First there was the old adage: never drink and dial.

Then we all learned that texting while driving was a very, very bad idea:

Now another no-no has been added to the list — for journalists.  From Mashable comes this news about Reuters:

Last night, Reuters released their social media policy, which includes instructing journalists to avoid exposing bias online and tells them specifically not to “scoop the wire” by breaking stories on Twitter.

The strict instruction makes it clear that even though news continually breaks on Twitter first — especially in disaster scenarios — Reuters journalists are to break their stories first via the wire and not on Twitter.

And why the new rules? (more…)

You’ll be pleased to know that the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance is still legal — but just barely:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld the use of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency, rejecting arguments on Thursday that the phrases violate the separation of church and state.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected two legal challenges by Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow, who claimed the references to God disrespect his religious beliefs.

“The Pledge is constitutional,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the majority in the 2-1 ruling. “The Pledge of Allegiance serves to unite our vast nation through the proud recitation of some of the ideals upon which our Republic was founded.” (more…)

A girl flees from her home in fear for her life – and law enforcement goes after the people who helped her.  That’s the situation in the Rifqa Bary case.

The Columbus Dispatch reported this about Rifqa’s friend Brian Williams:

An Ohio minister accused of driving a teenage runaway to a bus station last year has retained a lawyer as police say they’re investigating whether anyone broke the law in helping the Christian convert leave home for Florida.

And why did she flee to Florida? Because, she says, when her devout Muslim father found out she had become a Christian, he said to her, “I will kill you.” And with Islam’s death penalty for apostates, she had to take that seriously. But her father is not in danger of being prosecuted. Brian Williams is. (more…)

In June 2007 Castro’s Stalinist regime held a “tourism fair” in Havana to kick-off an ambitious plan to boost the Cuban military’s tourist booty. By some peculiar coincidence NBC’s Today Show decided to broadcast from Havana that very week. Amidst smiling, clapping, dancing tourists, Matt Lauer and Andrea Mitchell advised viewers on how to legally vacation in Cuba.

Don’t look for this from NBC, but Castro’s Soviet-trained and armed military and secret police own most of Cuba’s tourist facilities. Along with providing these inquisitive Cuban officials with certain “insights” regarding visitors to Castro’s fiefdom, this set-up also insures that most of the money that tourists spend in Cuba lands in the pocket of the only people in Cuba with guns.

Yet Castro apologists and/or agents (both on the payroll and off) keep insisting that a flood of rich Western tourists will magically smother Cuban Stalinism whereupon the island nation will quickly mutate into a bigger (and more historic and picturesque) Cozumel. This logic (which Matt and Andrea naturally shared) seems to go something like this: rewarding and enriching the KGB-trained and heavily armed guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist status-quo will magically convert them into instant opponents of that Stalinist status quo.

Amazingly, this line of reasoning fails to convince those with first-hand experience under Cuba’s Stalinist regime. But never mind this insufferable rabble of “Cuban-American right-wing crackpots!” and their congressional allies. And never mind the evidence. (more…)

Credit where credit is due:  Wired Magazine’s Noah Shachtman and Conde Nast have a scoop on their hands. In the course of researching his new and largely fair piece on Andrew Breitbart and the “Big” websites, during which he was given unprecedented access, Shachtman learned of a new project-in-progress by ACORN stingmeister James O’Keefe involving the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offices in Detroit and Chicago:

This time, there are no prostitutes involved, just a shady, and serious, tax-fraud scheme. The ploy involves the Obama administration’s 10 percent tax credit to first-time home buyers. The law says that the credit maxes out at $8,000 for an $80,000 home. But at the Detroit office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the rule seems open to interpretation. O’Keefe asks a staffer, What if I bought a place for $50,000, but the seller and I agreed to write down $80,000 as the purchase price?

“Flip it any way you want,” the staffer replies.

What if the place is worth much less — like only $6,000?

“Yup, you can do that.”

O’Keefe and fellow activist Joe Basel ran the same sting at HUD’s Chicago office and at several federally supported independent housing groups. Breitbart paces the parquet floor. The video is damning but not exactly Acorn-explosive.

Then O’Keefe stops the playback. “Oh yeah, I forgot,” he says. “We went to the Detroit Free Press, to the managing editor. We told her the whole thing. She said she wasn’t interested. Wanna see the tape?” (more…)

As you may know, I do a cartoon on Big Hollywood every Sunday with Batton Lash called Obama Nation. It gives us the opportunity to lampoon the WPE* since few others seemed willing to do it when we started. But Big Journalism offers the opportunity to mock the “mainstream media” which constantly fails to report the facts or deal with reality. So I called up another friend, comics veteran and fellow libertarian, Val Mayerik to enter the fray and have a few laughs.

The strip we’re doing is called “Useful Idiots.” A term coined by the Soviets as the pet name they had for Western Lefties who believed any lie they were fed. It will feature a cast of familiar characters you may have seen on TV while changing channels. For the sake of storytelling we’ve put them all at the same network which we call BSN. And we focus on showing how the so called infotainment world provides neither. Info nor entertainment. Just a lot of partisan noise dressed up as “news” or “commentary”.

(more…)

King Leonidas punctuated his epic resistance to the Persian horde by responding to Xerxes’ demand that the Three Hundred Spartans surrender their weapons.  Molon labe! … “Come and take them!”   Our senators and representatives should respond in kind to President Obama’s demand for their votes on his epochal healthcare takeover.

For much of a year … longer that most would have predicted … a vastly outnumbered force of 218 Republican congressmen and senators – prodded, poked and arm-twisted by the most powerful grassroots movement of our generation and egged on my its cheerleaders in the Mainstream Media – has withstood the Xerxian onslaught that is Obamacare.  And like Leonidas, Obamacare opponents know more is at stake than this single battle.

As important as the outcome is the manner in which this battle is waged.  A courageous and principled stand against overwhelming odds historically evokes sympathy and support by an otherwise unengaged populace – witness Thermopylae, the Alamo, Rorke’s Drift, to name a few. (more…)

There’s an old saying that describes the fortunes of families, corporations and criminal enterprises: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” You know: John D. Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller… the other Rockefellers.  Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry Luce, Hedley Donovan, Henry Grunwald… Your Name Here. Five Families Boss Carlo Gambino, Paul Castellano, John Gotti… Gotti, Jr.

But what better example of declining fortunes can there be than the Kennedy clan of County Wexford, Boston, Hyannisport, Palm Beach and Chappaquiddick.  From Patrick Joseph Kennedy to Joseph P. Kennedy (the Patriarch), to John Fitzgerald Kennedy to…

Yes, Patrick Kennedy, the soon-to-be-former Congressman from Rhode Island, substance abuser, drunk, late-night car crasher and all-around whackjob, was in the news again today, lashing out at, well, pretty much everybody in one of his farewell addresses to the nation.

Amazingly, he went after the media.  From ABC News’ The Note: (more…)

The Better Government Association, a busy Chicago-based watchdog group that has its work cut out for it, recently released its “Hall of Shame” report that details the nearly 150 county officials who have gone to jail for corruption in Barack Obama’s Cook County. And that doesn’t even include the more than one hundred Chicago officials who have also gone to jail over the last few decades.

Because of the high level of corruption and the large and ever-growing roster of jailed county officials, in its press release, the BGA bitingly asks, “[I]s it any surprise this multi-billion dollar labyrinth of governmental entities is referred to disparagingly as ‘Crook County?’”

The scams took place over the past four decades in the courts; the offices of the Assessor, Sheriff and Treasurer; and the President’s Office of Employment and Training. They involve bribes, payoffs, rip-offs, padded contracts, ghost payrollers and the wholesale subversion of the judicial system. The perpetrators include elected officials at the highest and lowest levels of city, county and state government; judges, lawyers and lobbyists.

(more…)

There’s an interesting piece out from the AFP entitled “Bold new Gaza play skewers Fatah and Hamas.”  Apparently, there’s a play out in the Gaza Strip that rips Hamas and Fatah:

A new play has shocked audiences in the Gaza Strip by shouting out what many in the Hamas-ruled territory mutter behind closed doors — that Palestinian politicians are a bunch of crooks. The biting comedy entitled “Umbilical Cord” goes after the Islamist Hamas and its secular Fatah rivals, accusing them of ignoring the suffering of their people and selling out to Iran and the United States, respectively.

The shocking part about the play obviously isn’t the content of the play – it’s that Hamas hasn’t shut it down and shot all the participants.  The question is: why not? (more…)

Another stunning rebuke to Barack Obama: Armenian American groups have for decades sought Congressional recognition as genocide of the murder of just under two million Armenian Christians by the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Last week, they cleared an important hurdle in getting this recognition: the House Foreign Affairs Committee, over Obama’s opposition, approved a resolution calling the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians a genocide.

The Islamic supremacists haven’t infiltrated as deeply as they thought. As long as Turkey was secular, we pretended it wasn’t genocide. And now Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who once said that “there is no moderate or immoderate Islam, Islam is Islam and that’s it,” is taking on the secular military in Turkey. Traditionally, the secular army kept Turkey a “moderate” secular Muslim country, but with the election of the devout Muslim Erdogan, Turkish secularism is on the ropes. And now that Turkey is returning to the dark side, we don’t have to lie for jihadis anymore.

The Turks were furious over the Foreign Affairs Committee vote, and withdrew their ambassador to the U.S. Turkish President Abdullah Gul issued a veiled threat: “Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to.”

Turkey threatens…what? Another genocide? (more…)

A new piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will be largely ignored by the MSM because it doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template. Yesterday, Friedman wrote this in an op-ed column entitled “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck.”

Saddam’s Iraq was a temporary iron-fisted bulwark against Iranian expansion. But if Iraq has any sort of decent outcome — and becomes a real Shiite-majority, multiethnic democracy right next door to the phony Iranian version — it will be a source of permanent pressure on the Iranian regime. It will be a constant reminder that “Islamic democracy” — the rigged system the Iranians set up — is nonsense. Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Yes, that appeared in the New York Times. (more…)

A week ago, news began to break in San Francisco about a targeted gay-bashing crime that allegedly occurred on February 26.

Three cousins from Hayward have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle at the face of a man they believed was gay, an attack the men videotaped, authorities said Wednesday.

Investigators believe the assailants chose the victim because he appeared to be gay. When the men were pulled over, police found a video camera that was used to film the shooting, investigators said.

Clearly, of course, this had to be a Christian right-wing, tea party, anti-government, bigoted homophobe from the South. Right?

Wrong.

The three men, Shafiq Hashemi, 21, Sayed Bassam, 21, and Mohammad Habibzada, 24, the driver, were arrested. (more…)

From a speech by Jimmy Carter at the University of Havana on May 14, 2002 which was broadcast throughout Castro’s islandwide fiefdom and trumpeted worldwide by all “news” agencies with Havana bureaus:

My nation is hardly perfect in human rights. A very large number of our citizens are incarcerated in prison, and there is little doubt that the death penalty is imposed most harshly on those who are poor, black, or mentally ill. For more than a quarter century, we have struggled unsuccessfully to guarantee the basic right of universal health care for our people. …but Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education.

Thus did a former President of the United States prostrate himself before a regime that jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered (in absolute numbers) more political prisoners in its first three years in power (out of a population of 6.4 million) than Hitler’s murdered in its first six years (out of a population of 70 million.) Not to mention that Pres. Carter’s host insulted his nation as “a vulture preying on humanity!” and came within a hair of nuking it.

There’s more: (more…)

Two clips, one comment.  Up to you to find the common thread.  First, Glenn Beck today:

Now, everybody’s favorite gangster movie. For copyright reasons, we can’t show you the scene in which Frankie Five Angels recants his testimony before the congressional committee, but you know the one we mean:

Compare, contrast, discuss, enjoy.

When I was at CPAC a few weeks ago, I decided to stay an extra day and do the Washington tour. Now as someone who lives in Los Angeles, it is simply shocking to me how much history is within walking distance of the Washington monument, say.

At the Air and Space Museum, you can see John Glenn’s FRIENDSHIP 7 capsule and a replica of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (you can tell it’s a replica, and not one of the built but unflown actual LMs, because the Lunar Module is so fragile it cannot support itself on its own legs in the Earth’s gravity field.)

Just a few blocks away is Ford’s Theater, and across the street, the Peterson House where Abraham Lincoln spent his final eight hours of agony. To go from that dingy, cheap little flophouse and then to the marble temple at the far end of the Mall produces a profound reaction in the human heart. But nothing I saw affected me as did the Declaration of Independence. I expected to be filled with reverence and awe. Instead, I was overwhelmed with despair.

My friends, the Declaration of Independence is gone: irreparably faded. And I fear that the ideals so boldly pronounced in that document are also fading from the pages of society. A few years ago, they opened the Super Bowl telecast by having players from both teams simply read lines from the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and the switchboards were flooded with thousands of irate calls protesting this “right-wing propaganda.” (more…)

Here’s my problem with NBC political correspondent Chuck Todd’s blast against “Drudge driven journalism:” the alternative that Todd attempts to defend isn’t actually journalism. If Chuck Todd’s network and the rest of the MSM really had been practicing journalism all along, there would never have been a vacuum for people like Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart, etc. to fill.

Many people would like to define the term “journalism” as the unbiased dissemination of information, but it’s never been that. For a very long time publications made no secret of their political points of view. Historically, America had Whig newspapers, Republican newspapers and Democratic newspapers. All of them spun the news in a particular direction and readers knew it. The situation has not changed, except that the legacy media desperately and unconvincingly clings to the notion that it is detached from any ideology and therefore the sole arbiter of truth. No matter where they fall on the the political spectrum, Americans know better. That’s the reason the Drudge Report, Breitbart’s “Big” sites and, to put a point on it, liberal outlets like Huff Po and the Daily Kos thrive.

My own field of expertise provides an object lesson in why legacy journalism is fading into irrelevance as “Drudge-driven journalism” fills the void in a world hungry for knowledge. The MSM’s coverage of science in general and environmental issues in particular has been abysmal for years. Journalists are, by training and inclination, generalists. How many times have members of the old media tried to explain away slanted coverage of the non-existent global warming crisis by declaring that they of course are not scientists and can not be therefore expected to personally understand the issue? Instead, they insist that they must rely on experts and if you have a problem with the way they’re covering the issue, go talk to the experts. (more…)

NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd is a neo-Luddite and he doesn’t even know it. In a brief impromptu video clip, Todd said that, “there is no worse crime in journalism these days than simply deciding something’s a story because Drudge links to it.”

So forget plagiarism, intentional misinformation, news fabrication -– remember the New York Times’s Jayson Blair? –- intentional shilling for a political philosophy or politician, and just plain incompetence. None, according to Todd, are as journalistically “criminal,” in the non-judicial sense, as taking a story cue from Matt Drudge.

Todd is replicating the two-hundred years old whine of the early 19th-century Luddites.  Here’s a brief reminder of the movement of British textile workers led by General Ned Ludd between 1811-1816: (more…)

One must at least credit NBC’s Chuck Todd with one virtue.  He is utterly transparent.

When real “journalist” Todd – Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News and the co-hose of The Daily Rundown — gave this impish put down of what he calls, “Drudge-Driven Journalism,” his resentment, fear and school-boy petulance could not have been clearer to any sentient observer.

Such a pity, really.  A grown man reduced to whining in front of the White House makes his viewers so embarrassed for him that it’s painful to watch.  He should have saved all that peevish poppycock for Al Gore, the inventor of the internet.  For, in reality, the saving grace of journalism today – the only thing that gives these leftist buffoons in the MSM even a tiny shred of credibility – is the internet’s check and balance on their politically driven narratives.

Their animus is usually aimed at the Drudge Report because of the number of hits.  It’s Drudge’s numbers that drive the most powerful wedge between these MSM indoctrinated monkeys parading as journalists and their monopoly on the “truth.”  And all it takes is a single flashback to know why all the hacks associated with the once-august MSM fear “Drudge-Driven Journalism” – down to their quaking toes in their manure-muddied Gucci’s.

Flashback:  Dan Rather, 60 Minutes Wednesday, September 8, 2004. (more…)