During an altercation at a meeting in New Orleans about razing damaged public housing, one of the rowdies provided a perfect illustration of the strong tendency of how examples of the poor in America selected by Old Media tend to discredit anti-poverty efforts. This woman, who complained of not being taken care of well enough and living in terrible conditions, has a nice apartment with hard wood floors and a 60 inch TV. It is, frankly, hardly to work up any sentiment for her except “my tax money paid for that?”.
Old Media: 6 bogus stories in six weeks. One might wonder if this is the sort of flourescent idiocy that is required to get fooled again and again, or excessive bias that leads to indifference as long as the narrative is supported. I don’t see why it can’t be both.
Nine Democrats voted No [on HR 847, honoring Christmas] – Ackerman, Clarke, DeGette, Hastings (FL), Lee, McDermott, Scott (VA), Stark and Woolsey. Nine Democrats voted Present – Conyers, Frank (MA), Holt, Payne, Schakowsky, Schwartz, Wasserman Schultz, Welch (VT) and Yarmuth
This is interesting because of this group 17 of the 18 Ds above voted for a resolution honoring Ramadan (Lee missed the vote). Note that the King resolution was based on the language in the Ramadan resolution. You can compare them if you want, but King’s is more benign. Ramadan – H.Res. 635 and Christmas – H. Res. 847
There were no “NO” votes on the resultions for Islam and Hinduism. Some religions are a little more equal than others.
When Iowa Democrat Tod Bowman got home Thursday night, he got an earful from his wife about what their fifth-grader had just done.
Earlier that day, their son, Beau Bowman, asked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., what he would do as president if U.S. troops were not yet back from Iraq when illegal immigrants “start to take action and start bombing buildings and stuff.”
The father is a very active Democratic Party partisan, and one who had less than a month previously tried to nail Senator Hillary Clinton on handling the future of Social Security. Naturally, he’s embarrassed that his son would ask a perceptive and important question of Senator Barak Obama. Apparently he forgot to tell his son that it’s about posturing, not getting answers.
A round up of some recent results concerning anthropogenic global warming. Oddly, despite being “dissenting” and “challenging”, the results aren’t getting much publicity. It’s worth reading just for the obvious mendacity of AGW proponents, regardless of which data and theories are correct.
Training to remind staff about the importance of telling viewers the truth will cost the BBC more than £1 million in staff time and expenses.
About 17,000 BBC staff have to attend a two-hour course, in which employees are invited to discuss where the line should be drawn between artifice and deception in the wake of a series of scandals.
Vin Ray, the director of the BBC’s college of journalism, said that the direct cost of the course would be “a maximum of £500,000”, but the cost of taking each employee out for a half day more than doubled that figure.
— Times Online (via)
Not that they’re going to be absolute on that whole “truth” thing, just the importance of “where the line” should be. Presumably just shy of the “getting caught” line.
The former American Vice-President was also accused of being “precious” at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.
Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000.
[…]
“Al uses his position for great personal gain. He goes from event to event delivering a similar speech, earning a large fee, and a lot of the time he doesn’t actually inform the audience.
“He refused to speak to journalists and security would usher away VIP guests and the Press”
The lack of press access is typical of a Gore speech on an alledgedly important topic which requires the public to be educated. One needn’t think consider too deeply what actually happens at such speeches to see what Gore’s purpose is.
Canadian authorities have decided they need to go into the homes of senior citizens with guns. (They know who owns guns because the government spent $2-billion — yes, with a “b” — of our tax dollars to set up a registry of legally owned firearms, in a nation with only a small number of legal gun owners.)
Why? Because they’ve heard tell of old folks storing their guns improperly. (Our gun storage laws are pretty involved — I know, I recently passed the written exam required to get a license).
All this is being done without a warrant.
But don’t worry: you’ll get a nice little receipt for your gun if the authorities decide to confiscate it.
Now please remember: in Canada, private property is not protected under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Like you, we have amendments prohibiting unwarranted searches and seizures, but unlike you, gun owners are considered “bad guys” and the public generally will shrug at their rights being violated.
In Toronto, the cops need a warrant to search the homes of gang members for weapons. Also in my province, armed Indian activists took over a housing construction site they claimed was on disputed Indian territory, occupied the new homes for weeks, wrecked them — and the cops did nothing.
[source]
Well yeah — senior citizens are a lot less likely to shoot back. It’s all an excellent example of how pacifism creates a reward system for violence and barbarity.
NBC refuses to run advertisements thanking our troops because the advertisement had the URL of the sponsoring (conservative) organization thereby making the advertisements about a “public controversy”.
I HEARD NEAL BOORTZ holding forth on the Omaha mall shooting this morning on the way to work, and I realized I haven’t posted on it. I don’t really have anything to say that I haven’t said before. But it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free. There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.
Perhaps we need legislation. If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.
Exactly!
This needs to be remembered:
Here is the progression of Times headlines covering the collapse of the Spitzer plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants:
Nov 7: New York Democrats Say License Issue Had Little Effect
Nov 8: Congressional Democrats Grow Wary of Spitzer License Plan
Nov 10: Spitzer Showing Signs of Shift on License Plan
Nov 13: Spitzer to Drop His License Plan
Nov 13 (revised): Spitzer Dropping Plan of Licenses for Illegal Immigrants
NEW YORK — When the Associated Press set out to investigate an apparent problem with sexual assault of children in public schools, the organization spared no expense. A congressionally mandated study by Hofstra University had already found school-based sexual abuse to be a big problem.
“It was one of our priorities for the year,” said John Affleck, editor of the AP’s national reporting team.
The result was a three-part series, available to editors throughout the country beginning Oct. 20, that revealed widespread and routine sexual assault of public school students throughout the country. The first story summarized: “Students in America’s schools are groped. They’re raped. They’re pursued, seduced and think they’re in love.”
The series told of an entrenched resistance to stopping abusers on the part of teachers, administrators and the National Education Association, a teacher’s union.
So why apparently have only a handful of newspapers nationwide run the series — in stark contrast to the avalanche of press received by the Catholic Church since 2002? Paul Colford, corporate communications director for the AP, said he was inundated with complaints from people wondering why their newspapers were not carrying the series.
[…]
“The Boston Globe began publishing on Jan. 6, 2002, a series of reports regarding sexual abuse of children by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston,” Nussbaum wrote “In a flash, newspapers around the country began reprinting the Globe’s reports and developing their own. They published 728 stories in January; 1,095 in February, and 2,961 in March. By April, these papers were publishing a new story every nine minutes, 160 every day, 4,791 for the month. By year-end, American papers provided their readers over 21,000 stories of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”
Boston Globe editors contacted by the Register claimed only vague knowledge of the AP series, and could not answer as to whether part of it ran in their paper.
Journalists wonder why they are despised, but they also wonder about things like this, where to non-journalists the question about the difference in treatment of these two issues is a question that answers itself.
I was honored that Pajamas Media asked me to write about the Democratic Presidential Forum being broadcast on HDNet, and without any hesitation, I said I’d do it, although I did allow that it might take me an hour or so after the debate was over to write my post. After all, I’d have to watch it first, right?
Not so fast!
[…]
Was I in for a shock! As it turns out, the only way to get this channel is to upgrade my monthly service to “HD TV,” (plus pay an extra charge for “special” channels like HDNet), but that even then my existing equipment (which I paid for and had installed) would not work. To actually receive the new signal, I would have to buy a new receiver, and on top of that I’d have to buy a new satellite dish, have old one yanked off the wall and the new one installed!
[…]
So, the Democratic Party — the party of the working class — is broadcasting tonight’s debate from an elitist network run by billionaire Mark Cuban that requires expensive equipment and high monthly charges to access.
[source]
It’s about the working class, not for them. Presumably, after their betters have decided what’s best for them, the working class will be told what to think. Or just ignored — it’s not like they attend the good parties anyway!