From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

While America heads home for the holidays, many will see the TIME Magazine cover displaying “The Protester” as Person of the Year in over-priced airport news stands for the first time.

http://youtu.be/nm9rf2UzCZ4

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Oh, if only that were true.

Instead, Time went the moral equivalence route with this nonsense:

Time’s rationale:

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It’s that time of year again, time for newspapers and magazines to start floating their “top stories of the year” lists and Time Magazine has a whole “Top of Everything” list with which to thrill us. But it is Time’s Top U.S. News Stories list that deserves some closer scrutiny because on it Time has determined that the Occupy Wall Street tale is the number one story of the year. As if anyone ever doubted that this left-wing temper tantrum would pique Time’s interest most.

But, seriously, now. Is the Tucson massacre somehow a lesser story than the Occupiers? Is the long-drawn out GOP primary campaign a lesser story? How about the debt crisis? Is that somehow a less important story than Occupy Wall Street? Apparently Time thinks so.

Certainly these lists are always somewhat subjective. After all, what one considers important another may not. But some of these entries seem to point out Time’s ideology as opposed to a serious attempt to pick the top stories of 2011. And making the Occupy story number one is pure ideology.

Time puts this story above the bad economy, Iraq, the Penn State sex abuse case, and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. In fact, if it weren’t for the bad economy, the debt ceiling debate and the bank crisis this Occupy business would not have occurred at all.

Naturally, Time’s characterization of the “movement” is all sweetness and light. Not one mention is made of the now over 400 arrests made as a result of crimes perpetrated by the Occupiers. In fact, Time blames all the ills of the Occupiers on the beleaguered cities for their “heavy handed-policing” of the protests.

Time also disgorges the discreditable claim that the OWSers are the left’s tea partiers. This is a calumny against the tea party that really needs to be eliminated from the national discussion of the two movements.

Another aspect of the Occupy events went unmentioned in Time’s laudatory entry on the protests is the fact that taxpayers are being charged millions of dollars in tax money we don’t have to clean up after and police these protests. This somehow never makes an appearance in Time’s gladhanding of the Occupiers.

What is clear with this entry is that Time Magazine had an agenda with this pick. Sure the OWSers deserved a mention on a top ten list. But that it made number one and that the entry ignored all the negative aspects of the protests proves what the magazine is really attempting to do with this list.

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Much of the bias of the mainstream media is not demonstrated by what they say but by what they omit. During the past four years there have plenty of examples of such media silence. Remember: the media ignored candidate Obama’s relationship with seedy figures such as terrorist Bill Ayers, Communist scholar/pedophile Frank Marshall Davis and hid the fact the future president’s first political office was won in part by earning the support of the Marxist New Party.

Protecting Barack Obama is not the only reason for the mainstream media to omit elements of a story, but protecting the President’s progressive agenda is usually involved.

Take for example this week’s release of a new batch of “climategate” emails.  This batch is from around the same time as the first set, leaked two years ago, and they feature the same cast of scientists such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, and Keith Briffa, who starred in the first set.  Scientists admit in these emails that the evidence behind man made global warming is paper thin, and the apocalyptic climate story is being pushed for political rather than environment reasons. There is even evidence of US and British government involvement in covering up evidence disproving the global warming story.

One would expect news such as this to become banner headlines across the country’s biggest papers.  Those expectations would not be met. The NY Times small story in its environmental column.  While someone seriously covering the story would post some of the controversial exchanges, the Times paraphrased some of them and concluded by explaining it was much ado about nothing:

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA, said he found such exchanges unremarkable. He noted that difficulties in modeling were widely acknowledged and disclosed in the literature. Indeed, such problems are often discussed at scientific meetings in front of hundreds of people.

Of the new release of e-mails, Dr. Schmidt said, “It smacks of desperation.”

Dr. Mann said he hoped the fresh release, apparently first posted to a computer server in Russia, would provide new clues for the British police as they seek to catch the hacker or hackers.

“Who are the criminals?” he asked. “Who is funding this effort, not just to steal these materials but to promote them?”

Time Magazine reported on the scandal by ignoring the bulk of the emails and calling it a ”weak sequel.” Interestingly it seems as if Health and Science reporter Bryan Walsh didn’t read any of the emails himself, but simply reported what others said before concluding that thy contained nothing new. Just like the NY Times, by omitting a broad selection of the emails, Time Magazine skewed the story.

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What we’re seeing happen to Herman Cain today at the hands of Leftist MSM race-baiters was absurdly predictable. Simply put, the Left cannot allow a Black conservative to remain “black,” nor can they allow white conservatives to be seen as embracing what the Left defines as an “authentic” black man. Because that blows all those trumped-up narratives about Republicans being racist right out of the water.

As Big Journalism has documented over the past few weeks, the merciless MSM’s unholy crusade to undermine Cain’s identity is well under way and today Time Magazine joined the electronic mob with a vicious column written by somebody named Toure’:

This presidential election has not lacked for clowns, and in a circus Herman Cain fits right in. But as the Black clown, Cain’s foot-in-mouth moments mostly involve insulting the Black community. This could be to establish his independence from the community in order to earn his bona fides with the GOP electorate or a way of appeasing the white conservatives he’s courting. Or it could be that his foot and his mouth are magnetized. Whatever the reason, as a Black person, the Hermanator experience has been as distasteful as rancid, spoiled, stinky, curdled milk.

From there it only gets worse…

• The Black Sarah Palin
• Big Daddy Cain
• Cain is a clown. You see it in the way he constantly mollifies white audiences with self-effacing, racialized comedy that borders on minstrelsy

Other than their tactics, what the MSM is doing here is no different than what we saw done to Southern Blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era. The biggest threat to the establishment, to those in power, is a free-thinking black man. He simply must be destroyed. In 1991, when he was under a similar assault by Senate Democrats and the Left-wing MSM, Justice Clarence Thomas summed up what was being done to him perfectly:

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There was an interesting exchange between Jake Tapper and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney earlier this week. Just a short while after Carney proclaimed that the President would “not rest until everyone in America who wants a job has a job,” the White House announced that the President will be taking a nine-day August rest in Cape Cod.  This means that Obama plans to have unemployment fixed within the next two weeks or his “not to rest” promise dropped very quickly even for this President.

Tapper decided to ask Carney about the contradiction.

Jake Tapper from ABC News asked Carney if the vacation was appropriate.

Jake Tapper, ABC News: “You said the President will not rest until the joblessness and the economy are worked out, but the President is obviously going on vacation…. Is there any concern about the impression that the President going to Martha’s Vineyard for 9 or 10 days might leave on the American people? And also, if this is such an important issue for Speaker Boehner, for Harry Reid, for President Obama, why the R&R?”

Jay Carney, WH press secretary:... I don’t think Americans out there would begrudge that notion that the President would spend some time with his family. It is also, as I think anyone who has covered in the past, either in this administration or others, there is no such thing as a presidential vacation. The Presidency travels with you. He will be in constant communication and get regular briefings from his national security team as well as his economic team. And he will of course be fully capable, if necessary, of traveling back if that were required. It is not very far.”

I don’t begrudge the President from taking a vacation either, except the timing does seem to be a bit inappropriate. Also the man who defended the President’s vacation, Jay Carney, bashed President Bush for taking one ten years ago. (more…)

ABC’s Brian Ross claimed that Michele Bachmann’s staff pushed him around on July 19 at a campaign appearance. I know, I know, you are waiting for the pity party to start.

In a fit of wild hyperbole, Ross called his treatment by Bachmann similar to the treatment he’s received “mostly by Mafia people.” The left-o-sphere has taken up Ross’ banner, of course, but one can only laugh at Ross considering the ho hum treatment that the media gave back in January of 2010 when a Democrat accosted a different reporter.

In truth, what happened to Ross is fairly mild and all his fault. Bachmann’s staff told the press that she was moving on and would take no further questions but Ross, being the uncouth sort of fella he is, broke away from the other reporters and ran pellmell at the candidate screaming questions anyway. He tried to follow Bachmann into the parking area and at that point her aides stepped in and blocked him even pushing him away a few times.

ABC claims it has video of this altercation, but has yet to post it.

If you listen to the silly hyperbole from the far left blogrags, the media is being treated like the Egyptian protesters in Tahrir Square by Bachmann’s campaign staff. Another lefty site says that Bachmann is indulging in “open conflict” with the press. Neither characterization is even close to the truth.

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Background: a few weeks back Time magazine published, as its cover story, an article by Richard Stengel.  Reading it, I was stunned to discover fourteen clear factual errors in his piece, and I have been on a bit of a crusade since then to force Time to either correct or retract the article, and I have been examining how other media outlets and organizations have treated Stengel.

One of the things that bothered me in particular about Richard Stengel was his association with the National Constitution Center.  As I wrote:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

So I decided to write to David Eisner, head of the National Constitution Center and see if they had any opinion on the rank incompetence on display.  As you might recall I asked him two questions:

First, what is Mr. Stengel’s exact role in the National Constitution Center?  Specifically, does he teach others about the Constitution?

Second, does the National Constitution Center have any official statement regarding the serial inaccuracies that appeared in Time, a national magazine, regarding the Constitution?

He wrote back to me with a brief “we’re working on it” message (that’s my gloss, not a quote) and I waited patiently.

Well, their response has finally come, in the form of an official post at their blog.  In a post entitled “Weigh in on Time’s Controversial Constitution Issue” simply notes that there is a controversy, but for the most part they refuse to take sides.  So you get this one ridiculous passage:

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To give a quick review, on June 23, Richard Stengel wrote a cover story* for Time Magazine rife with factual errors.  On June 29, I published a piece here recording fourteen clear factual errors in that story.  I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared at Time Magazine as its cover story, and ever since I have been crusading to embarrass them into a correction.

But what is also embarrassing is that other media outlets have treated Mr. Stengel as though he was an expert on the Constitution.  Consider, for example, this blurp for a show on NPR entitled “Talk of the Nation” that aired on July 4:

In the fierce debates over health care, Libya, debt, gay marriage and other issues, Americans have been getting a lecture on the meaning of the Constitution and the intentions of its authors. Andrea Seabrook speaks with Richard Stengel of Time magazine and Yale law professor Akhil Amar about the political divide over the Constitution and how an 18th-century document applies in a 21st-century world. [emphasis added]

Now, I may not like Professor Amar personally, and I may vehemently disagree with him on many points, but I think it is fair to consider him an expert on the Constitution.

But as the other “expert,” we have Richard Stengel. Really, Andrea Seabrook?  You actually read that article, and thought he was an expert?  Because it is important to stress is that many of these errors are obvious to any lay person.  You don’t need three years of law school to know it is simply incorrect to say “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  You only have to know that there is such a thing as the First Amendment or the Second.  Nor do you need complicated legal instruction to know that it is incorrect to say that the Constitution is not law—most people learn in elementary school that the Constitution is the supreme law of this land.  And one doesn’t need a particularly deep understanding of the Constitution to become concerned when they see Stengel declare that “[i]n drafting the 14th Amendment, Congress … wanted to emancipate blacks and allow them to vote.”  I consider it fairly common knowledge that it was actually the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery, and the Fifteenth that outlawed racial discrimination in the franchise.  These errors should have been obvious to anyone reading Stengel’s piece, and utterly undermined any claim he could make to be an expert.

A reasonable radio host, doing due diligence, would have realized that they only had two options with Mr. Stengel.  She could either grill him about the serial inaccuracies in his article.  Or, she could drop him as a guest entirely and find a true expert on the Constitution to replace him.

And while they were at it, they could have added a conservative expert on the Constitution to balance the debate.

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About a week ago I published a post at Big Journalism outlining fourteen clear factual errors in Richard Stengel’s essay on the Constitution.

I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared in Time magazine, a once-respected publication.  For instance, in the article he stated remarkably that “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  I have dubbed this scandal “Stengel-gate.”

I also considered it scandalous because of who the author, Richard Stengel, is:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

It has been about a week and the story has even appeared on Fox News.  And yet there is apparently no correction, no retraction of the story, or even a defense of it.

So frankly in an effort to keep the heat on, I decided to explore the other end of the scandal: what on earth was he doing working at something called the National Constitution Center? I plan to spend several days discussing that issue and to kick it off, I decided to write a letter to its current President and CEO, the man holding the position that Richard Stengel once occupied: David Eisner.

So on Tuesday night, I wrote to him directly.  You can see the letter I wrote below the fold.

I do not know if he will respond or how he will respond. But whatever his reaction is, even a non-response, will reflect on him and his organization.  And that in and of itself is noteworthy.

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On Wednesday, I introduced you to a scandal I have taken to calling “Stengel-gate” in a piece called “Fourteen Clear Factual Errors in Richard Stengel’s Essay on the Constitution (And I Am Looking for Your Help).”  In it, I showed that Time’s cover story …

… contained so many egregious errors as to constitute a journalistic scandal.  If you are new to this story, that may sound like hyperbole, but consider this line, from Mr. Stengel’s piece:

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.

I have counted thirteen other errors that are nearly as egregious as this one in that piece, by a man who helps other journalists learn about the Constitution.  Yes, really.

So I have been pushing this story for over a week, seeking at the very least a major (and embarrassing) correction, and I was very gratified Thursday when I woke up to see this on Fox and Friends:

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On June 23, 2011, Time magazine published an essay entitled “One Document, Under Siege” (one page version, here) by Richard Stengel.  I consider the publication of this article to be nothing less than a scandal.  Besides the deep philosophical disagreements I have with Mr. Stengel, the piece simply fails as journalism.  As I will demonstrate in this post, there were fourteen objectively verifiable errors in Mr. Stengel’s piece, half of which could have been discovered simply by reading the Constitution itself.

I will lay out all of the false claims and evidence in a moment, but let me preview the most egregious error in the article, when Mr. Stengel wrote this:

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.

As one commenter wrote: “I had to read it twice to believe my eyes. Time really did say this.”  And while I will prove definitively in a moment that he is wrong, I suspect every single person reading this knows it already.

The fact that this and thirteen other egregious errors appeared in Time at all is bad enough.  But further, it was a cover story:

And look at the top left corner.  This is their history issue.

It is also scandalous because of who wrote the piece.  The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

So I will present to you fourteen clear errors Mr. Stengel has made in his article, starting with the most egregious errors.  Here are the fourteen errors, in short:

The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.

The Constitution is not law.

The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment emancipated the slaves.

The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African Americans.

The original Constitution declared that black people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.

The original, unamended Constitution prohibited women from voting.

The Commerce Clause grants Congress the power to tax individuals based on whether they buy a product or service.

Inter arma enim silent leges translates as “in time of war, the Constitution is silent.”

The War Powers Act allows the president to unilaterally wage war for sixty days.

We have only declared war five times.

Alexander Hamilton wanted a king for America.

Social Security is a debt within the meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Naturalization depends on your birth.

The Obamacare mandate is a tax.

When I am done with this post, I am going to make a bleg where I ask you to try to help get out the word about this egregiously incorrect cover story.  So stay tuned to the end (or jump ahead if you feel like it).

But first here, point-by-point, is proof that each one of those claims are incorrect.

False Claim #1: The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Michael Watson and Val Jensen II:

Richard Stengel’s take on the U.S. Constitution tries to dispel the tea party movement’s claims that certain recent policies under the Obama administration are unconstitutional. The main argument is set out when Stengel, the managing editor of TIME, states:

“Originalists contend that the Constitution has a clear, fixed meaning. But the framers argued vehemently about its meaning. For them, it was a set of principles, not a code of laws. A code of laws says you have to stop at the red light; a constitution has broad principles that are unchanging but that must accommodate each new generation and circumstance.”

With this premise, Stengel tries to show that some of President Obama’s controversial initiatives are actually in line with the “spirit of liberty,” and since the Constitution should mainly be a “promissory note, one in which ‘We the People’ in each generation try to create that more perfect union,” then these initiatives align perfectly well with the Constitution. Do they, or is this just his spin?

Stengel first spins for President Obama’s “military action” against Libya. Claiming that “No President wants to have his powers as Commander in Chief curtailed,” Stengel dismisses then-Senator Obama’s argument that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Stengel also conflates general Congressional authorization for war-making with the technical declaration of war. Stengel is correct that Congress has not declared war since 1941 even as the United States has engaged in many military conflicts. However, as Charles Krauthammer notes, there is clearly intent in the Constitution for Congress to be consulted and the disappearance of the declaration of war from international law should not excuse the President from consulting Congress before making a war of choice.

Stengel asks, “Do Americans really want to let Congress have the sole power to commit U.S. forces to action?” This is the wrong question, and the Framers knew it. Congress is not the Commander-in-chief, but rather must be consulted to ensure that wars are nationally supported and in the national interest.

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We are told Fareed Zakaria is an intelligent man, a man of letters and a journalist. With his latest article in TIME, I’m just not seeing it. It is full of contradictions and transparent attacks on conservatives followed by praise for Ye Olde School conservatives, who espoused more or less the same thing as current conservatives.

Zakaria starts by praising the classical conservatives for basing their ideas on reality, as compared to the Marxists as socialists who start from an imagined society. The great conservative thinkers, he goes on, have tried to understand society, accept it and then help it evolve. He’s one hundred percent correct.

This is the point at which he begins to go wrong. His main claim is that conservatives have moved from the concrete to the abstract and he laments this supposed shift. His first attack is on the idea that Americans are over taxed. While it can be argued that America has a relatively low INDIVIDUAL tax rate as compared to other industrialized nations, he doesn’t take into effect two main points. If one includes State taxes, for those states that levy these as well as other taxes, the mean tax rate on Americans is approximately 40%. More importantly the CORPORATE tax rate on American businesses is the second highest amongst OECD nations, also at about 40%. Zakaria goes out his way to point to Germany as a country that has high taxes while avoiding the same financial issues that we see in the US. That is a debatable issue, one that balances on Germany’s role in the European Union and its control of the Euro, but one thing that the article leaves out is that, in 2008, Germany cut its corporate income tax rate by 8.7%, putting it as one of the countries with the LOWEST corporate income tax rates.

The next straw man Zakaria tries to build is in finding another President who has been as hostile to business as Obama. Yes, Nixon was not a conservative when it came to business. Yes, Nixon presided over 70% tax rates and price controls, but nobody can say that Nixon took every opportunity to bash business, increase the regulatory state exponentially or create such a wide swath of uncertainty in the business markets.

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So in case you haven’t heard, Jon Stewart was on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend and he spent a lot of time asserting to Chris Wallace that his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show” doesn’t have a political agenda.  He claimed that he has no desire to be a player in politics and that his show isn’t political commentary … it’s just comedy “informed by an ideological background.”

While walking that fine line, Stewart also insisted that the MSM isn’t politically biased,  they just trend toward “sensationalism and laziness.”  Inherent in that statement is the belief that one couldn’t be sensationalistic, lazy, and biased.  Thing is, bullies often are lazy, sensationalistic, and biased … it’s the nature of the beast.  But I digress.

As Stewart attempted to explain how the MSM isn’t politically biased in the face of examples from Wallace, he became visibly frustrated and spat out, “In the polls, who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox. Fox viewers! Consistently!”

Hmmmm.  After the death of Walter Cronkite, a Time poll showed that Stewart was to inherit Cronkite’s coveted title of “America’s Most Trusted Newscaster.”  For the record, 44% of respondents named Stewart, 29% Brian Williams, 19% Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric raked in 7% large.

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Whenever there is an unusual weather pattern, members of the Holy Church of Global Warming Moonbats start spreading new scare-tactics. Usually it sounds something like:

This planet is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament real wrath of God type stuff.  Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!  Forty years of Gilligan’s Island Re-runs! Earthquakes, volcanoes, another Rocky Movie rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, Elliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner living together… mass hysteria!

And just as common is the fact that scientists dispute their contention.  It happened when both Time and Newsweek blamed this spring’s tornado activity on Global Warming (contradicting earlier claims by the Magazines which blamed tornadoes on Global Cooling) and it’s happening now when Salon is blaming the extremely hot temperatures in the American West:

Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.

…Nonetheless, we have been experiencing a historic drought for about a decade in significant parts of the region. As topsoil dries out, microbial dynamics change and native plants either die or move uphill toward cooler temperatures and more moisture. Wildlife that depends on the seeds, nuts, leaves, shade, and shelter follows the plants — if it can.

….Global warming, global weirding, climate change — whatever you prefer to call it — is not just happening in some distant, melting Arctic land out of a storybook. It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.

The seas have warmed, ice caps are melting, and the old reliable ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams are jumping their tracks. The harbingers of a warming planet and the abruptly shifting weather patterns that result vary across the American landscape. Along the vast Mississippi River drainage in the heartland of America, epic floods, like our wildfires in the West, are becoming more frequent. In the Gulf states, it’s monster hurricanes and in the Midwest, swarms of killer tornadoes signal that things have changed. In the East it’s those killer heat waves and record-breaking blizzards.

Gee, they left out the Giligan’s Island runs and the New Rocky movie. Maybe its because what Salon is saying above is totally fraudulent.

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May 14^th. On this day 63 years ago the Modern state of Israel was founded, it is celebrated yearly on the Hebrew date as Yom HaAtzmaut, Independence Day. More recently another name has been attached to it; “Nakba.” Nakba is an Arabic word meaning catastrophe; it was originally coined to describe the splitting of Palestine from Greater Syria by the League of Nations. This formed the Mandate for Palestine as a protest of the description of the Arabs living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as not being part of Syria. It is generally observed by Arabs living in Israel by throwing rocks at passing vehicles and burning things.

This year was slightly different. While it was more of the same in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, there was also a mass movement of people on the Israel’s Northern border. Thousands pushed through the fence on the border with Syria, breaking into the Golan, and many more massed on the Lebanese border as well. The protest march broke into low level violence here and there, and Israeli troops running down various infiltrators shot and killed four of the Syrian invaders. More were killed on the border with Lebanon, but it is unclear who shot them.

TIME magazine has looked upon this somewhat peaceful invasion and has seen the “Arab Spring” writ large. The march was well organized, with workshops and training, by Israeli Arabs using Facebook and other social media. To the eyes of the people at TIME this connects it directly to the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

There are, of course, a few minor differences, but I will concede that some of the goals are the same. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria all saw internal protests against stagnation and ongoing human rights abuses by minority autocratic dictatorships. All of which were met with vicious repression. The one thread that has been seen repeatedly in many of these uprisings is a promise to “deal with” Israel when they’ve dealt with their own country first.

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Like all too many Americans TIME Magazine proves that it doesn’t know what is worth celebrating, noting, or memorializing in this world. Time doesn’t know what “important” means, it doesn’t know what “influential” means, it doesn’t even know what “top” means. And it has proven this again with its latest “2011 TIME 100 most influential people in the world.”

Let me just ask this: why is TV actress and comedienne Amy Poehler on a list of the “most influential people in the world”? It is idiotic. Actor Colin Firth is also on the list.

Another actress, Blake Lively, a B-list actress at best, is on the list. Unbelievable. TIME has so little to say of this “most influential person” that barely a paragraph was offered about her. How influential can you be if your whole life can be summed up in a mere 65 words?

Mark Wahlberg is there? Yeah, the one-dimensional actor Mark Wahlberg is on this list for some crazy reason. Why? Who the heck knows?

Singer/songwriter Patti Smith is on the list, too. Evidently TIME thinks she’s still big stuff. What has she done since the 1970s again? One would be excused for imagining that she died 20 years ago she’s so disappeared from the greater cultural attention span.

Also on this absurd list is — and this should make anyone laugh out loud — MSNBC’s faux conservative Joe Scarborough.

Let’s take a look at the guffaw worthy addition of low-rated TV talker Scarborough, he of the extremist left-wing cabler MSNBC. Joe’s presence on this list is inexplicable, not just because he is a TV talking head but because he is one of TV’s lowest rated talking heads.

Now, being a TV (or radio) talking head does not disqualify someone for inclusion on such a list, exactly. For good or ill, being a major media figure most certainly can lead to wielding great influence. Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly are examples of current commentators that have quite a bit of influence. In his day so did Walter Cronkite. Even someone like Father Coughlin (for worse) during WWII days on radio or Edward R. Murrow (mostly not for worse) were highly influential TV/Radio folks of their day that were worthy for inclusion in such a list.

However, Joe Scarborough is not anywhere near as influential or successful as any of those I mentioned above. It is flat out ridiculous to call Joe Scarborough one of the world’s most influential people. It’s pure fantasy.

Listen, these people I just mentioned are fine people. Successful at their work, known well enough by people, sure. But does “acting” and being a TV talking head make a person one of the world’s most influential people? It is idiotic to say so.

It isn’t just the hollow actors, aging singers, and TV personalities that don’t belong on this list, either. Injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords is also on the list. Why? It’s hard to fathom.

Gabrielle Giffords has a compelling story, of course, but to the greater world she is known for nothing but being the victim of a crime. Before being shot she was a virtually unknown Congresswoman. Since her shooting she has yet to do anything especially noteworthy due to her necessary rehabilitation. Further, we have no real idea how that is progressing so we don’t even have her example as something that can inspire us. Maybe she will inspire us someday. I hope she does. But as of right now she is not a “most influential person.” As much as we feel for her and are pulling for her recovery she simply isn’t a major world figure.

There are all sorts of people on this list that don’t belong on a list as vaunted as the 100 most influential people of the world. Take Amy Chua, for instance. She wrote the controversial memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Yes her book is very interesting and yes she has gained a bit more than her allotted 15 minutes of fame. But as worthy as her book is, a most influential person of the world she is not.

Do these people deserve to be better known? I don’t know. I guess so. Why not? But are they worthy of being included in a list of the most influential people in the whole wide world? Nope. Not at all.

Anyway, you can look this list over and find all sorts of people that do not belong on it. It shows that TIME Magazine hasn’t a clue what “influential” really means. It shows how facile the thinking of this Old Media staple really is.

In another example of a sort-of cultural suicide where western media types assume that all Muslims are blameless – while all Americans are at fault in this clash of civilizations between Islamism and the West – we have a recent episode of MSNBC’s Hardball with one-time Democratic operative Chuck Todd standing-in for host Chris Matthews.

Todd was discussing the riots in Afghanistan sparked by Islamist ire over the burning of a Koran by a Florida pastor. During the interview Todd and a guest stated that the Christian Bible was just a book written by men while the Koran was the “direct word of God.” The two implied that this excuses Muslims from murdering people over the book burning.

In the segment Time Magazine’s World Editor Bobby Ghosh told Chuck Todd that the riots and murders perpetrated by Muslims in Afghanistan were obviously understandable because the Koran is apparently more holy than the Christian Bible. Ghosh averred that it’s important to “keep in mind” that the Koran is “not the same as the Bible to Christians.” Why, you might ask? Why it’s because the Koran is “directly the word of God.” On the other hand, the Bible is just a book “written by men.”

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Sometime around 10:30 in the evening on Friday terrorists entered the house in the Israeli community of Itamar. When they entered the home of the Fogel family through the living room picture window, they did not notice 6-year-old Roi sleeping on the couch. They went right into the bedroom where they slashed the throats of Udi Fogel and baby Hadas who were asleep. Wife and mother Ruth came out of the bathroom and was stabbed on its threshold. The evidence shows that she tried to fight the terrorists. The terrorists then slashed the throat of the 11-year-old Yoav who was reading in bed, missed 2-year old Yishai who was asleep but totally covered by his comforter, and brutally murdered 3-year old Elad with two stabs to his heart. With that, they locked the door and escaped.

The Fogel’s 12-year-old daughter Tamar, returned home from spending Shabbos dinner with friends at about 12:30AM and found the door locked. She asked a neighbor, Rabbi Yaakov Cohen, of the Itamar Yeshiva, to help her. He brought a weapon with him once he noticed tracks and mud near the house. The two woke up the 6-year old sleeping in the living room by calling through the window and when he opened the door, the Rabbi returned to his home. When she entered the bedrooms, the young daughter saw the horrific blood-soaked scene and ran out of the house screaming.

A statement released by the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades took responsibility for the killings, describing the slaughter of the Fogel family as a “natural response” to “Israeli crimes.” The Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades is part of Fatah which is run by Palestinian Authority President Abbas. In other words it was an official act of the Palestinian Authority.

In covering the massacre of the Fogel family, the media did its best to make the Fogel family appear as something less than human, and to give the murderers cover.

CNN refused to label the murder as an act of terrorism by the Palestinians, desipte the fact that the IDF had already called it an act of Palestinian Terror.

The CNN report stated:

“Five members of an Israeli family were killed in the West Bank early Saturday morning in what the Israeli military is calling a ‘terror attack.’”
The report went on to say: “According to a military spokeswoman, an intruder entered the Israeli settlement of Itamar near the northern West Bank city of Nablus around 1 am, made his way into a family home and killed two parents and their three children.”

The IDF’s official statement had already noted that forces were searching for a “terrorist” and not an “intruder” as CNN reported. But that didn’t matter to CNN who wanted to give their cleansed version of what happened. The terrorist was also referred to as an “assailant” later in the CNN report.

The BBC was just as bad, although they did identify the murderer as Palestinian.

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