Thursday, July 27, 2006

Israeli-Hezbollah war

It's bizarre but it's how the Left thinks.   Ian Williams writing in Asia Times on the Israeli-Hezbollah war that makes absolutely no mention of the terrorist group.

Then there is Ralph Nader acting for democracynow.com who wants to hold the U.S. responsible for Israeli "war crimes." without once mentioning Hezbollah or terrorism.  

It makes you wonder how divorced from reality you have to be to write your own history.

Of course, Williams, it was revealed by Accuracy in Media, has been taking money from the UN while covering the UN for The Nation and other media.   This former British labor union official and speech writer for Neil Kinnock has a sideline in training UN representatives "in media handling" and
The UN's training section also called upon him to help with training senior officials at HQ.
Appararently he also produces booklets for UN agencies.

Impartial, huh?

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Big Brother and History

Talk about airbrushing history.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Air America

News: "Air America has signed off in Atlanta, with few immediate prospects for finding a new home."

Awwwwwww.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Martha Stewart

Lesson: Don't let Martha Stewart christen your ships.   Come to think of it, she didn't do much for K-Mart either.

AWWWWWWWW

New York Times economizing.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Hizbollah / Hezbollah

This will go under-reported in our MSM. "Saudi Arabia blames Hizbollah in Lebanon crisis" and the concluding sentence will not appear above the fold in any major media outlet.

But most amazing of all, is the description of Hizbollah by Reuters as a "guerilla group" and "fighters" and "a group backed by Syria and Iran." Not once mentioning that Hizbollah is a terrorist group with a history so violent that even the Israeli-hating, American-loathing E.U. has condemned them as terrorists.

UPDATE: To terrorist-loving Associated Press, this would be dire:
Trying to defuse the crisis, Lebanon's prime minister indicated he might send his army to take control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah -- a move that might risk civil war
The fact that a terrorist organization is openly tolerated within Lebanon, indeed accepted as part of the Lebanese government, forced upon the Lebanese by virtue of an 18-year Syrian occupation, says clearly that the civil war wasn't won in the first place.

A sign of encouragement is the fact that Saudi Arabia has refused to join the "let the United Nations handle it" crowd who hope the U.N. will consolidate and preserve Hezbollah's position.

We may yet win this war against terrorism if only because we are slowly shattering the driveby media means of protecting terrorist organizations.

Tennesee Amendment

Why, I wonder, is judicial fiat acceptable but voter activism is not?

I greatly respect Glenn Reynolds, but I think he is wrong on his opposition to the proposed amendment to the Tennessee Constitution to define marriage. At no time in our history have Americans passively accepted political definitions of morality. Why is gay marriage any different? Because some law professors and the ACLU think it should be a social or a legal issue? Excussssse me, but the basic foundation of our form of democracy state that Americans reserve all rights not ceded specifically to government. One of these is the right to define marriage and our own morality.

THIS is the reason why legislatures have avoided the fray. THEY know, as some activists refuse to acknowledge, that their preemption will be resented. The issue of gay marriage isn't one of "rights." Gays have or can have civil unions. What gays want, however, is to be sanctioned to mock the institution of marriage for everyone else. What they want is to remove marriage from churches to the courthouse so that the latter can dictate that the church obey THEIR definition of morality.

No thanks.

Oil Traitors Traders

From the Globe & Mail (Canada).
"The world's oil suppliers have lost control of the markets, ceding that power to traders and giving rise to greater volatility in crude prices, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Friday.

With oil hitting record highs of more than $78 (U.S.) per barrel Friday in the wake of increasing violence in the Middle East, Mr. Bodman said crude is now traded like securities �and so emotion enters into it.

"This is the first time in my professional lifetime that the suppliers of oil in the world have really lost control of the markets," Mr. Bodman said during a two-day trip to Western Canada where he toured the rapidly developing oil sands region in northern Alberta.

"They are unable to turn the spigot and increase supplies, and therefore are unable to control oil prices."
And that, folks, is why Enron was formed - to corner the market on oil trading and hold all of us hostage to their greed.  

Friday, July 14, 2006

Los Angeles Times and Hezbollah

When a former Los Angeles Times journalist tells you that the Los Angeles Times is out to get President Bush, the pretense in the MSM becomes ridiculous.

Reich is an avid supporter of the Times, which makes this admission damning:
In fact, there is a sheen of anti-Semitism on the Times editorial pages, either the responsibility of Martinez or Op-Ed Page editor Nick Goldberg, whose wife, Amy Wilentz, is pro-Palestinian, and who claims to be neutral in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Wilentz was (in 2004) an associate professor of journalism at Columbia University and is a contributing editor at the Nation and From 1995 through 1998, she was Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker, Deputy business editor, Newsday, and staff writer, Time, all liberal left publications. Bio You only have to google her and read her writings to know her sympathies. And their friends from the Nation.

However, none of this is a Tribune thing. Before Martinez and Goldberg, there was the rabidly Leftwing Robert Scheer who had the role of advocating for terrorism in the Los Angeles Times while married to a Times-Mirror Vice President at the paper.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Hmmmmm

Kentucky Derby horse Barbaro has not recovered from the injuries at the Preakness. It's always sad when a beautiful animal might have to be put down.

Still, I find it wierd that well-wishers sent thousands of emails of "concern and support" and vistors to the Center have brought cards, flowers, gifts and goodies.   Maybe it's me, but a what do you bring an ailing horse?   A stuffed Cabbage Patch doll? And what do you write in the card? "Get well soon. We're betting on you."?

What has happened that people want to place teddy bears and stuffed animals at impromptu memorial sites for the dead or injured or leave cellophaned flowers at such sites as if they need to publiclyaffirm their sentimentality for others to see?   Maybe it's because they no longer pray?   I don't know, but I find it unsettling.

What Goes Around -- maybe doesn't

Speaking of hot air, environmental quackery and fraud, and idiocy.
Welcome to Tsukuba, the town that prides itself on being the most hallowed scientific research centre in Japan and the site of perhaps the worst electricity wind farm in the world: in the 12 months it has been operating, its million-pound windmills have consumed 43 times more power than they have generated.
I like the part where the 23 windmills that cost £60,000 each have produced one megawatt in 12 months.   They turn them on and power them by electricity when they have vistors.

The entire project is under criminal investigation.  

The Kyoto Scam

Spain has already acknowledged, like Canada, that they cannot reach the Kyoto targets. Unlike Canada, however, Spain is planning on spending EUR 3 billion to buy "emission rights" - in effect "paying cash to pump CO2 and other harmful gases into the atmosphere."

What this amounts to is transfer of wealth from Spanish taxes on Spanish citizens and businesses to emission credit countries like Russia.   Of course the entire program will not be audited at either end, which is the beauty of the scam.   You could call it an International Socialism Tax.   All overseen, of course, by the French.
Emission rights can be traded at Powernext, a special exchange based in Paris that was set up on Jun. 24, 2005, which operates a market to enable trading carbon dioxide certificates for cash.
There are other mechanisms and schemes in place for the monetary exchanges.   But all you have to know about it is that A) It is an unvoted-for tax on citizens that will enable corrupt governments to B) transfer wealth to other nations without benefit of audit or oversight or citizen approval. And C) the Kyoto goals will do little if nothing to affect global temperatures, which makes the whole enterprise a scam.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Cable News Race via DrudgeReport

DRUDGE REPORT 2006 - CABLE NEWS RACE
MON., JULY 10, 2006
VIEWERS

FOXNEWS O'REILLY -- 2,264,000
FNC HANNITY/COLMES -- 1,801,000
CNN LARRY KING -- 1,382,000
FNC GRETA -- 1,340,000
FNC SHEP SMITH -- 1,252,000
FNC HUME -- 1,197,000
CNN COOPER -- 1,132,000
CNN DOBBS -- 823,000
CNN PAULA ZAHN -- 679,000
MSNBC HARDBALL -- 360,000
CNNHN GRACE -- 354,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN -- 349,000
-----------------------
I always enjoy seeing how few people watch Chris Matthews.   It validates my belief in humanity.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Distorting History

Proposed CBC (Canadian Broadcast Corporation) disclaimer for a miniseries on the life of a Canadian socialist politician. [Emphasis mine.]
This film is a dramatization based on true events. Some names have been changed and locations, events and characters, including James G. Gardiner, have been composited, condensed or fictionalized for dramatic purposes and do not necessarily reflect the generally accepted historical record.
Most docudramas are fictionalized to an extent as few movie or documentary makers have first hand experience in a given event, nor do historians.   But when you make a documentary that doesn't reflect historical record, you are talking about an Oliver Stone political fantasy tailored to create a misimpression.   It's agitprop.   It isn't interpretation.   It isn't an accident.  It is a deliberate attempt to rewrite history. What is it about Leftists that they have such a fervent desire to distort history?

I suspect it is the Utopianism in some that makes their grounding in reality so uncertain that they feel any distortion is justified if it sounds good. In others, it is probably less delusional and more sinister. Still, you would think the CBC would take it as a warning that their pool of talent has fallen to dangerously low intellectual levels.

Monday, July 10, 2006

Perfidy

This weekend the Los Angeles Times had a front page expose on Lance Armstrong. Hugh Hewitt rightly named it a "hit" piece. Both Hewitt and Power Line concluded that "Big MSM has really lost its way, concluding that anything "secret" is in fact wrongfully hidden from public view, and that its function is to act as a conveyer belt to the front page for whatever a party or person doesn't want revealed," as Hewitt put it.

I respect their opinions.   But that's if that's the case, how come the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the MSM never attempt to gleam details about, say, the private life and lawsuits of Oprah Winfrey that might embarrass the Liberal diva? Nor do the MSM crave the details of lawsuits that involve Michael Jackson or other pop culture icons. If the MSM was avid about exposing secrets why not explore Paul McCartney's pending divorce, the lurid details or which would sell newspapers for weeks.   How come they don't actually want to see John Kerry's service records?   Or Bill Clinton's medical records?   Or find out what was really in those memos Sandy Berger stole from the National Archives?

No. The "secrets" the MSM want to reveal are always a package deal. They involve the elements of "ta da" journalism, coupled with agenda promotion, and invariably include anti-Americanism as a theme. In the case of Lance Armstrong, France is reeling from urban riots, a humiliating climbdown on a youth labor law, the Clearstream scandal (If you want to have your eyebrows raise to your hairline, see "The republic of deceit" The Sunday Times Magazine, Times of London, July 9, 2006 and bear in mind that libel laws are onerous in the U.K.) Then there are more doping scandals in the Tour de France so pervasive that it "borders on farce", the conviction last week of 38 for corruption in Paris city hall when Jacques Chirac was mayor, and the ever-widening Airbus scandal, termed "strife" by the BBC.

THE AIRBUS SCANDAL
Airbus (80% owned by EADS) and the future of the rest of the multinational consortium that is unraveling is clearly an issue for the New York Times if you read this cheerleading article in the International Herald Tribune. The "you can do it!" pom pom journalism is at variance with the more balanced report in the Chicago Tribune that chronicles the abject failure of the A-380 Airbus, a plane "one-third larger than the Boeing 747" and the announced delays in production that will put the plane back one year and will cost billions in lost revenue.   (This, after a $10 billion investment.)   Partners DaimlerChrysler and Lagardere, the French media company, which hold a combined 37.5% stake in EADS both sold 7.5% of their shares in early April, reducing their losses early in the game, just weeks before the delays were publicly acknowledged.   (They were, perhaps, following the lead of Noel Forgeard, the CEO of Airbus, who reportedly sold his options and stocks in his childrens' names in March.   Forgeard, a former aide to Jacques Chirac, along with four EADS managers are under investigation by the French stock market regulator, Financial Markets Authority.   The Paris headquarters of EADS was raided as they gather evidence of insider trading.)  

THE FREEFALL IN STOCK
Immediately after the public announcement of production problems and a 6-month delay (following a 6-month delay announced last year), EADS (the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company), the parent company of Airbus, saw their stock fall 26% wiping out ¤5.5 billion of its value (June 14).   Worse news followed when BAE, the British partner in the consortium, announced plans to sell their 20% stake in Airbus.   Hampered by a provision that they can only sell to EADS and had to notify EADS a year before a sale, they were slow off the mark and then worse disaster struck when negotiations failed to produce a selling price, they contracted Rothschild investment bank to value their holding. Rothschild found it was valued at less than half what they had expected, a shock the market had not expected. Speculation immediately flared about what Rothschild discovered to come in with such a low estimation.   The BAE investment thought to be worth €5 billion, is estimated to be, after the payback of loans and transaction costs, considerably less -- €1.65 [£1.9bn] billion.  

As FT wryly noted, "almost everyone reduced exposure to Airbus: Lagardère and DaimlerChrysler and even senior managers at parent EADS.  BAE Systems' exit only stalled after Rothschild, an independent arbitrator, reached an unexpectedly low valuation for BAE's one-fifth stake."  

The stakes in the failure of Airbus are high. (Newsweek, July 17, 2006)
Founded in 2000, EADS was supposed to demonstrate the potential of a united Europe to compete with the United States and its aerospace industry. Investors were always skeptical, saying that co-CEO posts, shared by the French and Germans, were a typically European political compromise, and no way to run a business.
Of course not.   It's the French way to run a business.

Which is why the Lance Armstrong story was 9 pages long, perhaps the only story that might distract the French from the slow collapse of their government, the abject failure of the delusional A-380 -- itself a reprise of the commercially unviable Concorde -- unassimilated immigration problems, and the ongoing corruption scandals that just keep roiling.

The Lance Armstrong story was never intended for domestic consumption.   With the globalization of news, the audience, as well as the stage managed news are distant from the source, which is why you never read a lot either about 15,000 elderly French who died in the summer heat and why, oddly, wierdly no picture appeared of a single funeral and there was no expression of national grief, no anger.   No moral outrage.   The much more experienced and cynical French might suspect that the 15,000 were strikeoffs of the rolls of fictional French who were expendable in a budget crisis.  After all, the elderly could be reinvented again before another election called or when party coffers were empty.   But neither the French, nor we, would ever read of the possibility in the Los Angeles Times.  

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Fighting Back AND Winning

The Georgia Supreme Court has upheld the state ban on gay marriages. The ban was the result of an initiative.
Seventy-six percent of Georgia voters approved the ban when it was on the ballot in 2004.
The court decision was unanimous.   On the same day, the Supreme Court of New York also decided against gay marriages.

Forty-five states have banned same-sex marriages. All this, despite the drive by media insistence on imposing the marriages through the courts.  It's a tactic the Left has used for decades to impose legislation that they have no hope of achieving through legislatures.