At Paul Schmitt's backyard half-pipe, Costa Mesa, 1985. twitpic.com/cjegss
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 14, 2013
Right? Let's make it hard for women to "choose" to go to murderers like Kermit #Gosnell.
I read a lot of news on a daily basis, online and in print, and the Gosnell story hadn't crossed my radar screen until Friday. So I agree with the likes of Salon's David Weigel and the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that this story has received surprisingly little attention -- from the mass media, that is.
Why? Several readers of The Times say it's because the liberal media are trying to protect their abortion rights agenda. I don't like trying to guess what's on the minds of the editors and reporters who decide what to cover; "the media" are still a collection of individuals who compete with one another. Reporters and editors make news judgments for themselves, not for the group. On the other hand, there's a herd mentality among the major outlets, which is why some stories become national causes and grounds for societal soul-searching even though they're not, objectively, all that extraordinary.
So perhaps the main reason the Gosnell allegations didn't get elevated to that level is because none of the big media powers took the plunge. And you have to wonder why. The testimony at the trial seems to have been pretty dramatic too. Conspiracy theorists on the right argue that the liberal media avoid this story because it might prod the public to demand more limits on abortion. But because Gosnell is accused of operating a site for illegal abortions, he could just as easily illustrate what happens when government makes it hard for women (especially low-income ones) to end their pregnancies early and legally. (Read this piece by Carole Joffe, a professor of reproductive health at UC San Francisco, for a good elaboration on that point.)
He is a member of the editorial board at the Los Angeles Times, which means he is one of a nameless, faceless group writing screeds that, technically speaking, reflect the views of the publisher (whoever that happens to be at the time)...Well, as a "member of the editorial board" we can place the blame directly on dolts like Healey for the Times' complete absence of coverage of one of the most important national stories on reproductive rights in decades. Way to carry on the legacy of the great Otis Chandler!
Earlier I shared what happened when I asked an AP reporter and a Washington Post reporter about their personal Gosnell blackouts. It was so illuminating that I decided to check out a few other media outlets. I headed over to Politico. Since Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff tried to justify her lack of coverage of the Gosnell trial by calling it a local crime story, I thought I’d add other local stories into my search. Thanks for the idea! So here’s what I found out. Politico‘s search engine pops out 165 results on Trayvon Martin (local crime story in Florida), 94 stories on Komen, 233 on Sandra Fluke and 866 on Todd Akin.Well, WaPo's editors have already admitted their paper's paucity of coverage, but don't hold hold your breath on Politico. Those idiots were BuzzFeed before there was a BuzzFeed.
Guess how many stories Politico has published on Gosnell.
Did you guess zero? You win!
I’d love to ask the reporters in question about the shocking disparity but I noticed that the reporters who wrote some of the histrionic Komen coverage aren’t even around any more. Politico is known for its turnover. So I should probably ask editors. Once I figure out who I should talk to (I’m also trying to find Kliff’s editor since she has revealed some problems with her ability to cover this issue) and will let you know how it goes.
The fact that the exploitation of poor women, predominantly of color, hasn’t been subject to extensive coverage is pretty much the ultimate dog-bites-man story ... The story is now being exploited by opponents of legal abortion, although the idea that the proper response to this is to make safe abortions more stigmatized and inaccessible is a massive non-sequitur."Dog-bites-man?" Hmm, seems like I've been hearing a lot about that kind of reporting lately? Oh, yes, the Other McCain had a couple of related bits the other day -- because you can always count on the ghouls at Lawyers, Guns and Money for depravity fodder.
Just when it looked as if the Angels couldn't sink any lower, they hit rock bottom with a thud Friday in a 5-0 loss to the Houston Astros.More at that top link.
These are the same Astros who lost 213 games the last two seasons; the same Astros whose $22-million payroll is less than the free-spending Angels pay the right side of their infield.
These are the same Angels who started the season with World Series aspirations, then started Friday's game with five All-Stars in their lineup.
It should have been a rout — and it was, with the Astros scoring three times in the first inning while the Angels failed to get a runner past first base all night.
The loss was the Angels' fifth straight, leaving them winless on their first homestand of the season. At 2-8, they not only have the American League's worst record but they've equaled a 52-year-old mark for the worst start in franchise history.
And if all that wasn't embarrassing enough, the game ended with Josh Hamilton forgetting how many outs there were, allowing himself to be doubled off first base on Mark Trumbo's foulout.
Afterward Angel Manager Mike Scioscia didn’t have to think long to sum up his team’s problems.
"It’s pretty simple. We’re not pitching and we’re getting behind early," Scioscia said. "When you get behind early it really gives the other team a chance to match up, to use their bullpen. Gives their starter some breathing room."
A team of paleoanthropologists, after four years of analysis, has made its most detailed case that Australopithecus sediba is a direct ancestor of modern humans. But many experts are unconvinced.Continue reading.
With long arms, high shoulder blades and powerful fingers, the ancient creatures were built for climbing trees. But they also had long lower limbs, flat feet and a flexible lumbar spine that gave them a distinct evolutionary edge: They could cover long distances by walking upright on two legs.
After four years of intense analysis, a team of paleoanthropologists is making its most detailed case yet that a pair of ancient skeletons discovered in a grassy South African valley could represent the direct evolutionary link between modern humans and the family of human ancestors that includes the Australopithecus known as Lucy.
In a series of six papers published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, the researchers argue that the "mosaic nature" of the Australopithecus sediba specimens makes them a strong candidate to be the "missing link" — the branch of Australopithecus that ultimately gave rise to the genus Homo, which includes Homo sapiens.
The skeleton fossils have so many human-like features "across the whole of the body that it must be considered, at the very least, a possible ancestor," said Lee R. Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who discovered the fossils in 2008. Berger was senior author of all the new studies.
But not everyone accepts this view. Critics say the skeletons are not old enough to be the precursors to Homo. Others say the similarities can be chalked up to the diversity of early hominids, but that certain aspects of A. sediba's anatomy make it an unlikely candidate for being our forebear.
At a minimum, the new details revealed in the papers are causing scientists to revise, or at least question, some long-held assumptions about the anatomical makeup of our extended evolutionary family...
Gosnell atrocities didn't happen because someone was denied a "safe" and "legal" abortion. So kindly shut the hell up @amandamarcotte .Exactly.
— LilMissRightie (@LilMissRightie) April 12, 2013
Two ardent supporters of Margaret Thatcher have called on the BBC to broadcast the song mocking her death.
The anti-Thatcher anthem Ding Dong the Witch is Dead has seen a surge in popularity since Baroness Thatcher’s death and looks set to retain a top slot when the Official Chart Show airs on Sunday.
In a controversial move the BBC are likely to play the track if it is in the top five, after executives are said to see little reason to take it off of the airwaves. A final decision will not be made on grounds of taste or decency.
But the move has found support in some unlikely corners as UKIP leader Nigel Farage and Tory MP Philip Davies, who have both paid glowing tribute to the former leader, said broadcasting the song was the right thing to do.
Mr Farage said: “If you suppress things then you make them popular, so play the bloody thing. If you ban it it will be number one for weeks.
Geller was dismayed that her talk was shut down, but once her opponents were willing to put the safety of Jewish Sunday School children at risk, or simply to persuade the parents that there was a risk to their children, she understood her talk would be cancelled.They threatened the children. Way to go progs! Hard to beat that for utter authoritarian thuggery!
Let me state the obvious. This should be front page news. When Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke, there was non-stop media hysteria. The venerable NBC Nightly News' Brian Williams intoned, "A firestorm of outrage from women after a crude tirade from Rush Limbaugh," as he teased a segment on the brouhaha. Yet, accusations of babies having their heads severed — a major human rights story if there ever was one — doesn't make the cut.Progressivism is collective evil, and the mass media is working overtime to perpetuate it. This is truly a stain on our national conscience.
You don't have to oppose abortion rights to find late-term abortion abhorrent or to find the Gosnell trial eminently newsworthy. This is not about being "pro-choice" or "pro-life." It's about basic human rights.
The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace.
A goat’s head was delivered to Wrigley Field on Wednesday afternoon, addressed to Cubs owner Tom Ricketts, and police are investigating the dropoff of the “intimidating package,” officials said.Continue reading.
Cubs spokesman Julian Green said an unidentified person dropped off a package with a goat’s head at Gate K of the ballpark at 1060 W. Addison St.
The head was all black and had a U.S. Department of Agriculture tag on its ear, a police source said.
It was delivered by a man who drove up to the ballpark's security gate, the source said. The man gave the package to a security guard and asked him to deliver it to Tom Ricketts, the source said. The man then got back into his truck and drove away.
The package, which did not contain a note, was never delivered to Ricketts, the source said...
Over time, I’ve read opinion pieces in which the writer ponders the question of why Obama persists in pushing gun-control legislation: Is he sincere and actually believe his own BS, or is it simply to gin up his base? Well, probably both. But the real issue continues to be that guns have taken center stage in an ongoing cultural war. In particular, any legislation passed will be something to defend against the depredations of the cultural other. Look at the distorting effects of Roe v Wade over the years. In how many venues have supporters of abortion rights amplified criticism of the decision into a general assault to be resisted at all costs.That's actually the main reason to oppose anything from the left. It doesn't matter how good the legislation is, there's no upside in joining the radical progressives. They'll twist and distort any public policy to push the socialist agenda and destroy anyone who stands in the way.
From this point forward, criticism of any control legislation will be demagogued; the critic painted as one indifferent to the murder of children.
The best reason for unyielding opposition to any of the legislation being contemplated is that the legislation is terrible on its face – even failing to address the advertised concerns of those supporting it. However, running a close second to that reason is this: Nothing is to be gained and much is to be lost by appeasing those who simply dislike you. They will continue to dislike you, and all that they think you represent, regardless.
The fact that Planned Parenthood aggressively lobbies against legislation requiring medical care for such children is appalling. The fact that a Planned Parenthood official testified that killing such children is permissible is shocking. And the fact that most major media outlets — including The Post — all but ignored her comments is distressing.RTWT.
Our country is deeply divided over the question of abortion. But can we not all at least agree that killing a born child is murder — not a question that “should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician”?
Employers count keystrokes, read emails and monitor personal social media accounts. They time bathroom breaks. The cost of efficiency may be worker satisfaction.Continue reading.
Phil Richards used to like his job driving a forklift in a produce and meat warehouse. He took pride in steering a case of beef with precision.
Now, he says, he has to speed through the warehouse to meet quotas, tracked by bosses each step of the way. Through a headset, a voice tells him what to do and how much time he has to do it.
It makes the Unified Grocers warehouse in Santa Fe Springs operate smoothly with fewer employees, but it also makes Richards' work stressful.
"We're just like human machines," said Richards, 52. "But with machines, they don't care whether you feel good, or if you're having a bad day."
Technology has eliminated many onerous work tasks, but it's now one of the factors contributing to a harsher work environment.
Employers are using technology to read emails and monitor keystrokes, measure which employees spend the most time on social networking websites and track their movements inside and outside the office. They can see who works fastest and who talks the most on the phone. They can monitor how much time people spend talking to co-workers — and how much time they spend in the bathroom.
It's all part of an effort to drive down costs and squeeze as much production as possible out of each employee.
British leader stood up to unions, backers of government subsidies, foreign policy doves.Continue reading.
LONDON -- For years after her tumultuous time as prime minister, it seemed as if no one in the United Kingdom was undecided about Margaret Thatcher. You are either for her or against her.
But it's not clear whether the enmity and adoration she sparked in her conservative confrontation of labor unions, government subsidies and foreign policy doves will outlast Thatcher, who died Monday at 87 after a stroke.
"It's undeniable that for certain generations she is always going to divide the country," said Timothy Stanley, a historian and writer at the University of Oxford.
"I remember when I was a student, for example, there was a lecturer who at the beginning of the British political history course said: 'Now we all know Margaret Thatcher is evil, but please don't write that on the exam paper,'" Stanley said. "That speaks to how a certain generation in the U.K. feels about her."
But he said Brits born 20-odd years ago are not going to feel very strongly about the coal-mining unions she faced down in the mid-1980s.
"I know it still moves grown men to tears in some places," he said. "But if you grew up in the last 20 years, the days of Margaret Thatcher may as well be in the 19th century."
And now the last of them is gone. Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II—three who won the Cold War and, it isn't too much to say, saved the West (at least for a while!)—are no longer with us. Their examples remain.
I’ve written in the past about the big impact [Richard] Metzger had in introducing me to counterculture and my disappointment following his embrace of Orthodox Marxism in 2009 — the same year that I started working full time as a conservative new-media troublemaker in the Breitbart tradition. I’m not offended by Metzger’s poor taste, rather just at how predictable and nonsensical it is. Two observations of the paradoxes inherent in the strange tradition that has emerged of using social media to emotionally unload on recently deceased public figures...
"'Since Wisconsin stopped forcing public employees to pay union dues against their will...
... union membership in that state has plummeted," writes John Hinderaker'."
In that dreary winter of 1979, the piles of uncollected trash in London's Finsbury Park seemed to stretch for miles. The garbagemen were on strike. So too, at one time or another, were hospital workers, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, railwaymen. Also gravediggers: In Liverpool, corpses had to be warehoused as they awaited burial—yet another long queue that socialist Britain had arranged for its patient masses.Continue reading.
This was the "Winter of Discontent," when Great Britain came about as close to economic collapse as at nearly any point in its peacetime history, and it was the country Margaret Thatcher inherited when, on May 3, she defeated the Labour government of James Callaghan to become Prime Minister—the first woman in the office and 49th in a line that includes some of the greatest figures of Western civilization: Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, the Duke of Wellington, William Pitt the Younger.
***
Thatcher died in London Monday, at age 87, having earned her place among the greats. This is not simply because she revived Britain's economy, though that was no mean achievement. Nor is it because she held office longer than any of her predecessors, though this also testifies to her political skill. She achieved greatness because she articulated a set of vital ideas about economic freedom, national self-respect and personal virtue, sold them to a skeptical public and then demonstrated their efficacy.
Consider economic policy...
Tuesday's Socialist Worker front page - "Rejoice!" #tomorrowspaperstoday #Thatcher (ht @bysshe1) twitter.com/suttonnick/sta…Plus, Glenn Greenwald reverts to form with a defense of progressive grave dancing, "Margaret Thatcher and misapplied death etiquette" (at Memeorandum).
— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) April 8, 2013
Baroness Thatcher, who has died aged 87 from a stroke, was not only Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, she was also the outstanding peacetime leader of the 20th century.
For more than a decade Margaret Thatcher enjoyed almost unchallenged political mastery, winning three successive general elections. The policies she pursued with ferocious energy and unyielding will resulted in a transformation of Britain’s economic performance.Continue reading.
The resulting change was also political. But by discrediting socialism so thoroughly, she prompted in due course the adoption by the Labour Party of free market economics, and so, as she wryly confessed in later years, “helped to make it electable”.
As for the effects of the Thatcher phenomenon upon British society, these were both more ambiguous and more debatable. Her remark “there is no such thing as society” was wrenched altogether out of the context of the interview in which it was made, and made to seem to be an advocacy of naked individualism, when she was really calling for more personal responsibility. Yet, rightly or wrongly, the 1980s came to be seen as a time of social fragmentation whose consequences are still with us.
Margaret Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations strove to copy and apply. Monetarism, privatisation, deregulation, small government, lower taxes and free trade — all these features of the modern globalised economy were crucially promoted as a result of the policy prescriptions she employed to reverse Britain’s economic decline.
Above all, in America and in Eastern Europe she was regarded, alongside her friend Ronald Reagan, as one of the two great architects of the West’s victory in the Cold War. Of modern British prime ministers, only Margaret Thatcher’s girlhood hero, Winston Churchill, acquired a higher international reputation.
They are rushing things at this point, they must be behind. Hunter Hayes, aka the 12 year old looking kid is performing. Apparently Stevie Wonder is singing with him. That's, um, an interesting collaboration. He's a pretty good performer, I have to give him that. He plays guitar & piano. He's like Bieber with an accent, musical talent, and no punk attitude. Ooh, a horn section, cool! And the Hunter & Stevie on Sir Duke (You Can Feel It All Over) was actually pretty decent.And at the Los Angeles Times, "Miranda Lambert is Academy of Country Music Awards' top winner."
Druids, vegans and green activists should be given special treatment at work, according to ‘lunatic’ advice from the equalities watchdog.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) warns employers that they risk ‘potentially costly legal action’ unless they allow staff to follow their ‘religion or belief rights’ in the workplace.
This could include giving believers time off to go on pilgrimages, such as druids and pagans going to Stonehenge, while environmentalists should be free to lecture other staff about their car use.
CYBERSTALKER (noun) -- Person who obsessively follows someone online, for purposes of harassment. See: Bill Schmalfeldt.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 7, 2013
When you write a column about me, but don't allow me to comment in the comment section, that IS the DEFINITION of soliciting tweets, Stace!
— Bill Schmalfeldt (@LiberalGrouch) April 7, 2013
We MAY be handing out the home addresses and phone numbers of the various Breitbots who are pimping this dumbass "Everybody bother the...
— Bill Schmalfeldt (@LiberalGrouch) April 7, 2013
The memories could last a lifetime. You could tell the kids, and the grandkids, about the tingles in the Dodgers' season opener.Continue reading.
Sandy Koufax shyly emerged from the dugout to throw out the first pitch, serenaded and beloved. Clayton Kershaw dominated on the mound, as unhittable today as Koufax was in his day.
Yet, Dodger Stadium did not erupt into bedlam until the eighth inning, when Kershaw ended a scoreless tie by launching a home run that instantly became part of Dodgers lore.
"Pretty stirring," Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti said.
Here come the killjoys, lobbying to eliminate the possibility of any such magic ever again. The start of the season, the first with interleague play every day, brought forth a new wave of calls for the National League to surrender its tradition and adopt the designated hitter.
Should the NL confiscate the bats of its pitchers so both leagues can play by the same rules? We'll take up that issue in a moment, but first: among those who could change the rules, there is no momentum to do so.
Joe Torre, the executive vice president who handles on-field matters for Commissioner Bud Selig, said the issue has not come up in the commissioner's office. Angels Manager Mike Scioscia, who serves on the Major League Baseball committee that would discuss the issue, said it has not come before the committee.
Colletti said the general managers have not debated the issue. Neither has the players' union, according to Executive Director Michael Weiner.
The current collective bargaining agreement, in force through the 2016 season, calls for up to 20 interleague games per year. The agreement specifies that the designated hitter "shall be used" for interleague games in American League ballparks and "shall not be used" for interleague games in NL parks.
In the bargaining talks, Weiner said, the players were much more interested in minimizing the number of interleague games than they were in standardizing the rules. At one point, the owners had proposed about 30 interleague games.
The greater the number of games between the leagues, the greater the potential effect on teams assembled under the rules of their own league.
The Angels, for instance, put together a fly-ball pitching staff, under the premise that Mike Trout and Peter Bourjos could run down just about any fly ball. Then they opened the season in Cincinnati, where Scioscia benched Bourjos so the Angels could keep Mark Trumbo's bat in the lineup.
If owners and players were to agree on one set of rules, the designated hitter would come to the NL, just as it has to the minor leagues and to virtually every other professional league in the world.
"For the baseball purists who say, 'Just get rid of the DH,' I don't see that happening," Scioscia said.
Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.She's hilarious ---- but so true!
Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
What could I have done differently over the past years?
For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, I salute you and your 1/32 Cherokee heritage.
I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people's pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you're using someone else's misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you're golden.
Having a tiger mom helps, too. As the youngest of four daughters, I noticed long ago that my parents gave up on parenting me. It has been great in certain ways: Instead of "Be home by 11," it's "Don't wake us up when you come through the door, we're trying to sleep." But my parents also left me with a dearth of hobbies that make admissions committees salivate. I've never sat down at a piano, never plucked a violin. Karate lasted about a week and the swim team didn't last past the first lap. Why couldn't Amy Chua have adopted me as one of her cubs?
Then there was summer camp...
The lights have gone off on another American tradition.Actually, I'm surprised the company didn't fold sooner. It's not like photography is just now changing or anything.
The photographer that ran the portrait studios at Sears Holdings Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT and Babies "R" Us abruptly closed its business, at least temporarily ending a longtime retail tradition at those stores.
CPI Corp., CPIC -13.04% in a statement on its website, said it closed all of its U.S. studios "after many years of providing family portrait photography." The St. Louis-based company didn't explain the hasty closure, and calls to CPI went unanswered. However, the company has struggled financially, hurt by the rise of digital photography.
The news came suddenly to the retailers. "We were notified Thursday that CPI is ceasing its U.S. operations at retailers across the country immediately," Sears spokesman Howard Riefs said. CPI has provided photo services for Sears's customers since 1959 and has been the store's only portrait studio operator since 1986, currently located in all 788 Sears stores in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Sears "is exploring all options" to potentially provide portrait services as soon as possible, Mr. Riefs said.
The look and feel of the photographs—cloth backdrops, wide smiles and subjects looking slightly off-camera—became part of the visual dictionary of creative artists, being re-appropriated for everything from a band photo by the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the film poster for "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."
One former customer, Becky Schaaf, used to take her 4-year-old son to a Sears Portrait Studio every three months during the first year of his life, until she decided she could get the same result, or better, on her own or by finding local professionals.
"We started to realize that with a decent camera we could be taking strong photos," said Ms. Schaaf, now a mother of two in Ashland, Ohio. "I just got an iPhone…[and] for the day to day, we're just as happy with that."
Three American civilians and three U.S. troops were killed in two attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday, officials said, including a powerful blast that struck officials traveling to a school to donate books. Among the dead was the first State Department diplomat to be killed in the country since the war began.More at that top link, and at Long War Journal, "Taliban suicide bomber kills 5 ISAF personnel in southeastern Afghanistan."
The bloodshed Saturday, the deadliest day this year for Americans in Afghanistan, underscored how dangerous the country remains as the United States proceeds with the withdrawal of its remaining troops over the next 20 months, leaving security in the hands of Afghanistan’s fledgling army.
The attacks suggested that even as the military coalition’s focus shifts to managing the drawdown, the United States appears likely to face an intense “fighting season,” the springtime period in Afghanistan during which violence typically increases.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — With his shaggy hair, bushy mustache and obstinate ways, Jeffrey Allen Wright was well known to sheriff's deputies in Santa Rosa County, Fla.Continue reading.
Wright, 55, drove around with a phony license plate. When stopped, he refused to produce a driver's license. Once he threatened to sue a deputy who pulled him over.
After he was fined for traffic offenses in September, Wright paid with counterfeit money orders. When deputies served warrants for felony counterfeiting March 8, Wright barricaded himself in his garage and declared that he would not be "a servant of the king."
He broke out windows with a handgun, then pointed the weapon at officers, police said. Three deputies fired, killing Wright.
When Det. Rob Finch of the Greensboro police department heard about the incident, two words came to mind: sovereign citizen.
Finch teaches police and public officials around the country how to deal with self-described "sovereign citizens" like Wright. Finch and his partner, Det. Kory Flowers, have trained nearly 15,000 police and 5,000 public officials to combat sovereigns, zealots who refuse to recognize government authority in virtually any form.
Violent confrontations are rare, but the FBI says at least six police officers have been killed by sovereigns since 2000. A man tied to the movement shot and killed a California Highway Patrol officer who stopped him in Contra Costa County last year. A responding officer shot and killed the assailant.
The agency calls sovereigns — who number between 100,000 and 300,000 — a "domestic terrorist movement."...
There is something wrong at MSNBC.
Terrifying-->MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry » All Your Kids Belong To Us: youtu.be/N3qtpdSQox0 via @youtube
— Anna Maria Hoffman (@AM_Hoffman) April 6, 2013
To a moonbat, the community = the government. The voice of the community is the voice of the government, which is becoming increasingly synonymous with the establishment media.Actually, it's not hyperbole at all. Harris-Perry sounds fascist even, in the sense of European interwar fascism of the individual being folded into a superior essence of the all-powerful state. Again, it's bizarre in the American experience, but progressives are really taking their political capital and running with it. The downside for them is that flyover America isn't at all in tune with this kind of collectivist fascist intellectualism. There will be a reckoning around election time. Indeed, I expect that MSNBC might have bitten off more that it's able to chew. We might be hearing more about "Lean Forward" very soon, and not in a good way.
Anyone still think it is hyperbole to call these people totalitarian?
Not all of the academic experts find this research [on same-sex parenting] convincing.You don't say? Wouldn't want to promote those findings too much, or anything.
Douglas W. Allen, a Canadian economist, says the many positive research reports on gay parents and their children were questionable. "The samples are small and biased. The people are self-selected," he said. "If you start with a biased sample, you can't make a statement about the population as a whole."
He published data from a Canadian census survey in 2006 that found children with lesbian or gay parents were less likely to graduate from high school.
"FEMEN needs to recognize that Muslim women do in fact have agency, and the idea that Muslim women are helpless, passively indoctrinated by the alleged evils of Islam, and desperately need of Western feminist help is oppressive and orientalist."Agency." That's a big word, right? Click through for the full article.
#Femen #muslimahpride #toplessjihadday "I do not need patriarchal states or eurocentric feminists to dictate to me!" twitter.com/sofiaahmed1/st…
— Sofia Ahmed (@sofiaahmed1) April 4, 2013
The MSNBC Messaging Machine finds new ways to be stupid just about every day.Dumb, and morally bankrupt.
MSNBC is a televised blog. I keep saying this because it's true: part of blogs' charm, at least initially, was that they gleefully ignored any standards of professionalism. The honesty about the slapdash nature of them was bracing. And the honesty about agenda -- to wit, we have one -- was liberating.
But that upside of blogs also comes with a downside. Blogs speak relentlessly to one side of the aisle (are there any actual centrist blogs out there? It's a business model I don't think can actually work). We look for new ways to provoke -- because it's fun and profitable. And I don't mean that in the cliched joke way; I mean, it's literally both fun and profitable (at least in the sense of hit-whoring) to find exciting new manners of juvenile tweaking of one's political enemies.
The medium tends towards two things: emotional hotness and intellectual dumbness. Those aren't cast-iron rules, of course. (Present company excepted!)
MSNBC has fully embraced the blogger ethos of hit-whoring provocation first, second, last, and always. As well as exploring all the new and inventive ways to call people you don't like Nazis.
There simply is no professionalism at MSNBC, no aspiration to any kind of standards at all. It's Dumb By Design (TM), because Dumb is Easy and Easy is Holy.
He who controls the language shapes the debate: In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of the New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of Will & Grace:No, they don't tolerate much, do they. See College Insurrection for just one more quick example that comes to mind: "Gay Students Seek Campus Chaplain’s Removal from George Washington U."
“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”
For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: It’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, the chief justice, Warren Burger, declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.
Nonetheless, Max Mutchnick’s “vigilance” is a revealing glimpse of where we’re headed. Canada, being far more enlightened than the hotbed of homophobes to its south, has had gay marriage coast to coast for a decade. Statistically speaking, one-third of 1 percent of all Canadian nuptials are same-sex, and, of that nought-point-three-three, many this last decade have been American gays heading north for a marriage license they’re denied in their own country. So gay marriage will provide an important legal recognition for an extremely small number of persons who do not currently enjoy it. But, putting aside arguments over the nature of marital union, the legalization of gay marriage will empower a lot more “vigilance” from all the right-thinking people over everybody else.
Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent...
