRIES TO SKEWER COMPETITION
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC home) squealed to Reuters on CanWest.

A CBC reporter contacted the news agency after noticing that a Reuters story in last Tuesday's National Post was altered.

The result was this story that quickly disappeared.

CBS HUMILIATION
Globe and Mail refer to CBS's "humiliating apology" calling it " a huge blow to the credibility of CBS and its 60 Minutes public-affairs program," ending with the unexpected conclusion. HERE

The apology is the latest in a series of scandals that have questioned the journalistic ethics of leading U.S. news media, including The New York Times and USA Today.

It's fair to say that the left leaning Globe and Mail are not happy with the ineptness of our own left leaning media. Since the Globe and Mail has hidden their columnists and editorials and even their letters behind a subscription wall, we can't read Margaret Wente, but it's a safe bet she was gonna skewer CBS too. "After a series of increasingly absurd efforts to defend the indefensible... "

Monsters

He was five-years-old when was lured into a bar where pedophiles paid $12 each to rape him. He was killed the same day. His body has never been found, but the thirteen adults are in court in Germany.

Liars or buffoons

FoxNews "CBS: We Were Duped" is a nice copout, blaming Burkett, as if they didn't know he was a mental basket case.

As for the rest of us, we've all seen the memos. If CBS was taken in by such cheesy forgeries, you have to worry about their ability to judge any news story. The fake-but-authentic-memos story, however, demonstrates to another generation the bias, blather, and blatant incompetence of CBS.

Tim Blair on how the "Authenticity wasn't proven." OUCH

CBS woes grow

From the Globe and Mail (Canada) that is no fan of GW Bush.

In its rush to broadcast a story besmirching George W. Bush's Vietnam-era war service, CBS News has managed to turn a long-running controversy over the President's lacklustre military career into a public accounting of its own judgment.

"I, ah, sent the memos.
But I didn't, ah, create them."

Posted by Hello

Reuters is upset by CanWest's rewrite of their stories.

Papers owned by CanWest Publications, Canada's largest newspaper chain, have been altering words and phrases in some newswire copy stories dealing with the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thereby changing their meaning.

In one Reuters story, the original copy reads: "… the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which has been involved in a four-year-old revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank."

In the National Post version, printed Tuesday, it became: "… the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group that has been involved in a four-year-old campaign of violence against Israel."

I guess that means not using the word "terrorist" to describe ah, well, "terrorists" also serves to change the meaning?? The editors at CanWest think it does.

Ownership Notes: CanWest is the only "conservative group"of papers in Canada. It includes the National Post (formerly Hollinger) and a number of smaller papers.
Reuters was winner of the 2003 Dishonest Reporting Award for the most skewed and biased reporting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by Honestreporting.com

Emmy ratings

Ratings weren't good for the Emmy's, but even worse than most outlets are reporting.
"The latest figures mark a 22 percent drop from the 17.9 million viewers who watched last year's Emmys on Fox. Ratings dropped even further by 34 percent among viewers aged 18 to 49, the demographic favored by advertisers."
Source: ABC news link

The Gilligan defence

I can't figure out if the Washington Post actually believes this or they are trying to offer CBS a lifeline, a means of scapegoating the White House for the memos.

The papers were hand-delivered at 7:45 a.m. CBS correspondent John Roberts, filling in for Rather, sat down with [White House communications director] Bartlett at 11:15.

Half an hour later, Roberts called "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes with word that Bartlett was not challenging the authenticity of the documents. Mapes told her bosses, who were so relieved that they cut from Rather's story an interview with a handwriting expert who had examined the memos.

Mapes is going to be sacrificed. "Howard said Mapes told him the analysts' concerns had been addressed." [Which is odd when CBS never mentioned having concerns before now and doesn't again until after the broadcast and blogger reaction.]

WashPo offering CBS an out. It's a hoax. [Bolding mine]

As they continue their investigation into whether they were hoaxed, CBS officials have begun shifting their public focus from the memos themselves to their underlying allegations about the president. Rather said that if the memos were indeed faked, "I'd like to break that story." But whatever the verdict on the memos, he said, critics "can't deny the story."

The problem is, they they aren't claiming a hoax, as Mark Steyn points out. "The only reasonable conclusion is that the source -- or trail of sources -- is even more incriminating than the fake documents. Why else would Heyward and Rather allow the CBS news division to commit slow, public suicide?"

WashPo final paragraph unintentially sums up the CBS problem.

As the days begin to blur for Josh Howard, he embraces the same logic: "So much of this debate has focused on the documents, and no one has really challenged the story. It's been frustrating to us to see all this reduced to a debate over little 'th's."

It's a debate over fraud, stupid, and journalistic ethics. The Independent calls it the

"Gilligan defence", pioneered by the BBC journalist in the corporation's 2003 row with the Government over the "sexed-up" Iraq weapons dossier.In both cases, the accused party claims that, whatever the doubts about the supporting evidence, the basic story was true."

Compare the liberal position on gun control and the reality.

FOLLOWUP: Michelle Malkin is following the story of Phil Parlock who was photographed with his 3-year-old daughter crying after a protestor ripped up a Bush/Cheney sign she was carrying.

There is some dispute about whether it was staged. There is a very handsome online apology from the International Union of Painters and Allied trades that Captain's Quarters thinks is unncessary. He has doubts about the family. As do some other conservative bloggers. Michelle will be following.

If it was a stunt, it deserves to be exposed and thankfully, bloggers on both sides are trying to get to the bottom of it. At the minimum, though, I agree with Captain Ed. The man had no business taking a three-year-old to a political rally as an opposition protester.

RUSSIA: Moscow police have defused two car bombs. A suspect was arrested and confessed. He since has died of a heart attack, which strikes me as a very effective start to a war on terrorism.

CUBA: The BBC which usually praises Former Czech president Vaclav Havel is oh so carefully neutral when he predicts the end of Fidel Castro and encourages Cuban "anti-Castro activists." (The BBC reserves the term "dissidents" for those they agree with or for whom they have sympathy.)

SPAIN: Draft legislation for divorce in Spain would not only be no-fault, but no-judge either with the added bonus that Divorce will be final in two to six months. "According to 2002 data from Spain's state-run INE statistics office, the number of single-parent households nearly equals that of families comprising a couple with three or more children." What a surprise.

Game over

When the Independent, home of Robert Fisk, scolds CBS, the game is over.

For Mr Rather himself, the dispute is another acrimonious brush with power in a career studded with them. For the moment, he is adopting what might be called the 'Gilligan defence', pioneered by the BBC journalist in the corporation's 2003 row with the Government over the 'sexed-up' Iraq weapons dossier.
In both cases, the accused party claims that, whatever the doubts about the supporting evidence, the basic story was true.

Oh, and they read ratherbiased.com

The remedy

Richard Reeb relects on a remedy for a media worldview that is alien to our thinking of just "powers from the consent of the governed." We no longer want to consent.

But old media have an overweening sense of their own importance. They believe that they alone can or should guarantee our freedoms or, perhaps more accurately, to restrain our natural inclination to think, speak and act without oppression by the government. As long as we consent to this situation, we are consenting to be misled.

A do-not-miss read: Horsefeathers on warfare and utopian Liberalism sensitivities and John Stuart Mill.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Freedom of the press for those who own one

The Independent's John Lichfield worries about the independence of the French press with the takeover of Le Figaro.

M. Dassault's takeover of Le Figaro has raised fears that the French press is falling under the control of the political-military-industrial establishment. The Lagardère group, formerly Matra and a shareholder in European Airbus, already owns the Hachette empire. It is also the biggest book publisher, book distributor and newsagent. With Dassault's takeover of Socpresse, three-quarters of the press is run by two military-industrial groups, posing the question: is French press freedom about to become a "mirage"?

[Bolding mine]

Getting tough with journalism

New rules in the U.K. would make newspaper editors liable for "wasted costs" and require them to reimburse the government if they are found liable for the collapse of a criminal trial. After several high profile cases in which retrials were ordered after adverse media coverage, the government is taking a harder stand. The ruling would apply equally to jurors, witnesses or members of the public if they are found guilty of "serious misconduct."

Reigning in paraprazzi-style journalism practiced by major media outlets would not be a bad thing.

Someone write a requiem

Sensing on why the documents matter.

The authenticity of the memos is the most important aspect of this whole scandal. If documents can be forged, handed to co-conspiratorial media and used to hammer or destroy a political figure without regard to the fact that the documents are forged, then what the Left has long claimed about America will come true: we are not far removed from a Gestapo regime. Only the Left will itself will have brought it about, and the Left will be the new reichsfuhrers.

Read it all.

It occured to me in reading Sensing that he makes too much sense. He's rational, responsible and entirely lucid and honorable. That's when it struck me that it is those qualities that makes us repel most about CBS's faked memoes. The disregard for the rules of ethics and morality, decency, and fair play, produces in most of us an outrage at the flagrant lie the faked documents represent. But, really, should we be outraged?

It is not a frivilous question. Most of us do not think highly of the MSM and haven't for a long time. Since the 60s and with a constancy that has become so predictable that it is stale, the media has been far more liberal than average Americans. The acceptance of this as universal fact, though, is a rather recent phenomenon when you think about it. It is a consensus that was not reached recently, but assented to only a short time ago, responded to recently in our own form, our own way, on the internet, in blogs.

The Liberalism of the media is no longer something we sense but something we deeply resent. In concert and in chorus. So why should they act differently now and why should we suddenly expect more of them? Because we have caught them so flagrantly lying? That's just it -- they know this isn't an unusual occurrence. They know that when Rather pretended that those documents were genuine, it was not a first time CBS or Dan Rather scammed the American public. In a Joe McCarthy gesture, Dan Rather held up the memos, waved them, and expected us to accept his word. They can't respond with guilt because if they did, they would have to admit that this tactic was nothing new. Shame is a emotion they can't afford to display.

CBS isn't going to apologize and Dan Rather isn't going to quit. To do so would be to undermine the whole concept of a talking head journalist speaking to a one-dimensional audience he can only imagine beyond the lens of the camera out there... somewhere. People he never sees, never meets and never really exist in his reality are hard to address in terms of moral responsibility. How can you feel guilty about lying to people who despise you anyway?

That's what struck me about Rather's appearances this week. Think about his street interview outside the studio that day. Who did he remind you of? He looked like Madeline Albright and Sandy Berger and Judy Woodruff in that gymnasium for the first time in their lives in a live setting where the responses are not scripted, the audience wasn't hand picked, the game wasn't already fixed. They looked like deer caught in the headlights. They looked terrified.

It's what Dan Rather looked like. It was like he walked out into the sunshine for the first time in forty years, blinked, looked around, and was amazed, frightened, and unsure all at once. The MSM cannot operate in the glare of public scrutiny. They know it, too. They're scared.

Turkey to EU: mind your own business

This is heartening. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told the European Union on Friday to mind your own business. This was in response to EU interference and hectoring about Turkey's desire to pass a law making adultery a crime. Naturally, the pantywaist liberals in the Liberal media promptly trotted out the womens' groups to protest this codification of Turkish morality. The Internationalists around the globe had hardly stopped cheering when it looked like they might prevail in derailing another demonstration of national sovereignty. What the cheering did was make Turkey dig in and now plans for a new penal code in conformity with the EU have been delayed.

Whether or not you agree with the the proposed law, the Left Liberals in Europe have gotten their way too long. Ultimately member states have to ask if it is possible to pass any laws that aren't pre-screened by the European Union and the slavish world press?

This is the second time the pantyhose men in the Hague have been slapped down in the last month. The last time it was by Putin.

Dutch proverb: Sweep before your own door before you look after your neighbour's.

Loose Lips

The Germans are taking terrorism seriously, more so than the rest of Europe. They probably have to because Germany is a higher profile. But the news that an German-born American woman who had been living in Canada was arrested and is accused of treason tells you how concerned they are. According to Deutsche Welle, the betrayal would have raised a serious security threat to Germany.

NPR's Undecided Voter

We always knew the liberal media were dog-kicking liars. It took the internet and blogs, though before we could document their fakes and frauds. Like NPR's Undecided Voter.

Tip to Reader David Ragsdale and fraterslibertas. Good job, guys.

Kofi Annan

Interesting background for the Kofi Annan remarks that the war in Iraq was illegal. Thanks to Secular Blasphemy for the tip.

Sustaining resentment

Who said this? "Nobody should expect people to forget the suffering of their ancestors, nor should they. But memories of past trials should translate into efforts to ensure that they don't happen again, not into sustaining resentment."

If you guessed the New York Times (International Herald Tribune), you probably guessed they were talking about Polish reparation claims against Germany, too. The Times, however, is a dollar late on the story as the brief flirtation with the reparation idea was quickly abandoned. Unlike, say, slave reparations in the U.S.

This NYTimes article, oddly, doesn't mention 'sustaining resentment' once. Maybe they should cc the Romantic Revolutionary.

Motor Voter Fraud

Jeff Jacoby, the lonely conservative at the Boston Globe, has written about election fraud before. In 1996 he registered his wife's cat in three states and requested and got absentee ballots from all three venues. He did this to point out the election fraud possibilities of the Motor Voter law very dear to Clinton and the Democrats who crafted and passed it as a priority in Clinton's first term. They never had a chance to enact Pt. II which would have been some sort of measure to allow voting at work so that poll scrutiny of multiple voters would be less likely to discover election fraud. The fraud is very real as he points out in his column.

As journalist John Fund shows in an alarming new book, 'Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,' the United States has an elections system that would be an embarrassment in Honduras or Ghana. It is so unpoliced, he writes, that at least eight of the 9/11 hijackers 'were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations.

Double voting - registering in two different states - is pathetically easy. It's done on university campuses all the time. It's a safe bet, too, that the elite who live in New York also vote in their second home residences. (It's comforting to think that's why Connecticut and Vermont have such screwy politics otherwise it's hard to imagine why anyone would want such disastrously bad governance.)

Jacoby suggests I.D. at a minimum when voting. I think a thumb print and I.D. are better safeguards. I bet those hijackers had exquisitely crafted I.D. I know they all had valid drivers licenses. But a thumb print is a signature to a felony.

Surfing the continent

GERMANY: Germans unhappy with Islam. "When asked what they think of in association with the word 'Islam' some 93 percent of Germans said 'oppression of women', 83 percent said 'terror', 82 percent said 'fanatics and radicals', 70 percent said 'dangerous', 66 per cent said 'backward', 45 percent said 'hospitality' and 6 percent said both 'tolerance' and 'nice'. "

THEN THERE IS THE GOVERNMENT VIEW. Belatedly, the German government is moving to ban an Islamic "Congress" planned for October in Berlin. Previously they had refused to act, deferring to Berlin to take the heat make a decision. The group planning the "First Arab Islamic Congress in Europe" aims to support "the resistance movement against aggression and occupation in Palestine and Iraq." (taken from their web site.) They deny, however, they are catering to Islamic extremists. Interior Minister Otto Schily thinks it would pose a security threat.

But Schily appears loath to take any chances in letting the conference go ahead, especially considering how hard the government has worked to avoid having Germany look like a haven for Arab radicals in the past couple of years.

The authorities became particularly concerned after it became known that several of the men involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington had lived for several years in the northern German city of Hamburg.

ELECTIONS ON SEPT. 19TH don't look promising for Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats. I guess building a social welfare system to buyoff voters based on an economy subsidized by cheap oil smuggled by French firms from Iraq through Syria is, apparently, a poor economic model.

UPDATE: (Sept. 20th) The Lebanese organizer of an Islamic conference with anti-semitic, anti-American overtones planned for August in Berlin has been deported.

SPAIN: It's a matter of semantics. Police raid netted ten Pakistani men in Barcelona from two flats in an investigation of forged passports. The regional police however denied they were part of a terrorist cell. A police spokesman said: "We are not talking about an Islamic terrorist group but a support group for radicals outside Spain." Glad he clarified that.

FRANCE: Nothing good can come of an industry association plan to improve service as the French hotel and catering industry's main trade association, UMIH, plans for the notoriously awful cafe industry. If you've ever encountered a French waiter, you know snottiness is a job qualification and hygiene is a variable standard. Inspections would be a helpful, but with French corruption, no one will hold out for changes anytime soon. But, hey, it sounds good.

NETHERLANDS: The European Parliament finally got around to condemning the violence in Darfur. About 50,000 too late.

Now for something completely different

Alberta, Canada, has a waiting list web site where you can get current information on the expected waiting time for anything from cardiac surgery to radiation and therapy.

Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery at the Univ. of Alberta hospital has, for instance, 150 patients waiting, with most patients (90%) receiving service within --- 8 weeks. Priority 1 (undefined) patients have estimated waiting times for physicians of 3, 5, 4, 4, 2 weeks. (Yes WEEKS, not days).

These times are not for emergency care, but, then Bill Clinton's wasn't either. It would not have been even if we had accepted Hillary's health care that wanted to duplicate the Canadian system. It's only the rest of us that would have to wait 2 weeks, 3 weeks, a month, or 5 weeks for the same procedure.

Hearing from the grownups

The Wall Street Journal on "A Media Watershed."

However the flap over CBS and those National Guard 'memos' turns out, the past few weeks mark a milestone in U.S. media and politics. Along with the Swift Boat Veterans' ads, the widespread challenge to Dan Rather's reporting -- to his credibility -- means that the liberal media establishment has ceased to set the U.S. political agenda.

This is potentially a big cultural moment. For decades liberal media elites were able to define current debates by all kicking in the same direction, like the Rockettes. Now and then they can still pull this off, as when they all repeated the same Pentagon-promoted-torture line during the Abu Ghraib uproar. But the last month has widened cracks in that media monopoly that have been developing for some time.

Good overview, lucid writing (compare it to the Editor & Publisher weed-is-good writing) and a great conclusion, none of which the MSM will listen to or heed.

Editor & Publisher dude weighs in

Or maybe the story is a walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction, as Kris Kristofferson (like Killian's typist) would have it.

That's how the editor of Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell, "sorts out fact from fiction" in the "60 Minutes Flap" as the "CBS controversy" grows "more curious."

Curious, indeed. Jim Romenesko, the acknowledged official blog of journalism, whose site is hosted at Poynter ("Everything you need to be a better journalist"), the wannabe official home of journalism, finally had a main column item on the CBS faked documents. After what? six days? And the result is a link to aging hippie lookalike Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publishing, ("America's Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry.") You just know the Boomers have taken over. It's like some alien movie where you keep hoping there is some physical mark at the wrist you can spot to warn you if the writing already isn't clue enough.

In case you need more convincing, there's a neat box to the right of the article with links left out of the article. Under "Concepts" there is word processor, letter writers, news pages, media response, Texas attorney. Talk about high tech. Related Articles, above, has a link to three items, including "Helen Thomas Slams Bush at Newspaper's Summer Social" (Pub. Aug. 03, 2004).

It was too much to hope that the aliens at E&P would act like responsible adults, not when they've spent a lifetime creating an alternate reality for themselves and their readers. You can't expect too much of people who have helped the newspaper industry self-destruct. They didn't need help to do it, but the encouragement was nice. And when you are looking for reasons for the deplorable standards in the media, look no higher than the Editor & Publisher.

Bloggers are so cool. Link

Burkett's lawyer is an activist. Democrat activist.

[Tin hat warning] Burkett writes an opinion piece. says Bush wants to be "king of America." "But I first had to survive. Without a single bit of help, contact and in spite of threats against my life and that of my family, I have had to relearn to walk and to live. "
His "friends" are winners and the online journal is strictly Twilight Music stuff.

Sucker story?

NYTimes trying to add to the confusion. [My comments are indicated.]

CBS has refused to say how it obtained the documents. But one person at CBS, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed a report in Newsweek that Bill Burkett, a retired National Guard officer who has charged that senior aides to then-Governor Bush had ordered Guard officials to remove damaging information from Mr. Bush's military personnel files, [ what date? How does Burkett know and can he prove it? ]had been a source of the report. This person did not know the exact role he played.

Mr. Burkett declined to return telephone calls to his home near Abilene, Tex. [Drudge is running a story that memos were faxed from a Kinkos in Abeline, Tex.] His lawyer, [why does he need a lawyer] David Van Os, on Tuesday repeatedly refused to say in a telephone interview whether the officer had played a part in supplying the disputed documents to CBS. Mr. Van Os said 'the real story is and should be, where was George Bush?' and that Mr. Burkett 'is not the proper object of attention.'

Mr. Van Os called Mr. Burkett 'a man of impeccable honesty who would not permit himself to be a party to anything fake, fraudulent or phony.' He also said, in response to questions, and stressing that he was speaking only hypothetically, 'If Bill Burkett were to later discover that something he was a party to were fake or phony, as a man of honor who lives by a code of honor of the military, he would not permit the falsity to continue.' But, the lawyer hastened to add, 'This is not intended to be any kind of specific statement.'

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush's military service, Mr. Van Os said: 'If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 - which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done'' - then, he continued, "what difference would it make?" [So now the memos are replicas? And someone BELIEVED they existed?]

Designated fall guy?

On'tday aysay anything

Underground (BBC) report on -- shhhhhh -- religion in America.
Do not forward this posting. If you print, please destroy the paper after reading. If the ACLU finds out, they will possibly sue BBC for their honesty. The separation of relgion and media is a sacred tenet of journalism.

Klingon Service

I am excited about this. Deutsche Welle (DW) is celebrating 10 years of its online service by adding Klingon language to their daily translation.

Too bad that Klingon isn't on the DW language selector and the link from the BBC doesn't work. Oh well. On the bright side the Klingon Language Institute KLI offers a postal course in PDF.

UPDATE: They fixed the DW Klingon page. It looks like a one-time though. But it's clever.

Europe

NETHERLANDS: "Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands has launched a blistering attack on Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery on the eve of the 60th commemoration of the costly failure of the Battle of Arnhem in 1944." Speaking on television, Bernhard said the British ahd tried to blame the commander of the Polish forces who took part in the operation.

One little item at the end of the article was worth noting. "Bernhard was a member of the Nazi SS before he married the future Dutch Queen Juliana in 1937." who "has been plagued by rumours that he tipped off the Germans about Market Garden." He has a colorful history. That probably explains the Dutch obsession with euthanansia, abortion ships, and Internationalism.

OTHER NEWS FROM THE HAGUE: "The European Parliament rejected earlier this week a resolution condemning the bloody end to the Beslan tragedy and at the same time demanding attention to Russia's actions in Chechnya. The large parties had been concerned that the resolution could have given the impression that the killing of children could be justified." Link (Third item down.)

Milosevic war crimes trial suspended... again

The mockery of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic has been suspended for a month after 20 defense witnesses refused to testify to protest the court appointment of defense lawyers.

The trial has been a joke, as this Sept 03, 2004 cached CBC item shows.

After 2½ years and 296 witnesses, Milosevic's trial hasn't yet reached the halfway mark.

The timeline of the United Nations "International Criminal Tribunal" trial illustrates the problems that include humiliating cross examination of the prosecution, the retirement and death of a judge, exposure of the utter incompetence of the United Nations to the extent that even the legitimacy of the Tribunal itself is in doubt. Certainly the procedures are confused. Some had doubts even before the trial.

The Tribunal itself is a show piece for Internationalism under UN auspices. Supposedly a descendant of the Nuremburg trials, the problem is that those trials were conducted due to and in absence of a functioning German court system. The UN Tribunals are based upon an international treaty (unsigned by the U.S. under Clinton) in a court unrecognized by non-signees to the treaty, a court where no established law or precedent exists. In addition, the trial itself insults the concept of the nation-state, not to mention the distrurbing similarity to the Russian show trials of the 1930s that became verdicts in search of law.

UN International Criminal Tribunal

UPDATE: An AP story from the Toronto Sun quoted James Bissett, Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia.

In court, Milosevic read a letter from James Bissett, who was the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia when the Balkan wars erupted in the early 1990s, saying the trial "had taken on all the characteristics of a Stalinist show trial."

"I do not wish to appear," Bissett wrote in the letter. "I have from the outset had serious misgivings about the legitimacy of the tribunal." He wrote that the tribunal, created by the UN Security Council in 1993, "is a political court rather than a judicial body operating in the interests of truth and justice."

Contacted in Canada, Bissett confirmed the accuracy of the letter. "My own view is that the court is trying to find Milosevic guilty as a scapegoat for what went wrong in the Balkans," he told The Associated Press.

He has an article on Serbia that is well worth reading, particularly his criticism of the United States that confirms much of what most of us suspected about the Clinton foreign policies. [Bolding is mine.]

The reason the Americans decided to intervene was because they suddenly discovered that arising out of the Yugoslav turmoil there was an opportunity of pursuing two short term United States foreign policy objectives.

The first of these occasions was the opportunity presented in Bosnia of displaying to the Islamic world that the United States was not anti-Muslim. This was particularly important following the first Iraq war. It was thought that by throwing US support behind Alija Izetbegovic and promising him US recognition for Bosnian statehood that US relations with the Muslim world would be strengthened. Izetbegovic’s dream of becoming the leader of the first Muslim state in Europe since the Ottoman Empire was to be realized.

The certainty that this policy would cause a civil war in Bosnia and lead to the death and displacement of many thousands was of little importance. Similarly, the possibility that in the long term United States intervention on the Muslim side would create a potential base for Islamist terrorists in the Balkans was obviously not considered.

The second opportunity for the United States was offered later by the deteriorating situation in Kosovo. By intervening on the side of the Albanians the USA was able to reassert its primacy over NATO and to revitalize a dormant institution that had lost its reason for existence after the Warsaw Pact armies had gone home.

As for the first reason, there is a distinction between the U.S. under Clinton and other administrations. This was purely a Clinton decision to support Albanian Muslims. It was not to right any perceived injury to Muslim relations after the first Iraq war. That was a war Clinton nor his party supported with any enthusiam. The purpose of supporting the Izetbegovic was expressly to establish a Muslim foothold in Europe. It was just an extension of the Jimmy Carter foreign policy that, after all, created the terrorist-supporting state of Iran.

As for the use of NATO, I suspect that had more to do with the re-admission of France to NATO after twenty years and French desires to gain influence with their Muslim friends.