Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Mosque and religion in general.



"That they have the right to build a Mosque near ground zero says everything you need to know about the USA. That they are going to build it anyways, says everything
you need to know about Islam." Dennis Miller

It really does not get any simpler then that. I believe they absolutely have a right
to build that 'Community Center' right there. It just seems like a douchebag thing
to do. IF they would come out and say 'You know what? In the name of being sensitive,
were going to not put that Mosque there' they would be heroes and ALL of us would love them. This is the country of the 'second chance' after all. But, they wont, and the 'rest' of the 'moderate' Muslims will not condemn them for it.

I liken this to the Catholic Church. They have a 'unnatural' relationship within thier ranks. It is not 'natural' to be Celibate, either way. Nature demands it. But, when you put a culture in there that is 'unnatural', after a time then it damages the religion. When the Vatican hid this problem, it was exposed to the World, and the Catholic Curch rightfully took a hit.

When Southern Christians did not object to the KKK using the Confederate Flag, they lost the right to counter those that are 'offended' by it. They did not work quickly enough to oust the KKK members from thier Protestant Churches. Some of those Deacons wore sheets, and subjectagted Blacks. This unnatural philosophy has made it impossible for anyone to take a person defending the Battle Flag of the Confederacy to a blck person today seriously...

It did the same in Islam. By forcing the subjectation of women, it has damaged it's followers. By taking away a womans image, and hiding it under a sheet, it teaches young men it is okay to think of mommy as 'property'. This, in turn leads to it being easier to convince young desperate men to do unimaginable things.

But, until the 'Moderate' faction of Islam confronts it's wildcard, then they will continue to be viewed like Rednecks who endorse Bigotry, and are undeserving of sympathy. Sometimes, I do hear an impassioned plea from "moderates', but it seems it's always followed by '....but America must be aware of how it has hurt _____'. Screw that.

If the followers of Islam want to be accepted, they must do this.

Monday, August 23, 2010

A Balanced look @ Palin


Anyway, a thin new volume arrived over the transom this week, an offering from Jacob Weisberg called Palinisms: The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin. There are a few nuggets here, but it would seem from this little paperback that Sarah Palin is not the dimwit liberals make her out to be. Palinisms made me miss George W. Bush -- and Ronald Reagan, too. It also implicitly raises the question of where the comparable volume is for Joe Biden, the gaffe-prone pol who actually holds the job Sarah Palin sought in 2008.
Weisberg's critics have long complained that he's a liberal with an obvious partisan agenda, and while I can't speak to that, it's apparent than in modern political writing a point of view can be a shrewd marketing technique. My father, Lou Cannon, pioneered the literary conceit of the "Reaganism of the Week," ending each Reagan & Co. column with one of them, but those were an eclectic compilation, catering neither solely to Reagan lovers nor Reagan haters.
Some "Reaganisms" made The Gipper sound foolish, as when he mused about his "suspicion" that the Mount St. Helens volcano released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than 10 years' worth of automobile driving. Others Reaganisms were clever. "I'm not worried about the deficit -- it's big enough to take care of itself." The best Reaganisms rendered his listeners speechless, which is how the leader of the free world left Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 when Reagan sought to establish common ground by telling the Soviet premier that if Earth was attacked by aliens, the Russians and American would fight the extraterrestrial invaders together. And some of the most memorable Reaganisms were statesmanlike -- as when Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and declared: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
The most endearing Reaganisms were self-deprecating: "It's true hard work never killed anybody," Reagan liked to quip, "but I figure why take the chance?" When a wire service reporter Reagan knew asked him to autograph a photo from Bedtime for Bonzo, the 1951 screwball comedy starring Ronald Reagan, the president signed it, "I'm the one with the watch."
Unfortunately, it's a different era now; we're supposed to laugh mirthlessly at those we voted against, and to use verbal misfires as proof of their idiocy -- whether or not they are laughing along with us at their own fallibility.
While giving the commencement speech at his alma mater, Yale, President George W. Bush said: "And to you 'C' students, -- you too can be president of the United States." Another time, while campaigning for reelection at a town hall in Ohio in 2004, one of Dubya's questioners identified himself as an operator of air compressor stations – a man who sells air. Bush retorted quickly: "You and I are in the same business. Is it hot air, by any chance?"
Such cleverness could be quickly negated, by George W. Bush's own hand -- or rather his tongue. The same day as the Ohio rally -- at a bill-signing ceremony, no less – the president uttered one of his most famous Bushisms: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
Everyone has their favorite Bushism. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" he said while discussing education in South Carolina on Jan. 11, 2000. "I know the human being and the fish can co-exist peacefully," was his contribution to environmental thought. His economic theory? "We ought to make the pie higher."
The Texan's saving grace -- at least to some -- was that he was in on the joke, something that Jacob Weisberg himself explained. "People often assume that because I've spent the past nine years collecting Bushisms, I must despise George W. Bush," Weisberg wrote at the end of Bush's tenure in the White House. "To the contrary, Bushisms fill me with affection for the man -- and not just because of the income stream they've generated..."
Less than two years into a new administration, we're in a political environment that is even more polarized and poisonous. Into this milieu comes Palinisms. Two things can be said about the woman nicknamed in high school "Sarah Barracuda" and who calls her political allies "mama grizzlies." The first is that barracudas and grizzlies don't laugh, they bite. In other words, Sarah Palin doesn't easily laugh at herself -- not in public, anyway. The second point is that she's not all that funny, which helps explain why Palinisms is so thin.
The book is tiny -- 5-by-7 inches -- and fits in a back pocket. It's 95 pages, but the preface goes to page 13. And though the pages are small, the type is big -- and double-spaced with a picture on about half the pages. You can read the whole thing in five minutes. Worse, you've heard much of this stuff before, although Tina Fey said it better: "I can see Russia from my house!" is hilarious. But what Palin actually said in her infamous interviews with Katie Couric was: "They're our next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska." Not that funny.
Scanning this booklet, something else occurs to a discerning reader: Sarah Palin may be more careful than people think. She has given numerous interviews, talks, and campaign speeches since John McCain plucked her out of obscurity two years ago, and yet of the 116 Palinisms in Palinisms, eight are from her (ghost-written) autobiography Rogue. Another seven are from a single talk she made while speaking about her faith at Wassilla Assembly of God church; six are from those Katie Couric interviews; five from a speech she made in Ontario, Canada last April to raise money for Charity of Hope, which helps needy children; four came from her resignation as governor; three from an interview with Charlie Gibson.
The Palin material from the Gibson interview certainly isn't elegant, but it's simply not in Bush's league for being off-kilter or entertaining. "You are a cynic," she told Gibson (page 50), "because show me where I have ever said that there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect -- or no effect -- on climate change." Maybe I'm cynical, too, but that clunky prose sounds to me like the mind-numbing obfuscation that is a politician's stock-in-trade.
None of the Palinisms in this booklet are lifted from her 2008 debate with Joe Biden. And there's the rub: In that debate, Biden said numerous things, which, had Palin uttered them, would have generated pressure for John McCain to drop her from the ticket the following day. Palin wasn't perfect. Twice she referred to the top U.S. military officer in Afghanistan as "General McClellan." (His name is David McKiernan), she claimed that McCain's $5,000 tax credit for health coverage was some how "budget-neutral," and she combined the last names of the Democratic ticket when she called opponent "Senator O'Biden," reminiscent of Biden's gaffe of introducing Obama to a crowd as "Barack America."
But Biden's performance that October night in 2008 wasn't characterized by slips of the tongue so much as wildly inaccurate claims about everything from the basics of the Afghanistan war to Constitutional provisions of the office he was seeking.
Joe Biden claimed that McCain voted against a nuclear test ban treaty "that every Republican has supported" (McCain actually voted with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty), credited Pakistan with having intercontinental nuclear-armed ballistic missiles (it doesn't), and asserted that he had opposed Bush's support for holding elections on the West Bank (Biden actually gave a spirited defense of this policy). He also maintained -- while prefacing his point with the statement "facts matter" -- that the United States spends "more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan." Biden was so taken with this statement that he repeated this ludicrous claim, which was off by 2,000 percent.
Biden tried to establish his common-man bona fides by inviting voters to walk down Union Street in Wilmington and talk to regular folks at "Katie's Restaurant," which would have been hard to do because the diner (actually located on Scott Street) had been closed for 20 years. More substantively, Biden excoriated Dick Cheney for his "bizarre notion" about Article I of the Constitution (Cheney was correct) in a confused riff that reminded one commentator of John Belushi's famous rant in Animal House: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
Biden has continued in this vein as vice president. No less an aficionado of the official gaffe than Jacob Weisberg oversaw their collection for Slate. Weisberg explained to me that they didn't get a big response. Perhaps this is because Slate's readership trends liberal. Or, as Weisberg says, the problem might be that Biden's goofiness is so situational it doesn't translate well to print -- you have to be there to really appreciate the outlandishness -- which was often the case with John Kerry's verbal blunders.
Maybe the moral of the story is that employment is not the only thing in short-supply -- these aren't great days for political humor, either. Of course, there's always Twitter, and this may be the saving grace for collectors of Palinisms. A post-script to Palinisms pays homage to this truism with a "top 10 tweets" postscript. These are pretty good, and many of which have already been topped since the book went to press. My favorite: "Research is your friend, News Media," Palin tweeted on May 15. "Try it sometime."

Monday, August 9, 2010

Media Endgame.

For a year, a small number of conservative media outlets have been reporting on the New Black Panther Party scandal – a slam-dunk voter-intimidation case documented on videotape, which the government won by default but that Obama administration appointees ordered career lawyers to dismiss against the NBPP and two individual defendants. (The injunction against a third individual was drastically curtailed.) On the web at CONTENTIONS, Hot Air.com, and National Review Online, and on the pages of the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times, readers could watch the story unfold as bit by bit an extraordinary tale came into focus and the stone wall erected by the Holder Justice Department crumbled.

The liberal media, meanwhile, ignored the story even though the allegations were explosive. Had the Obama team, in concert with the NAACP, quashed the case because of an ideological aversion to filing cases against minorities? Did the head of Obama’s Civil Rights division provide misleading testimony under oath when he said he had never heard of such a sentiment? Was there a new Obama policy to file only civil rights cases against white defendants? Had the Justice Department acted illegally in preventing its attorneys from testifying pursuant to a subpoena?

These and other issues, including the potential involvement of Attorney General Eric Holder (whom the Justice Department admitted in written responses was briefed on the matter), were explored on the pages of conservative print outlets and on right-leaning blogs. From the liberal media? Silence.

Congressmen Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) dueled with the Justice Department, seeking answers about the case for a year. Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, was grilled by House Republicans before the House Judiciary Committee as to why the case had been dismissed and whether his attorneys were hostile to claims that didn’t support the “traditional” civil rights model (i.e., bigoted whites vs. minority victims). The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights launched an investigation. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (whose investigation — botched, it turned out — of John Yoo and Jay Bybee was breathlessly reported by every newspaper and TV news network) did as well, although it didn’t bother to question the NBPP trial-team attorneys. None of this raised any eyebrows in the newsrooms of the broadcast networks or liberal news magazines. (During this period, Newsweek did, however, run a great many stories on Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.)

In June, a whistleblower, J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on the case, stepped forward to give public testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Fox News drilled down on the story, and cautiously CBS, the New York Times, and the Washington Post gave brief accounts.

Finally, last weekend the Post’s ombudsman, Andy Alexander, and Howard Kurtz on CNN’s Reliable Sources raised the question that conservative reporters and columnists have been asking for a year: where have the mainstream media been? Bob Schieffer, under Kurtz’s questioning, said that had he known about the story, he would have questioned Holder on Face the Nation the prior week. He acknowledged it was a real story that he now “cared” about. Alexander forthrightly chastised his own paper for missing the boat. And finally this Tuesday, NBC Nightly News ran a segment on the story but eliminated any reference to the most explosive allegation, namely that the dismissal of the case stemmed from an aversion to a color-blind application of the law.

So what happened here, and will the mainstream media atone for their yearlong sin of omission?

As to the “why,” one could chalk up the liberal media’s sloth to a busy news year (“we had bigger stories to cover”) were it not for the fact that the non-coverage of the NBPP scandal fits a pattern. This isn’t the first time liberal outlets ignored a story harmful to the Obama administration that was covered almost exclusively by conservative media until the incident was virtually over. Chas Freeman, who had expressed radical views about China, 9/11, and Israel, was appointed and forced to withdraw from a national-security advisory role before the mainstream media caught up. The controversy over Van Jones, the radical “9/11 truther” working as the administration’s “Green Czar,” was ignored by the mainstream media until he resigned.

These episodes repeatedly place the liberal media in an uncomfortable position. When the news can no longer be ignored, they must catch up their readers and viewers on stories they haven’t covered while delicately sidestepping how their crack investigators missed a significant controversy. At times, the op-ed pages of these outlets slip in news to their readers that their reporters have ignored. (The Washington Post editorial page provided that service on the Chas Freeman debacle.)

The easiest explanation may be correct: these outlets don’t want to report “bad news” that might harm the Democratic agenda. Really, when was the last negative story about conservatives that the New York Times “missed”? If the missed news stories were evenly distributed between those “bad for conservatives” and those “bad for liberals,” the evidence of bias would not be so strong.

Such bias, however, need not be as conscious or blatant as the most aggrieved of the conservative critics claim. Liberal outlets have, in essence, insulated themselves from a whole segment of the news. Campaign-donation records and polling reveal that liberal news outlets don’t have many (in some cases, any) conservative-leaning staff members. It’s not hard to conclude that they therefore have few, if any sources, inclined to provide information harmful to liberals. They have, for example, plenty of contacts with the NAACP, but how many of them have Justice Department sources who object to a race-conscious enforcement of civil rights laws? I’m going out on a limb: none.

Moreover, the reporters and columnists who populate the New York Times or the Washington Post and broadcast-news networks are not inclined to follow, let alone take seriously, reporting from conservative outlets. Would the network news anchors have missed a year of the NBPP scandal if they or a single person on their staff read some of the right-leaning blogs or print publications? It would have been hard. If the reporters, producers, and editors of liberal media only read each other’s publications and watch each other’s programs — and they all have exactly the same narrow news “judgment” — a lot is going to slip by.

We shouldn’t be too optimistic that the liberal media outlets will correct their errors, hire more ideologically diverse staff, cast a wider net on investigative reporting, and be on the lookout for Obama scandals. Even in its mea culpa mode, the delinquent media did not exactly come clean. Schieffer claimed in his interview that he “missed” the NBPP story because he was away on vacation the week that Adams testified. Presumably he was not on vacation for a year. There was no hint that his network (and his competitors) not only missed the story but was also beaten to it -- for a year. To have acknowledged that would have been to confess that they were not simply busy but blinded to a big story that conservative reporters spied very early on.

Nor did NBC fess up that the case had implications far beyond a single investigation. Again, it would involve dredging up much explosive news that had gone unreported for a very long time.

The problem is cumulative, and the pattern has a self-fulfilling quality to it. Whistleblowers in a liberal administration (who are often conservative, just as those in a conservative one may very well be liberal) are not going to beat a path to liberal outlets that they suspect will bury or distort their accounts. So even if they wanted to, at this point, liberal news organizations are seriously handicapped in uncovering such stories, no matter how important or intriguing. Once you forfeit your journalistic credibility, it is very hard to get sources – and readers – back.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Pandora's Box

here is the problem with sites like 'Snopes' and "Crooksandliars' on the left.

Look at this snopes page about Barry's famous gaffe, '57 states':

http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/57states.asp

Now, it's very clever but transparent attempt to sideline this obvious gaffe by stating that 'Obama meant to say 57 Islamic States' does 2 things. First, it covers for the awful fact that without a teleprompter, the Great One with the Golden Tongue is pretty on par with the former gaffe-machine, W. Obama did not have his prompter, and he MEANT 57 United States. Which is, pretty 'W' or 'Sarah Palin' -like ( *wink*) It also uses a classic 'strawman argument', which is something the left screams about ad nauseum. If I was a staffer during the campaign, and my candidate did something this dumb, I would create an even DUMBER 'internet rumour' so Snopes would have to print 'mixture of true and false information', thereby diluting a Snopes reference as 'true' to a weaker 'maybe'. Get it?