When they’re not shaping views; “…someone needs to tell AP that “gotcha” journalism loses considerable umph in the rearview mirror.”
“In a not so stunning revelation, the BBC admitted to allowing employees to call in to shows either asking for audience involvement, or offering prizes, when the network wasn’t receiving enough real feedback.”
“In the final poll of a series measuring perceptions of media bias, the Associated Press, local television stations, MSNBC, and CNBC are all perceived as tilting to the left when reporting the news.”
And it’s only Monday!
They are turning.”
Fed up with being part of a group that cuts off a person’s face with piano wire to teach others a lesson, dozens of low-level members of al-Qaeda in Iraq are daring to become informants for the US military in a hostile Baghdad neighbourhood.
The ground-breaking move in Doura is part of a wider trend that has started in other al-Qaeda hotspots across the country and in which Sunni insurgent groups and tribal sheikhs have stood together with the coalition against the extremist movement.
[…]
The increased presence of US forces in Doura, however, is encouraging insiders to overcome their fear and divulge what they know. Convoys of US soldiers are working the rubble-strewn streets day and night, knocking on doors, speaking to locals and following up leads on possible insurgent hideouts.
“People in al-Qaeda come to us and give us information,” said Lieutenant Scott Flanigan, as he drove past a line of fruit and vegetable stalls near a shabby shopping street in Doura, where people were buying bread and other groceries.
The informants were not seeking an amnesty for crimes that they had committed. “They just do not want to be killed,” Lieutenant Flanigan said.
At Least She’ll Be Spared That Interview* With Avi Lewis
Reporting from Londonistan;
A Kurdish woman was brutally raped, stamped on and strangled by members of her family and their friends in an “honor killing” carried out at her London home because she had fallen in love with the wrong man.
Banaz Mahmod, 20, was subjected to the 2-1/2 hour ordeal before she was garroted with a bootlace. Her body was stuffed into a suitcase and taken about 100 miles to Birmingham where it was buried in the back garden of a house.
If you say “Timothy McVeigh” three times and throw a handful of ammonium nitrate over your left shoulder, you can make this go away.
*
SDA Flashback: A Sunday Telegraph investigation has established that honour killings are increasing rapidly in Britain. Home Office statistics suggest that there are 12 such murders each year. However, according to research, the true figure is much higher. At a conference in Southampton last week, police chiefs revealed that they are re-examining 2,000 deaths and-murders between 1996 and 2006 to establish whether they involve honour killings. So far, 19 have now been found to be honour killings. A further 20 involved some element of “honour violence”.
Reader Tips
The days may be numbered for Opportunity, and Spirit.
Breaking faith.
Oops.
Renee Rene, 38,Queens Village. – “Allegedly paid $3,000 for a Master’s of Science in special ed, though never attended Touro; allegedly submitted fake degree to city Education Department; has worked at PS 233 in Queens since 1994.”
Add yours in the comments.
When In Doubt, Hum.
It’s not true that we don’t have speech rights in this country.
In fact, you are free to republish and distribute pretty much any type of race-based commentary you like…
White girls theyre pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get f*cked all night
I just don’t have that much jam
So long as you set it to music.
Err Support
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Russ Vaughn;
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Windsor: Going Out Of Business
A note from a reader;
The local newspaper’s editor is in bed with mayor as the editor’s wife is the mayor’s personal assistant and chief of staff. To speak out against the mayor is suicidal . MP Brian Masse and his NDP thugs with the help of cityhall are running a campaign of ruin against all businesses. Kate, I know you are extremely busy but I hope that you might get other consrvative bloggers to aid us and help bring an investigation to our municipality . Windsor has the highest unemployment,property taxes, utilities, water and sewage plus being next to Detroit our insurance rates are astronomical. Windsor has achieved socialist utopia with almost everyone living off a social program controlled by the left.
This is the type of local story that’s a bit outside the usual realm of SDA, but interested readers can bookmark these three Windsor blogs. Reading some of their entries, it sounds a bit like Saskatoon under previous administrations, or as John Gormley describes them – “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”.
Chirs Schnurr
Windsor Municipal Shadow
Windsor City Blog
Fenris And The Feminists
QOTW:
“Thank the gods… I was afraid I was the only one to notice this need for domination thing with feminists. I’d have said something before, but I have had a haunting fear that if I did, Andrea Dworkin would show up on my doorstep demanding entrance to berate me, only to beg a caning when the door closed on the world.”
(Please keep any discussion work-friendly.)
Omaha Beach, 2007
Shocking, But Untrue
Free Dominion Targeted by HRC, Updated
Big Blue Wave is following the HRC complaint against Free Dominion.
Now the details of the complaint are emerging.
The subject of the complaint is one Bill Whatcott, who has already been the target of complaints by other quasi-judicial tribunals. For instance, he was fined $17 500 for by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal for distributing flyers denouncing homosexual behaviour. SLIGHT CORRECTION: Whatcott was fined for photocopying a classified ad from a gay magazine which solicited boys for sex. Nevermind that could be illegal, he was still fined.
Mark Fournier has more on the complainant;
Marie-Line Gentes a wildlife biologist who studied at the University of Saskatchewan and now teaches at Vanier College in Quebec. She obviously has a serious hate on for Bill Whatcott and Free Dominion is caught in the crossfire.
The odd thing is she isn’t whining about what everyone would expect, she is whining on behalf of her poor Muslim brothers and sisters. I guess she figures they are too stupid to act on their own behalf so she will condescend to do it for them.
Some of the comments Gentes alleges to have violated her human rights:
04/24/06 “I can’t figure out why the homosexuals I ran into are on the side of the Muslims.
After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate beheading homosexuals.”
03/09/06 “I defy Islamic censorship and speak about what I believe is the truth about violent Islamism and its threat to religious liberty in Canada.”
No kidding.
I can’t figure out why women in academia are on the side of the Muslims, either. After all, Muslims who practice Sharia law tend to advocate executing women who learn to read, expose their ankles and appear in public in the presence of men who are not family members. I defy Islamic censorship and speak about what I believe is the truth about violent Islamism and its threat to womens’ liberty in Canada.
(Good enough?)
On further thought, it’s probably not.
White girls theyre pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get f*cked all night
I just dont have that much jam
That pretty much ought to do it.
Free Dominion’s Connie Wilkins will be interviewed by Michael Coren on CFRB on Sunday at 7:30 pm.
Previous: Free Dominion Targeted by HRC
Yes or No?
At Angus Reid;
IS LORNE CALVERT DOING A GOOD JOB AS PREMIER OF SASKATCHEWAN?
Update – here’s another!
I was undecided, until I looked over to the host site’s blogroll and noticed the link to rabble*.
“Tommy Douglas, Not Dead Enough!”
So I voted for Grant Devine.
14% Approval
Under Democratic leadership, Congress has gone from the brink of the abyss and leaped. Whee!
Pollster John Zogby broke down the numbers.
“The Democratic Congress gets poor marks across the ideological spectrum — just 21 percent of liberals and 10 percent of the very liberal give it positive marks, while 14 percent of conservatives and 14 percent of the very conservative give it positive ratings,” Zogby wrote.
“Among Democrats, just 19 percent give Congress positive marks, compared to 13 percent of Republicans and 8 percent of political independents.
“By way of comparison, the Republican Congress had a 23 percent positive job approval rating last October, just a week before voters tossed the GOP out of their leadership posts in both houses.”
After six months, Democrats do have one bipartisan accomplishment: Everyone hates Congress.
Not so George Walker Bush. Among Republicans, 63 percent still think he is doing an outstanding job
Congress now has no base outside of its staff, the reporters who cover it and Mom, and even she is wavering.
He doesn’t think this is funny.
Reader Tips
Open thread.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Models trump measurements (Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post);
We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today. Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all.
“This is nonsense,” says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments the paucity of geologic knowledge among IPCC scientists — a knowledge that is central to understanding climate change, in his view, since geologic processes ultimately determine the level of atmospheric CO2.
“The IPCC needs a lesson in geology to avoid making fundamental mistakes,” he says. “Most leading geologists, throughout the world, know that the IPCC’s view of Earth processes are implausible if not impossible.”
Catastrophic theories of climate change depend on carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere for long periods of time — otherwise, the CO2 enveloping the globe wouldn’t be dense enough to keep the heat in. Until recently, the world of science was near-unanimous that CO2 couldn’t stay in the atmosphere for more than about five to 10 years because of the oceans’ near-limitless ability to absorb CO2.
“This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines,” says Prof. Segalstad, whose work has often relied upon such measurements.
Then, with the advent of IPCC-influenced science, the length of time that carbon stays in the atmosphere became controversial. Climate change scientists began creating carbon cycle models to explain what they thought must be an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These computer models calculated a long life for carbon dioxide.
Amazingly, the hypothetical results from climate models have trumped the real world measurements of carbon dioxide’s longevity in the atmosphere. Those who claim that CO2 lasts decades or centuries have no such measurements or other physical evidence to support their claims.
Neither can they demonstrate that the various forms of measurement are erroneous.
Click
Nothing To See Here
Iran is holding (and parading on television) American Hostages. But the press is not covering it. […] It’s what Robert Jackson said in his closing argument in the Nuremberg trial:
“They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: ‘Say I slew them not.’ And the Queen replied, ‘Then say they were not slain. But dead they are.’ If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.”
In other words, if you do not report that Iran has seized American hostages, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there have been no hostages, there is no crisis.
“This was not United Airlines”
All night I waited for a flight and was bumped again and again by soldiers on their way to places like War Eagle, Victory, and Fallujah. Finally I got on a manifest and gathered around a gruff barking sergeant with everyone else.
“I want you all back here in 20 minutes,” he bellowed. “First, I want you to go to the bathroom. Then I want to see you standing in front of me with a bottle of water.”
I went to the bathroom even though I didn’t have to. Then, as ordered, I pulled a cold bottle of water out of the fridge. We lined up with our gear and marched single file into the plane. I felt awkwardly out of place and also like I was in the army myself at the same time.
The plane was windowless and loud as 100 lawnmowers. I crammed pink foam plugs into my ears, strapped on my body armor, and seat belted myself into the side of the plane.
“Hang your bags on the hooks!” barked the sarge. “Hang them all the way up!”
“Don’t fall asleep,” said the soldier next to me. “When you see the rest of us grab our helmets, put yours on, too. We’ll be beginning the spiral dive into Baghdad.”
A great read by Michael Totten, from Baghdad.
He relies on reader donations to fund these trips, so consider hitting his paypal button while you’re there.
The Save Mickey Campaign
the “N” word, the “H” word and “B” word
LOWRY: If a robot or to dress like a prostitute, isn’t that the kind of outfit it would wear?
SHARPTON: Do you have a copy of the outfit? I happened to have been there that night, because it was the night I did a tribute to James Brown at the BET Awards, and the outfit was a totally clothed outfit.
LOWRY: Looked like a robot, didn’t it?
SHARPTON: It did not.
LOWRY: You think he thinks Beyonce is a robot.
SHARPTON: Slow down, Richard. Don’t go past your statement. The problem you guys get with me is I know how to listen so I can out-debate you. He said a robot would wear that outfit if it was a prostitute. What does that mean?
LEVIN: Guys can I just get one word in?
LOWRY: It means the costume looks like a robo-prostitute costume.
SHARPTON: Why? Why?
LOWRY: What if he said robo-stripper? Would you be upset?