You’ve seen the media hype all the civilian casualties, women and children, before. In fact, it has become fashionable to report on women and children casualties as a result of war. We see it in our media and everywhere else in the world. We see it in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon and the Gaza strip. Not so much in Israel, at the hands of Hamas. Since Israel’s enemy and our enemy choose to use their own families as human shields, women and children casualties are a given. So media, spare me the tears please.
The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers, diplomats said.
With no history nor expectation that Hamas will live at peace and accept the existence of Israel, the US did the right thing at the UN. All the bleeding hearts be dammed. That war, as in any war, is not going to end until one side or the other wins it. Or to put it another way, until one side loses it. ‘Cease fires’ where Islamofascists are concerned is Osama-speak for back up, regroup, re-arm, and attack another day. Not surprisingly, the Useless Nations has no memory of this tact, or Tora Bora, or Sadr City, or Fallujah.
Right now, in the heat of the battle, while military jets and attack helicopters are flinging munitions all over Gaza doing surgical strikes, and with foot soldiers about to enter to mop up the last of the enemy, Hamas, journalists are complaining that Israel won’t let them in.
Israel is continuing to bar foreign journalists from entering the Gaza Strip, despite a Supreme Court decision to allow a limited number of reporters to enter the territory.
The ban has been in place since a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas began to fray on Nov. 5 as militants intensified rocket fire on Israel.
That’s a toughie for me. On the one hand, it is better that they stay alive than to go in there where they could be blown up. On the other hand, they could go there and get blown up.
Starting with an AP report of civil unrest and peaceful protests, and Russian riot police reacting by beating and kicking protesters and journalists, and ending with no mention of or comment from either Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, or Russia’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, the story of what looks like Russia’s biggest problem, freedom, is being minimized while Russia’s Navy in the Western hemisphere takes center stage.
Riot police clubbed, kicked and detained dozens of people who gathered at a holiday celebration in Russia’s Far East Sunday as hundreds protested across the country over a hike in car import tariffs.
Rising unemployment and a sharp slide in the ruble have driven discontent across Russia and the Kremlin fears the deteriorating economic situation could lead to public unrest.
With domestic car production suffering, the government this month announced higher import tariffs on automobiles, prompting several protests. The demonstrations have been most vehement in Vladivostok, Russia’s largest Pacific port, where nearly all private cars are imported from Japan.
Hundreds rallied in the city Saturday for the second weekend in a row and demonstrators hoped to rally again on Sunday.
But authorities refused to authorize the demonstration and hundreds of riot police blocked off the city square where it was planned.
Soon after, some 500 people gathered around a traditional Russian New Year’s tree on Vladivostok’s main square, singing songs and dancing. It was unclear how many were thwarted demonstrators, and there were no placards or signs of political protest, but riot police demanded that people disperse.
Putin’s idea of progress is to return to the 20th century Soviet Union. Raising protectionist tariffs, squelching public dissent, silencing political opponents, and controlling the press, hallmarks of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, is the direction that the ‘new’ Russia is headed.
An Associated Press reporter watched as several people who resisted were beaten with truncheons, thrown to the ground and kicked. Several parents were detained as their children watched.
“Riot police encircled the group … even those just passing by, and they started taking people away without any sort of comment,” said Olga Nikolaevna, a 62-year-old pensioner who witnessed the incident.
An AP reporter saw at least 10 journalists detained by police, who demanded several turn over videotapes and photo memory chips and wrecked a Japanese TV crew’s video camera. Some journalists were beaten and kicked, including an AP photographer. National TV channels, which are state-controlled, ignored the demonstrations.
The Kremlin has sidelined political opponents and put tight controls over civil society and the media, rolling back many post-Soviet freedoms.
For Putin, this is a case of history repeating itself. He seems hell-bent on resisting freedom, like Gorbachev did, instead of embracing it. Boris Yeltsin embraced it, and won. Putin and his puppet president fear freedom and the power and prosperity that freedom and a free-market economy can deliver to the Russian people. Rather than being a champion of freedom, they are proving to be an enemy of it.
Cool. Time magazine’s person of the year for 2008, President-elect Barack Obama. Try this admission by the Times.
In one of the craziest elections in American history, he overcame a lack of experience, a funny name, two candidates who are political institutions and the racial divide to become the 44th president of the United States.
It is happening every day now. Businesses are taking actions to remain in business, not to mention be competitive in today’s economic climate. You see it happening in Newspapers, broadcast radio, and now GoLeftTV on the Internet.
Obviously, the current state of the economy is not good. But that hasn’t always been the case. These media have had problems generating revenue for years. Adding to that, one could argue that the product these media are delivering is defective to the point that there is not enough support in the free market to keep them in the black, forcing them to find a Sugar Daddy like George Soros to keep them going. Air America Radio seems to have found Big Labor, you know, one of those evil ‘special interest’ groups. Ring of Fire Radio has resorted to Google Ads. And GoLeftTV has apparently given up and moved their site to YouTube, which is free. It is a sign of the times.
That newspaper publishers are in tough times is nothing new. Circulation and advertising have been falling for a few years now. And when you consider what percentage of their advertising revenue depended on car dealers, they are seeing their difficulty being compounded.
A snapshot from today’s headlines should tell you how newspapers are going have to be creative, from a purely business standpoint, in order to survive.
The ill-advised bailouts we’ve already seen do not justify yet another one for this industry. Like automakers, this industry needs to change to meet the times as well. But not at taxpayers’ expense.
Some on the left are falling back to another FDR program, focusing on the writers that are finding themselves out in the job market. About 15,000 of them so far. So what kind of make-work program would this ‘Federal Writers Project’ look like you ask?
Today, there are many dislocated “old media” journalists from newspapers, radio, and television on the street–here I declare my personal interest, as one of them–who could provide a skilled pool to staff a new FWP. But since these journalists represent only a fraction of the larger displaced workforce, it is fair to ask what the public benefit would be of money spent.
This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics. As an example, oral history as a discipline has made great strides in the past 70 years, and with the development of video techniques, the forum of the Internet could make these multi-media interviews widely available to schools and scholars, as well as to average Americans.
And how it might work? According to Mark I. Pinsky at The New Republic, it would, naturally, involve colleges and universities, liberals’ home away from home to manage the program.
Administering the new FWP as an individual grant program through community colleges and universities could minimize bureaucracy and overhead. In consultation with the Obama administration–perhaps through the National Endowment for the Humanities–and Congress, guidelines could be established and a small staff assembled in Washington to oversee the projects, in the form of grants, rather than hourly wages. Projects could be pitched locally to colleges, or suggested and posted by them, vetted preliminarily and then approved or rejected by the national staff.
If the Obama administration decided to include the newspaper publishing industry in some kind of bailout, wouldn’t that be a conflict of interest?
Oh if they could just have their way, which is to silence ‘free’ speech that they don’t like, Democrats in Washington could always try what the city-state of Singapore is doing. In Singapore, if the shoe fits, and you report that the shoe fits, that is tantamount to defamation. And because the WSJ had reported on cases in Singapore’s legal system before, and been sued for doing so, they are now being charged with contempt.
From Singapore’s Law Ministry, Justice Tay Young Kwang interprets it this way . . .
“Words sometimes mean more than what they appear to say on the surface,” he writes, going on to interpret the words as contemptuous because they had an “inherent tendency” to “scandalise the court.” The fine he levied, S$25,000 ($16,500), is the largest ever meted out for such an offense. Justice Tay expressed the hope that it will deter “future transgressions.”
To Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, are you taking notes on this? As for the Journal . . .
Let us begin with an apology to our readers in Asia. Unless they are online, they will not see this editorial. For legal reasons, we are refraining from publishing it in The Wall Street Journal Asia, which circulates in Singapore.
We’ll pay the fine. We’ll also continue to express our views about politics, the courts and other subjects that we think our readers should know about. And we’ll let readers decide what to make of the judiciary in Singapore.
Here are two visions of presidential leadership. One is a top-down approach. The other is more of a collaborative approach. Let’s play pin the leadership on the candidate.
But I understand where the — the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from ME. That’s my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure then that my team is implementing it.
I am going to surround myself with the brightest and the best advisers from all over the country. With competing ideas on how to solve our nations problems. And together we will come up with solutions to our nations problems.
Enter Number
1
2
Barack Obama
John McCain
It would seem that a number 1 man would not need advisers, but yes-men and/or pit bulls around him. A man that knows where he’s going and how to get there. Quite a contrast with a number 2 man, who would more or less govern by committee. That’s why you might be surprised to learn that one of these two men are actually both. Hint: If you are not surprised then you probably voted for President-elect Barack Obama.
Type 1 Obama was borne out of criticism that he has surrounded himself with Clinton administration operatives and what we have is a Clinton third term, only without the sex. Apparently not worried that he totally dissed democrats outside of the Clinton administration by wrongly assuming that there isn’t any talent out there. Just one way that inexperience on the national stage manifests itself. And type 2 Obama was borne out of what he ran his campaign on, CHANGE. He was the one that would bring in disparate groups of advisers and wise men, to get all sides of an issue, then give an informed decision.
If we’ve learned nothing else about Barack Obama, it is that he is an expert at being able to be on all sides of every issue and get away with it.
The Iraqi Defense Ministry reported the arrest of Riyad Wahab Hassan Falih, deemed one of the most brutal agents of Al Qaida. Falih, along with nine other key alQaida cell commanders, was captured in an underground torture chamber, five others were killed. Most of the anti-Al Qaida operations have been conducted by Iraqi military and security forces.
‘Iraqi forces received intelligence on a very dangerous terrorist known as the number-one butcher who was responsible for a beheading squad that slaughtered innocent people,’ Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Al Askari said.
Dang, looks like I missed that in the U.S. media too!
Look at the opportunities that the surge created for us in Iraq. It is what it is hoped will happen in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. . .
Over the last six months, Iraqi forces, bolstered by the Sunni-dominated Sahwa auxiliary police, have driven Al Qaida squads out of villages in Diyala. In some villages, the Baghdad government has restored order and established municipal councils to provide services.
‘Sahwa walks hand and hand with the Americans and that’s extremely bad for us,’ a Sunni insurgent in Faluja told the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. ‘There is no doubt we have been weakened. The surge was never the problem. The Americans are not that dangerous. They have the technology, but they don’t know the topography. But we’ve been betrayed by our own brethren.’
Below is a video of the Charlie Rose show the night after the election. Rose’s guests are Newsweek’s Editor Jon Meacham and Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas. The video is further evidence, or justification if you will, that what got this man elected as our next President and Commander in Chief was more a charade or illusion than what we know. And where the media is concerned, Rush Limbaugh characterizes it this way . . .
[t]his is just indication all they knew that they didn’t report about Obama and his associations and his alliances and how Obama was playing the game.
At 2:30 (two minutes, 30 seconds) into the video, Evan Thomas honestly puts the whole Obama campaign into its proper perspective, one day after the election, by going to the roots of community organizing and its founder, Saul Alinsky. From the transcript, Thomas says . . .
Saul Alinsky is, uh, really was a model from this, er, famous community organizer in Chicago, and this whole idea that Alinsky had that it’s not gonna work if you offend large groups of people. You know, we think of community organizers as having their fist out and, you know? Ah, no, no, no, no, no. You have to win over the majority by being peaceful and nonthreatening. Saul Alinsky used the word “nonthreatening.” This is key to Obama. There’s no militancy involved. This is very important and — and his chief strategist, Axelrod, really understood this. Especially if you’re running a black guy for president, you cannot threaten the whites.
At 6:15 into the video, the discussion goes into the ‘creepiness’ of Obama’s performance . . .
MEACHAM: He’s very elusive, Obama, which is fascinating for a man who’s written two memoirs. At Grant Park he walks out with the family, and then they go away.
ROSE: Mmm. Mmm-hmm.
MEACHAM: Biden’s back, you know, locked in the bar or something.
ROSE: (haughty chuckle)
MEACHAM: You know, they don’t let him out. And have you ever seen a victory speech where there was no one else on stage?
ROSE: Mmm.
MEACHAM: No adoring wife, no cute kid. He is the messenger.
THOMAS: There is a slightly creepy cult of personality about all this. I mean, he’s such an admirable —
ROSE: Slightly. Creepy. Cult of personality.
THOMAS: Yes.
ROSE: What’s slightly creepy about it?
THOMAS: It — it — it just makes me a little uneasy that he’s so singular. He’s clearly managing his own spectacle. He’s a deeply manipulative guy.
At 8:30 into the video, Meacham recounts Obama’s writing in the Audacity of Hope, where he begins to set the stage. At around 9:30 into the video, Rose and his guests begin to get that tingly feeling in their legs in describing Obama’s ascension to greatness, ‘watching us watch him.’
In their continued adoration of Barack, Evan Thomas says, around 10:30 into the video, that Obama says in his book, ‘I’m not sure I am Barack Obama.’ Meaning, according to Rose, that Obama knows that he has created a persona that he thinks the American people want, then questions whether he fits the image he has created on the ‘projection screen’ of American opinion. From the transcript . . .
ROSE: Watching him last night in that speech, he finishes —
MEACHAM: Yeah.
ROSE: — and he sort of — it’s almost like he then ascends to look at the circumstance.
MEACHAM: He watches us watching him.
THOMAS: Watching him!
ROSE: Exactly!
THOMAS: He does —
MEACHAM: It’s amazing.
ROSE: It is amazing.
THOMAS: He writes about this metaphor being a screen upon which Americans will project. He said they want of Barack Obama; I’m not sure I am Barack Obama.
ROSE: Mmm.
THOMAS: He has the self-awareness to know that this creature he’s designed isn’t necessarily a real person, and he’s self-aware enough —
ROSE: Ahhhhhh.
Listen as Jon Meacham explains that Barack’s ‘whole life is a narrative’ at 15:10 into the video.
The video then turns to a discussion as to whether the United States is still a ‘center-right’ country. What is illustrative here is that Europe is used as the measure of whether or not it is. Whether he will be able to ‘expand the power of the state.’ We know how popular Obama was, and is, to Europeans. They are, in a political sense, soul brothers.
Evan Thomas says that after the economy tanked in mid September, Obama was ‘risk averse, he was laying back in the weeds.’ But that’s alright because as Rose then proclaims, ‘we’re in an age of Obama right now.’ Where were these geniuses a few months ago? Oh right, they were carrying the water for him. They were ‘in an age of Obama.’
Rose ends the segment with this question, ‘Who will be the principle opposition? Where will the voice of the opposition come from?’ Jon Meacham suggests that it will be Gov. Sarah Palin. He and Thomas then proceed to trash Gov. Palin with their anonymous sources from within the McCain campaign over the clothing issue. Real presidential stuff you know. And befitting of Newsweek.
Update 1/23/2013: For reasons known only to the Charlie Rose Show, this video from Nov. 5, 2008, “A conversation with Jon Meacham & Evan Thomas” is no longer playable. Here is the link to it, http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9341 Is it now a media cover-up?
Watch twenty minute video segment here.
In discussing Obama’s victory at 11:30 in the video, Meacham makes an incorrect statement that shall be corrected here. He says that Obama got the majority vote which had not been done since George H.W. Bush twenty years ago. In 1988 Bush 41 got 53.4% of the vote. Actually, George W. Bush got 50.7% in 2004. Obama ended up with 52.6%.
hearts be dammed. That war, as in any war, is not going to end until one side or the other wins it. Or to put it another way, until one side loses it. ‘Cease fires’ where Islamofascists are concerned is Osama-speak for back up, regroup, re-arm, and attack another day. Not surprisingly, the Useless Nations has no memory of this tact, or Tora Bora, or Sadr City, or Fallujah.
