A young woman’s mother dies recently, and a few weeks later, suffering from severe depression, she herself dies, falling off a cliff in California in an apparent suicide. In the old days of responsible journalism, publications didn’t report suicides unless they were of high-profile people. So why was this apparent suicide worth of coverage on the leftist snarksite called Gawker?

The woman just happened once to work for the Fox News Channel:

Julianna Rolle, a 39 year-old former Fox News producer, was found dead at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff last weekend in her hometown of Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Authorities now say she jumped to her death…

Rolle’s father said that she had joined Fox News in New York as a producer after graduating from UCLA, and “traveled through Europe and worked as a bureau chief in Iraq, covering the war.” We can’t find any further information about her employment online, however. We’ve emailed Fox News for confirmation and we’ll update if we hear more.

While many of Gawker’s readers displayed the appropriate sentiments, some of the tolerant, compassionate liberals predictably showed their true colors, which was probably the whole point of publishing the obit in the first place.

Dear other Fox News employees: Julianna Rolle is a shining example for you all.
— scarletmenace

There’s more: (more…)

This is the kind of story that might be expected to draw a journalist’s attention, for it has the kind of elements that should outrage the average reader: a commander playing politics with the military, troops called upon to execute a mission they had neither expected nor been trained for, and subsequent accusations that heavy casualties might have been avoided, but for politically-motivated shell games.

The commander in question is the commander-in-chief, who has made it the policy of his administration to reduce troop deployments in the “bad war” (Iraq) while increasing the number of boots on the ground to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. While the President has followed through on the latter, the former has yet to happen in any substantive way and our troops have paid the price for this political sleight of hand.

On February 17, 2009, the Defense Department announced, to great fanfare, that it was deploying an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, including the 5^th Stryker Brigade, 2^nd Infantry Division. The problem with that, which would soon become evident when the 5^th Stryker entered combat, is that the Brigade was trained to fight one kind of war and then, apparently for the sake of political expediency, deployed to fight quite another.

One of the 5^th Stryker’s units, the 1^st Battalion, 17^th Infantry Regiment (1-17) has been particularly hard hit since arriving in Afghanistan last fall, suffering twenty-one combat deaths in one battle in the Arghandab district alone. One of the battalion’s company commanders, Capt. Joel Kassulke was replaced after that action, a move that angered some of the Captain’s troops, according to this Army Times article. The problem, some soldiers said, was not their commander, but mismatched training: (more…)