Preparations for the defense

Getting in their digs before the election results, according the Editor & Publisher (the reliably left of Lenin "journal covering the newspaper industry") gleefully reports a New York Times report planned for Sunday on Howard Dean.

What is interesting about this is that the newspaper industry seems to be setting the stage to shift the blame for any election failures from the MSM to Howling Howard for their message, their tactics, their hit pieces, and their anti-Bush animus that has led them to disclose classified information over and over with no other purpose than to score against the war and president Bush.   Something that just might not sit well with voters.

Major miscalculations with the Plame Blame Game, a failed campaign to derail military tribunals, and an ineffective effort to prevent effective monitoring of communications with known terrorists have been public relations disasters for the newspaper industry. Add to that with open speculation about whether the publisher of the New York Times is not up to the job even from insiders and you have to wonder if their focus groups are telling them they need to prepare a defense of shifting the blame.  

EU Ministers Cool ...

Why the EU will be a dismal Soviet-style economic failure.   In a nutshell.

Read and remember

From Investor's Business Daily, 97 Reasons Democrats Are Weak On Defense And Can't Be Trusted To Govern In Wartime.   Those who forget the past are condemned to repeating it.

Mark Foley, sexual addict

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla, won his last race with 65% of the vote.   Today he resigned less than six weeks before the election that probably would have sent him back.

The gay Congressman resigned after release of his obscene text messages to a former male Capitol page who was 16 at the time.   The St. Petersburg Times had the story last November but did not publish until today in time for the election.  

It's another reason why gays are not welcome in intelligence service or in the military.   Or in public service.  (Think James McGreevey, NJ)  The obsessive nature of homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, is both morally reprehensible and pathetic.  Celebrity gays like George Michael who trolls in parks for anonymous sex and takes his encounters to public restrooms and politicians like James McGreevey, D-NJ,   Gerry Studds, D-MA, and Foley demean humanity by with their sick addictions to cheap thrills.

Good riddance.

Historical Footnotes

RUSSIA     Empress Maria Fyodorovna, mother of the communist-executed Nicholas II, was reburied in St Petersburg.     Pictures     Background
In fact, the last time she lived in Russia, it was called Russia.

GERMANY    A mass grave in Germany contained the bones of 20 children and five adults.   The children ranged from 1 to 7 years old.   They are believed to be victims of the Nazi euthanasia program aimed at the handicapped.

Free speech .... except

A philosophy teacher in France who criticized Islam in an article in Le Figaro was in hiding after death threats to his wife and children.   Villepin chimed in that such threats were "unacceptable."   The teacher is receiving police protection and changing addresses every two days.  

Notable in all this is that while Le Figaro (initially) gave him full support for his article the AFP article had the headline: Teacher who attacked Islam: 'alone and abandoned' which says a lot about their stirring defense of free speech.   Brussels Journal reports that the editor of Le Figaro later apologized for the article.

Tell me again why the U.S. really wants the respect of countries like this?
And isn't it just political correctness with a gun?  

EADS and EU Socialism

The EU's answer to Boeing, a government-subsidized EADS is having more problems with the A380.   Stocks in EADS dropped 26% in June when production delays forced a major shakeup.   I wrote about it in July.

No mention by AFP that DaimlerChrysler and French Lagardere both bailed in April just weeks before the delays were acknowledged in June.   Nor do they mention (into the convenient black hole of media memory) that BAE, the British partner is trying to unload their stake in the venture.   They also don't recycle the fact that the head of EADS who oversaw the massive failure was a former aide to Jacques Chirac.   (What a surprise.   Billions of dollars invested in a government-subsidized company, overseen by a former aide to a soon-to-be-indicted-when-he-leaves-office Jacques Chirac and financial irregularities.   How unexpected.)

The latest news is telling. They are talking about layoffs which assuredly tells you that EADS isn't going to produce anything anytime soon.   So much for the joys of EU Socialism.

Larry Sabato

Larry Sabato is a name I used to respect.   It's hard to accept that he has yielded the high ground of objectivity and decency to provide cover for a campaign smear.   (Full coverage from Powerline)

In an act of political sabotage in an interview on Hardball he pretended personal knowledge he did not possess, inferring he witnessed the events.   Later, of course, his spokesman said that he could not state that it wasn't first hand knowledge because, ahem, of his promise to reporters breaking the story - a story he instituted by sending "sources" to the media in the first place.

I think we can safely call this Brand Name Smearing.   For those who respect Sabato, the smear can be seen to be more believable than a hit piece from Salon.  

From his spokesman:

At no point did he say that he had firsthand knowledge of the language in question; all he did was assert that it did happen, and he's either right or wrong.

How does he know it happened if he was not there?   On one hand, he KNOWS it happened and he BELIEVES it happened.

Which is it?   You judge and then judge his impartiality in all of it.

Dick Morris: The real Clinton emerges

Dick Morris who knew Bill Clinton well comments on the former president's performance on Fox News:

There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know - the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation.

Read the whole thing.   Morris refutes Clinton point by point.

Not Alone

This is one of those "I am not alone moments" when you read something and say, wow, it isn't just me.

I was in a William Sonoma store looking at cookbooks, the vast majority of which were celebrity cookbooks, and I picked up a Rachael Ray book.   A helpful clerk asked if I watched her show and I replied without thinking that she drove me nuts with her crude accent and that awful laugh.   The clerk burst out laughing and said she felt exactly the same.  

We aren't the only ones.

Celebrity News You Won't See Hyped or even Complete

Unhappy customers sued TV pyschologist Dr. Phil over his Shape Up! diet plan received a $10.5 million settlement.  

With the exception of the San Diego Union-Tribune, few newspapers included the fact that Dr. Phil had a prime time special with Katie Couric to hawk his diet plan and books.   Certainly not by CBS Broadcasting in their version of the story.   All of them failed to mention that Dr. Phil was another Oprah Winfrey finds.

Laughing Outloud

I know you have to consider the source -- it was an article in Time ("in partnership with CNN") -- and the author -- Michael Kinsley -- but I am still laughing at Kinsley lecturing newspapers on what their future might be and then adding this.

I'm not sure what that new form will look like. But it might resemble the better British papers today (such as the one I work for, the Guardian). The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity.

In other words, the elites at the paper will tell you what they know and that's all you need to know.   This from a man whose one abortive attempt at working at a newspaper didn't last very long.   The journos are still smirking and sneering.  

The Guardian is a "better British paper"?   Excuse me, but the last time I checked it was not even commercially viable.   It is funded by a trust.   Guardian journalists have been found to be repeatedly engaged in outright propaganda.   One of their interns was happily writing for a jhadist group.   Maybe to Kinsley they are one of the better British papers because they pay his salary?

In any case, the idea that Time magazine, itself an abject failure and CNN, another abject failure whose cable ratings are only slightly higher than the Shopping Network hawking celebrity perfumes, would contact a woulda-been editorial page editor for a failed newspaper to write about the future of newspapers is, well, the story of the media industry in a nutshell.  

Bill Clinton, his own worst defender

It's an interesting idea but I don't think Bill Clinton "planned his tantrum" as Lynn Woolley writes in Human Events.

I am not convinced for two reasons: For one, his performance was so wildly unflattering that I can't believe he or anyone else thought it was helpful in reassuring liberals or useful in convincing moderates. Even the wild eyed Lefty ravers in the Democrat party for whom, like Howling Howard Dean, verbal assault is a preferred dialogue, Clinton looked particularly inept because he did not look quite in control and he scored no points. It's okay for Howling Howard to look maniacal and even Al Gore ("HE PLAYED ON OUR FEARS!") but you don't expect an ex-President to act like a loon, especially, most especially, not when he's raising billions to save the planet. Would you trust your billions to a guy who can't handle himself in a one-on-one interview?

The other reason I don't think the tantrum was planned was because it accomplished nothing. It relegated his Save The Planet campaign to a secondary concern, and it inconveniently reaffirmed the opinion of those who dislike Hillary that Bill will always be a liability to her ambitions because He. Just. Can't. Shut. Up.

The fact is that Bill Clinton has always been his own worst defense. In the black hole of modern journalism that kind of thing would have disappeared forever. It would be only distantly repeated, vaguely remembered - like Rhwanda. That's no longer true. The fraudulent Dan Rather story with faked memos about GW Bush's National Guard duty did not disappear into oblivion. Plamegate didn't flush down the black hole and swirl away when the media lost the advantage and the truth emerged. Bill Clinton's infamous "It depends upon what your definition of 'is' is." can be found somewhere in the ether.

I once told a cabbie in London when he asked what I thought of Clinton right after his first election victory. I said then and I still maintain, that he was our first and last media president. They and Clinton just haven't caught on yet.

Memory Lane

Sometimes it's good just to remember.

A good read

If you read nothing else today, check out how The Anchoress nails it when she sees clearly what Democrats should be seeing.   Read her take on Chavez's speech at the U.N.

President of the World pt II

There really is a divide in this country.   You only have to read the rough transcript of Chris Wallace's interview of Bill Clinton and THEN read the comments.

It is, of course, a "progressive" site, i.e.- lefty liberal.   Even so, the disconnect from reality is disconcerting.   Especially weird is 103 - who asserts that he is not American but noticed "the rest of the world dislikes America but loves your ex-president."   Considering that the "rest of the world" applauds and cheers the likes of Hugo Chavez as he appeared at the United Nations, endorses Marxist Robert Mugabe's killing rages in Zimbabwe, embraces Fidel Castro's murderous regime in Cuba, and finds no fault with China nor North Korea, not to mention, the President of Bolivia, a coca grower, a United Nations where Libya is honored by the Human Rights Commission, isn't horrified by civilian deaths by homocide bombings, wants to save our whole climate and yet isn't moved to stop genocide in Darfur -- considering who and what the "rest of the world" finds perfectly acceptable -- their embrace of Bill Clinton isn't exactly something Democrats ought to be proud of or cheering over.

It is, of course, something to actually be cheered about when you consider just how low the Liberals have to go to find support in this world.  

Hmmmmmmm

Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal was writing about Islam, but he could have made the same observation about the Clinton interview with Chris Wallace.

If a person is incapable of tolerating criticism, including mild criticism, and especially if he perceives criticism where there is none, this is often a sign of this person's deep psychological insecurity.   Rude aggression and wild rage, too, are usually not the normal behaviour of a self-confident person, but rather of someone who knows that he will lose an argument unless he can bully others into silence.

Interesting.

Read the whole thing.   Some important thoughts about the decline of Islam and the street theatre intended to intimidate other muslims.

Clinton, President of the World

Along with Boobs Babs invited to the Clinton Global Initiative, there was another goof nut invitee - Bolivian President Evo Morales.  

Morales is described by Bloomberg news as an "an Aymara Indian activist and coca growers' advocate."   And like Putin, he's busy trying to nationalize oil and gas companies.   Like Putin, it's in the guise of "redefining contracts."   He also advocates coca that Green Left Weekly reminds us that "long before coca was used to make cocaine, the indigenous people of the Andean region, the Aymara and Quechua, chewed coca leaves as a dietary supplement."   Who knew coca was so healthy?

His election was miraculous.   He won 53.7% of the vote in which an unprecedented 84% of the electorate participated.   (Which, oddly enough, sounds like the voting pattern of blacks in Harlem and New Orleans.)

Nationalization of the oil and gas will not affect the U.S. as we have no investments in Bolivian oil, but Brazil who does rely on Bolivian oil and has invested heavily in the industry is about to learn the same lesson as those investing in the Soviet Union.   As to coca production, Brazil is the third largest coca grower.

Having a cocaine grower in Clinton's camp probably isn't new.   Certainly embracing International Socialists isn't.   It's a reprise of the 1960s Radical Chic embrace of "indigenous movements."   Too bad no one ever asks what the Clinton and his Socialist friends ever did for indigenous people when they had the White House for all those years.   But hey- it's the revolution that counts, not the results.

And doesn't that sound familiar?

The Value of Life

If you think the current War on Terrorism is a new thing, it's probably because you don't remember the daily acts of violence in the mid to late 1960s through the 1980s.   They included plane hijackings, explosive devices at airports, and systematic kidnappings, mutilations and murders, bank robbery to finance the endeavors and widespread terrorism, mostly in Europe.

Christian Klar was a member of the terrorist Red Army Faction (RAF) who was convicted in 1985 for nine killings and 11 counts of attempted murder.   He was sentenced to life imprisonment that apparently only means 21 years because Germany will be pardoning him soon.

Twenty-one years for nine murders and 11 attempted counts of murder.   Such is the accomodation of Germany with terrorists.   In all, the RAF killed 30 people (not counting bodyguards, bystanders or others) in what Deutsche Welle calls an "armed struggle against the Western German state."   Eight other RAF members have been released from prison, a move strangely similar to the Labour release of hundreds of IRA terrorists and the pardoning of Puerto Rican terrorists by Bill Clinton.  

What is there about terrorism that Liberals and the Left do not understand?   The answer is: nothing.   They understand very well that terrorism is a proxy war against the West.   It is a war that Liberals and the Left condone.   How else do you explain the embrace of Yassir Arafat, a man who systematically murdered every single opponent to his leadership?   How else do you explain the release of murderers like Christian Klar?

Liberals will be aghast and appalled to be accused of being soft on terrorism, let alone beind accused of condoning it.   But their actions make a lie of their words.

For background on the Red Army Faction, see link.

Ewwwww

The "Clinton Global Initiative" has the, ah, firm support of Barbra Streisand. She forgot the support, however, as the Daily Mail noticed.  (Make sure to click on the image for the full effect.)


















If you think that was deflating, take a look at Babs minus her makeup.



Not in a million years would the driveby media reveal their favorite Lefty in such an unflattering display.   They reserve their chortling for pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The New Colonialism

Just what the world needs: a disgraced, impeached former U.S. president with a foundation that will negotiate coerce discounts with drug companies to funnel money to yet another UN boondoggle organization. All this based on unlegislated taxes on airline tickets.

You might think cheap AIDS drugs sounds like a lofty goal. What it really does is reward French generic drug companies who violate patents held by legitimate drug companies who have invested billions into drug research.

If Clinton OR the UN OR Brazil, Britain, Chile, France and Norway cared anything about AIDS in Africa, they would attack the root causes of the disease - dirty needles spreading the infection, poor sanitation, and lack of education coupled with poor nutrition and even basic health care. But that wouldn't enrich the "generic" drug companies formed by the French using cheap drugs imported from India and Brazil and their own generic drug companies sold to the Third World. In a speech, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, From the American Enterprise Institute explains the role of generic drugs in Europe.

Sanofi Aventis is one of the largest sellers of generic drugs in France, and the government helps the company protect that lucrative franchise by making it hard for other generic makers to enter the market.

European countries are overpaying for generic drugs to subsidize their local generic drug businesses, while underpaying for branded drugs, which are increasingly produced by American and Japanese companies.

In other words, American and Japanese drug companies bear the cost of development and testing and the French merely copy the drugs and then overcharge for the generic.

In Italy, for example, a study revealed that generic drugs cost almost twice as much as those in the U.S. Other data from a study commissioned by the U.S. Commerce Department shows that prices of U.S. generic drugs range from a third lower in France to almost half as much in both Italy and Germany.

Such, however, is the role of government when they determine what health care means. It is also clear that it is so profitable to the French government that extending the game to the so-called Third World would prove to be a real money maker.

Because, at bottom line, does anyone actually believe that with the poor health care delivery systems in Africa that AIDS treatment with even generic drugs would be possible? These are people who do not even receive vaccinations or even checkups in a lifetime.   And we expect there to be a strict regimen of diet and drugs delivered precisely on time?   What it will be, you can almost guarantee, would be another scam without accountability because who in Africa, after all, bothers to even count the populations, let alone fully document the existence of AIDS except as fantasty numbers embraced by the United Nations?

Yesterday the UN said there would be 50 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa by 2010, of whom 18.4million would have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Yet it was a crisis that had been ignored. A report from Unicef, the children's fund, revealed that from 2001 to 2003 the number of children worldwide orphaned by AIDS rose from 11.5 million to 15 million. Most of the AIDS orphans were in Africa, which has been hardest hit by the pandemic.

Poverty, lack of sanitation, lack of health care delivery systems, inadequate food, civil wars, murder, and the occasional genocide are, of course, not real revenue-generators for the French and their allies because they would actually have to spend money to improve the quality of life in Africa something you can bet the farm they aren't doing anytime in anyone's lifetime.

It is just a replay of French colonialism, folks. And it has the same taint of cynical exploitation for profit. The lack of accountability afforded through the Clinton Foundation and the U.N., however, make it even better this time around.

BBC Idiocy

Hypercritical as only the BBC can be when they want to skewer someone, the Blairs are obviously out of favor.  

The headline screams, "Cherie Blair in boy 'slap' probe."   The subhead: "Cherie Blair has been investigated by police over claims that she motioned to slap a 17-year-old boy."   The story, however, is absurd.   Six detectives were sent to investigate after "officials from the child Protection in Sport Unit complained to police."

A teenage kid made rabbit ears behind her head and Cherie Blair took a playful swipe at him.   Only with the collusion of the rabid BBC could something so stupid be made an issue.   What any respectable news outlet should do is sneer at the officials from the Child Protection Unit who complained.  

No wonder we block BBC America.

Journalism keeps getting worse

If you thought newspapers would be trying to lure readers with snappy writing, you haven't seen the latest example of sob story journalism.   I defy you to find the facts in this article written by "the AP's Western regional writer, based in Las Vegas."  

Why the Editor chose to identify Angie Wagner as "the AP's Western regional writer" is also a mystery.   My guess is he didn't want anyone to think that someone who wrote that bad actually worked for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Amnesty Rally a No Show

The latest immigration rally in Los Angeles demanding amnesty was a dud.   Some 200 people attended.   That seems to be the trend, too, with voter registration figures in major cities after large rallies.

This is either because, A) the attendees are union thugs who are already registered to vote, or B) the few illegals who do show up are smart enough to know it's illegal to register to vote despite what A) tells them.  

The union thugs who organize these rallies have a lot to answer for, but, trust me, the drive by media won't question them closely about this.