Representatives from Mr. Pyle, President of the Institute for Energy Research, recently reached out to me in an effort to set the record straight on natural gas extraction. Recently, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed that was chockfull of scare tactics, false analysis, and misrepresentations about the science and methods behind natural gas extractions. In fact, the op-ed was so misleading it caught the attention of Mr. Pyle himself. Big Journalism is where he turned to help set the record straight.
Consider these bullets before reading the rebuttal by Mr. Pyle.
A current estimate of natural gas in America is 2,047 trillion cubic feet (enough to power our nation for the next 100 years).
Congressional Research Service claimed that America’s supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal is the largest on the planet.
On Monday, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post each published opinion articles attacking President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
Obama and Venezuela;s Hugo Chavez. (Photo source: Huffington Post)
The LAT article, by former Dick Cheney adviser John Hannah, was entitled: “The U.S.: MIA in the Mideast.” It makes the case that despite Obama’s success in the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, overall his foreign policy of “retreat” has destabilized the region:
In private conversations I’ve had with Middle Eastern officials, the sense of unease and dread expressed are only more severe. Fairly or not, these leaders appear to have taken Obama’s measure and found him wanting. Their bill of indictment includes retreat from Iraq and, soon, Afghanistan; betrayal of longtime U.S. allies, especially Mubarak; indulgence of enemy regimes in Tehran and Damascus; overblown promises to end the Palestinian conflict; and a persistent failure to mount the type of credible military option that these leaders believe is necessary for addressing the region’s most urgent threat — Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
The hardening conviction that the U.S. is disengaging from the Middle East should be cause for real concern.
Hannah also attacks “the administration’s lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region’s security.” He notes that a perception of U.S. weakness is “one that left unchecked will breed uncertainty, instability and even war.”
The Washington Post article, by columnist Jackson Diehl, declares: “Obama’s foreign initiatives have failed.” Like Hannah, Diehl questions the conventional political wisdom, which sees foreign policy as a strong card for Obama to play in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death. (more…)
In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times,Aaron David Miller admits the obvious: “Unlike his two predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.”
But Miller doesn’t address Barack Obama’s immersion in the anti-Israel, antisemitic views of his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, in whose Trinity United Church of Christ Obama worshipped for two decades.
The Obamas with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, 1998 (Source: Electronic Intifada)
Instead, Miller cites Obama’s “logical,” “intellectual” and “moral” approach to Israel–as opposed to the “emotional” approach of previous occupants of the White House, whose views were allegedly informed by simplistic faith and fables:
Obama’s views came from another place: his own logic, the university environment in which he developed intellectually and his own moral sensibilities. And according to this view, the Arab-Israeli dispute isn’t some kind of morality play that pits the forces of good against the forces of darkness. Instead, it’s a more complex tale, not of heroes and villains but of a conflict between two rights and two just causes. It’s also a conflict that is vital to American interests. And those interests are being threatened by the divide between those who want a solution and are serious about moving toward one, and those who aren’t serious about finding a solution and throw up obstacles. After three years, the president has clearly placed the Israelis in the latter category and the Palestinians in the former.
Miller adds that the sour relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a result of Obama’s allegedly “intellectual” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He seems to forget that it was Netanyahu who famously gave Obama an “intellectual” lesson in the history of the conflict and Israel’s borders in May 2011:
The truth is that Obama’s antipathy towards Israel is rooted in a passionate, radical left-wing ideology that thrives in both the academic cloisters and the radical pulpits that gave Obama his political inspiration and foundation. And the Los AngelesTimes knows it, for it is in possession of a key piece of historical evidence: the “Rashid Khalidi tape.” (more…)
- Chris Moody says that Trump sent him a critique of his piece, linked above:
If this is really his, and Moody has a great poker face, Donald Trump really puts a circle as the dot for his exclamation points? Call him a trainwreck all you want to, but I love that he did this (if he did. I want to so badly believe).
… while this guy is coming from the Jewish perspective, he is more crucially coming from a liberal perspective, and he’s been taught, as many liberals have been, that Hatred is a powerful and useful weapon, and can be righteously wielded against the Unworthy.
[...]
… the idea of a new age of pogrom based upon the Tim Tebow throwing a football seems to be a reactionary one, conceived in hatred, executed in bitterness.
- Whoa: Russian blogger harnessing opposition to Putin is emerging as the opposition leader. Ew: He has a dark side. How dark? Think Russian nationalism and neo-Nazism.
The end of occupy Occupy Wall Street is nigh. The movement’s collapsed under the weight of its own nihilism, narcissism, and depravity; it’s broken into 360 bitter, little pieces that not even all of Obama’s MSM horses can put back together again.
Even the left-wing city of Los Angeles has had their fill of the literal and figurative stench of Occupy, and as though to prove their point, this joke was published Sunday:
Occupied Los Angeles Times, the latest in a series of newspapers from the Occupy movement, put out its first issue this past Sunday. It’s only Tuesday, but the paper might as well be weeks behind in terms of the news value of its content. None of the stories address the movement’s impending eviction from the park outside LA City Hall. Instead of breaking news from within the movement, the paper is essentially a primer for the uninitiated. Its stories debunk the notion that Occupy lacks coherent demands–noting that the reimplementation of Glass-Steagall, for instance, is a universal demand of all Occupy encampments.
Oh, so Occupy doesn’t lack a coherent message cuz Glass-Stegall and, uhm, public defecation and rape… yeah.
Some of my friends criticize me because they believe I am too hard on President Obama. They say they can’t believe that there is not one of his policies which I support wholeheartedly. Even a broken clock is right two times a day, they say; isn’t there one policy to which you can urge “let’s help Obama on this one”? And I would reach down to the bottom of my soul and really try to come up with something, but I always failed … until today. I have finally found something we should all help Obama implement. He doesn’t like talking to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu all the time; all of America should be behind our President insuring that he doesn’t have to talk to Bibi every day.
During the G20 meetings, President Barack Obama and French President Sarkozy got caught talking in front of a hot mic.
The conversation began with President Obama criticizing Sarkozy for not having warned him that France would be voting in favor of the Palestinian membership bid in UNESCO despite Washington’s strong objection to the move. But then the two got personal:
“I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama. The POTUS replied: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day!”
Nothing leads to good political pundit material like pair of catty politicians speaking candidly an without realization that they’re in front of an open mic. In true Los Angeles Times fashion, the “journalists” in the room agreed not to report the comments (remember during the 2008 campaign the Los Angeles Times withheld a potentially damaging video tape of Barack Obama toasting his friend and former PLO press spokesman Rashid Khalidi). Then all of the reporters in the room signed a pledge to withhold the damaging information (although there is no truth to the rumor that Abe Foxman of the ADL insisted on the written pledge).
What happened next is what usually happens in cases like this. (more…)
To understand if a person or group is on the left or the right, look no further than what outrages them. If you’re offended by how much tax revenue is squandered year after year, you’re probably on the right; if you are ticked off at the “rich” for not paying their “fair share,” you lean left. If you have a strong urge to kill or capture evildoers around the world, you’re likely conservative; but if you’re irate that detainees might be water-boarded, safe money is you’re lefty. If you drive home in your Toyota Prius to pop a Big Pharma-produced Lexapro that gives you just enough vitality to take your ungrateful kids to the Starbucks for a Java Chip Frappuccino®… only to lecture them on the evils of the corporations once you get there, there’s a good chance you’re left-wing. But if you love capitalism… you get my point.
What inspires your ire tips your hand–politically speaking–and a sanctimonious editorial on Tracy Morgan in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times tells you all you need to know about the staff of SoCal’s leading paper.
For those of you who dropped out of society for the past week, the synopsis is that during a stand-up comedy routine in Nashville, Morgan, of “SNL” and “30 Rock” fame, joked that he would stab his son if he used a “gay voice.” Word got out and all hell broke loose. The twitterverse was outraged, celebrities clamored to condemn the comment, and Morgan eventually delivered the obligatory pandering over-apology replete with a commitment to partner with America’s most ironically named advocacy organization: GLAAD.
The story is a social justice cliché.
The courageous editors at the Los Angeles Times joined the fray yesterday, unloading a bold editorial stating Morgan had crossed the line: (more…)
At The Corner the other morning, Andy McCarthy points out the LA Times’ “mainstreaming of the Muslim Brotherhood” by providing a forum for Mousa Abu Marzook—at one time the most senior Hamas operative living in the US:
This was akin to giving equal time to the director of the FBI and the head of Cosa Nostra. Marzook is the most important Muslim Brotherhood operative ever stationed in the U.S. I discuss him in some detail in The Grand Jihad. During his 14 years here, which ended when he was deported in 1994, he actually ran Hamas (the terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) from his home in Virginia.
Mousa Abu Marzook
This was in the early 90s, during the Intifada. He also had a hand in the establishment of many of the Islamist organizations with which we are familiar today. The Islamist infrastructure he helped build here was the foundation of the Justice Department’s successful terrorism financing prosecution against the Holy Land Foundation for funneling millions of dollars to Palestinian terrorists.
Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”
In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.
Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.
To make his point, Rutten proves himself keen on unduly enlarging the supposed attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion from both today and in his earlier run for the White House. While there were attacks on Romney for his religion in 2008, those attacks were relatively minor and never really made much headway against his candidacy.
Certainly there are many thousands of Christians that don’t think Mormonism is a Christian religion. I believe that it is a correct assessment, too. But so what? Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not has nothing whatever to do with Mitt Romney’s suitability for becoming president of the United States. Only a small minority of Republican voters hold Romney’s Mormonism against him. I’d guess that number would dwindle to even less should Mitt become the GOP nominee, too. (more…)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s gave a speech to the Knesset yesterday, seen by many as a precursor to his Congressional address next week. The PM outlined his parameters for a peace plan with the Palestinians. However, if you went by the press reports you would think that peace was the last thing on Netanyahu’s mind.
The AP story carried by most US papers said, “Israel’s Netanyahu takes tough line toward Palestinians, Hamas ahead of trip to White House.” The NY Times called it “hawkish.” Both sources reflect their bias against Israel in general and more specifically Netanyahu, who they see as a right-winger (and you know how the mainstream media feels about right-wingers). The Wall Street Journal called the speech a “stark assessment,” and the Los Angeles Times piled on with
In a speech Monday before Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, that some saw as a preview of his planned May 24 address before the U.S. Congress, Netanyahu offered no new peace initiative and faulted Palestinians for the collapse of U.S.-mediated talks.
Wow, you would have thought, Netenyahu came out in a Patton costume, stood in front of a giant Israeli Flag and opened with something such as:
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
The truth is if they fairly reported the Prime Minister’s words, they would have reported that not only were they reasonable, but they included more concessions than the supposedly moderate Palestinian President Abbas had ever offered to Israel.
About three miles south of Beverly Hills in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Beverlywood is Hamilton High School. An otherwise ordinary Los Angeles Unified School District-sponsored juvenile detention center, Hamilton is home to a couple of well regarded magnet programs, particularly the Academy of Music Magnet. The Music Magnet is the old stomping grounds of pop stars, Broadway talent, and even Hollywood A-listers who were drawn to a public school program that has a focus on the arts. Yet, even this rare LAUSD high school that students actually want to attend has become a casualty of the horrendous budget crises in the state of California.
Reporter Steve Lopez was dispatched to the scene to write up the various cutbacks for the Los Angeles Times. Lopez is known for being the journalist whose articles on a schizophrenic musician inspired the Robert Downey Jr./Jaime Foxx film The Soloist. Then all of a sudden, what had the makings of a compelling human interest piece on one of the handful of quintessentially Hollywood high schools quickly devolved into a sob story about how these poor teachers and students have been victimized by the dastardly Republicans and their resistance to tax hikes.
How did he do this?
First, Lopez paints a rosy picture of the school by glowingly describing a performance by the jazz band and cherry-picking quotes raving about teachers; his portrayal of Hamilton is a lot like Sean Penn’s depiction of Iraq in Team America:
As it happens, Hamilton is my local high school and I have family and friends who have graduated from the Music Magnet in recent years. To put it bluntly, many of their experiences didn’t resemble the mythical land of incredible teachers and students anxious to learn that Lopez describes. An anonymous Hamilton graduate told me she recalls students doing cocaine in the state-of the art auditorium (which was overhauled with a lavish grant to the Music Magnet)—in fact, the source recalled students showing up to class on an assortment of drugs. Faculty members were seen “celebrating” with students at cast parties after plays.
And I thought programs like these were meant to keep kids off drugs. (more…)
Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels resigned Friday, pressured by tales of raunchy behavior that likened him to the ringleader of a college fraternity house.
Michaels’ decision to leave comes at a pivotal time for the troubled media company. After nearly two years operating under bankruptcy protection, Tribune Co. is drawing up a reorganization plan that it hopes to get approved by a federal judge before the end of the year.
A four-man executive committee will fill the void created by Michaels’ departure. The new bosses are Don Liebentritt, Tribune Co.’s chief restructuring officer; Nils Larsen, chief investment officer; Tony Hunter, publisher of the Chicago Tribune; and Eddy Hartenstein, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
The Tribune and the Times are the largest newspapers owned by the company, whose holdings also include more than 20 television and radio stations. (more…)
UPDATE: At 6:22pm, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “An associate of Jerry Brown calls Meg Whitman a “whore” over pension reform (AUDIO).’” At 10:58 PM, the Times published another article with the headline “Brown or Aide Is Heard Slurring Whitman.” When the Times first broke the story, they had only reported that a Brown “associate” had used the slur, but now they are acknowledging the possibility that it was Brown himself who called the California GOP’s gubernatorial nominee a “whore.” A third possibility still is that both Brown and an aide used the offensive language to describe Whitman.
A transcript of the conversation authorized by the LA Police Protective League and transcribed by a registered court reporter identifies the voice that said the word “whore” as “J.B.” for Jerry Brown.
***
A lesson in why you should always double-check that your phone is properly hung up before participating in a conversation wherein your rival is called a “whore.”
In an epic fit of frustration, Jerry Brown – and/or an aide with the Brown campaign, as the Los Angeles Times is asserting – is heard calling Republican challenger Meg Whitman a “whore” on a voicemail left for Scott Rate, a union official associated with the Los Angeles Police Protective League. Brown is upset that Whitman is scoring more police endorsements than he.
Brown campaign spokesman Sterling Clifford, confirming the tape’s authenticity, said that Brown was responding to the notion of accusing Whitman of cutting a deal to gain endorsements, not to the use of the word “whore.” The campaign was trying to determine the identity of the second speaker, he added.
The exchange starts at the 1:50 mark.
It’s unclear whether or not the LA Times decided that it was an associate before calling Clifford, or whether it was Clifford who suggested that it was a campaign associate, rather than Brown, who made the remark. What we do know is that the LA Times went straight to the Brown camp for their narrative and at the time of this writing have made no effort to contact the Whitman campaign for a response. The voice in question has yet to be identified. (more…)
The command center of Andrew Breitbart’s growing media empire is a suite of offices on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles with the temporary feel of a campaign office. Only the computers seem firmly anchored.
On a recent summer day, just weeks after he posted video clips that touched off a national furor over race, Breitbart was swigging a bottled Frappuccino at his desk. In a Lacoste shirt, cargo shorts and laceless Converse All-Stars, he looked every bit the 41-year-old industry player he might have been, but for a political awakening that transformed this liberal, West Side child of privilege into a Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative.
Breitbart, who has emerged as a star of the “tea party” movement, loves telling his apostate’s tale in the italicized, frequently profane manner that is his trademark. Three epiphanies stand out: (more…)
The unshackling of the MSM — and, to a lesser extent, their erstwhile brethren in the Democratic Party — from the clutches of the nation’s teachers’ unions continues apace.
In defiance of what must have been intense pressure from organized labor and the Los Angeles education establishment, the Los Angeles Times just published an incredible series of stories on the effectiveness of the city’s 6,000 teachers.
The Times, which over the years hasn’t exactly been a great friend of conservatives, has shown tremendous bravery in going forward with this package, which juxtaposes students’ performances on standardized tests with the teachers in their classrooms. The paper calls it a “value-added analysis.”
Among other things, the study found that:
After a single year with teachers who ranked in the top 10% in effectiveness, students scored an average of 17 percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in math than students whose teachers ranked in the bottom 10%. Students often backslid significantly in the classrooms of ineffective teachers, and thousands of students in the study had two or more ineffective teachers in a row.
Predictably, L.A teachers’ union boss A.J. Duffy has called for a “massive boycott” of the Times because the data and the stories might be “leading people in a dangerous direction.” (more…)
In the greatest party-affiliation cover-up since the media tried to portray Gary Condit as a Republican, the media are refusing to mention the party affiliation of the thieving government officials in Bell, Calif.
There have been hundreds of news stories about Bell city officials’ jaw-dropping salaries. In this poor city on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the per capita annual income is $24,800 a year, the city manager, Robert Rizzo, had a salary of $787,637.
That’s about twice what the president of the United States makes. (To be fair, Rizzo was doing a better job.)
Rizzo was the highest-paid government employee in the entire country, not counting Maxine Waters’ husband — pending further revelations. With benefits, his total annual compensation, according to the Los Angeles Times, came to $1.5 million a year. (more…)
The L.A. Times’s James Rainey predictably seizes on the Sherrod story, in a futile attempt to rehabilitate his reputation after his mishandling of the ACORN story last year. If I told you that Rainey’s attempt at column is highly dishonest, would you be surprised?
Rainey first deceptively suggests that Ann Coulter has labeled Breitbart a fraudster:
But certain media outlets have played the story and the political ramifications for the Obama administration (and there are questions to be answered) as if they sprang out of the ether. There’s a continuing rush to talk about effect, and very little desire to talk about cause — the steaming pile of misinformation delivered on a platter by one individual with a giant ax to grind.
Andrew Breitbart, the conservative agitator behind websites like Breitbart.com and BigGovernment.com, likes it this way. Stirring the pot, gobbling up chunks of cable television time, doing whatever it takes to further his political beliefs, even if it means putting one woman’s reputation through a meat grinder.
The severely edited video posted on Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com shows Sherrod, who is black, telling an NAACP gathering in March that she had once scrimped on assistance to a white man in danger of losing his farm. Not included in the video posting was the bulk of Sherrod’s talk, in which she recognized the error of her ways a quarter of a century ago and helped the white man, saving his farm. As a result, the farm advocate and the white family formed a lasting friendship.
Breitbart headlined the video as “proof” that “the NAACP awards racism,” when in fact it showed one woman trying to teach a lesson about the shortcomings of racial discrimination.
Conservatives including David Frum and Ann Coulter have acknowledged that the video Breitbart posted is a fraud. But Frum, a former speechwriter in the Bush White House, wrote that he has seen this act too many times to expect Breitbart to apologize for “distributing a doctored tape to defame and destroy someone.”
Reading that passage, any reader would naturally conclude that Coulter has said Breitbart knowingly posted a deceptively altered video. But it turns out Coulter said nothing of the sort. Instead, she has proclaimed Breitbart innocent of fraudulent intent, opining that Breitbart was set up (a notion that Breitbart himself has dismissed): (more…)
In a report published on July 21, 2010, the Los Angeles Times incorrectly claimed that an article that I wrote on an August 10, 2009 National Endowment for the Arts conference call was somehow “misleading” and advanced by using a “fragmentary” portion of the conference call.
The Los Angeles Times should make it clear that the White House did not react to my article until AFTER the ENTIRE transcript and audio of the conference call was released. Only after reviewing the ENTIRE transcript and audio did the White House react by conducting new training sessions and issuing a memorandum containing new conduct guidelines for grant making agencies to prevent such a call, as reported by ABC News, “from ever happening again.”
Only after the ENTIRE transcript and audio was released, not a “fragmentary” portion, did the NEA official involved in the conference call fully resign from the agency and the chairman of the NEA issue a statement admitting that some of the comments made during the conference call were “unfortunately, not appropriate.” Also after the entire audio was released, the NEA submitted to a congressional inquiry new actions that it was taking to strengthen its ethics training. (more…)
Columbia University is the place where leftists give leftist journalists Pulitzer Prizes and then tell each other how prestigious leftist journalism is because—wow!—look at all the Pulitzers they’ve won.
This week, the president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, wrote a specious opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, crying that American journalism, dying in the free market, needs to be bailed out by government support.
Katie Couric Lip-Synching Foreground While Leftism Sings Behind.
Two memories come to mind from my years in England during the nineties:
In the first, recovering from an operation, I’m watching television and trying not to bust my stitches laughing at an hilarious sketch by young comedians Hugh Laurie (now TV’s House) and Stephen Frye. In a send-up of It’s A Wonderful Life, Frye’s angel is showing Laurie’s villainous Rupert Murdoch what the world would be like if he’d never been born: a virtual paradise!
And again, I’m watching TV. Innovative writer Dennis Potter, dying of pancreatic cancer, gives a final interview to presenter Melvyn Bragg. As Bragg chuckles amiably, Potter declares he has named his cancer after Murdoch and that he would use his last days on earth to “shoot the bugger if I could.” (more…)
When the employees of the Los Angeles Times go home at night, I wonder if they ever think about the travesty that they are contributing to on a daily basis. After all, when writers like David Lazarus and Michael Hiltzik first joined the paper, did they consider themselves real journalists? Did they feel that they were reporters in the truest sense of the word?
Because there’s no way they are now, and I have trouble finding other employees of the Times that I would call true journalists.
These days, real journalism is happening at the LA Weekly. This free, alternative newspaper has out-reported the propaganda machine at the LA Times over and over again. Reporters at the Weekly have repeatedly, and properly, hammered Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for gross incompetence. The most recent example was the Weekly’soutstanding exposé on the Mayor’s failure to report over $100,000 in free tickets to various sporting and entertainment events. As the intrepid reporters at the Weekly have shown, there is simply no excuse for what the Mayor has done to Los Angeles. This came on top of the paper’s report that the Mayor spends only 11% of his time actually handling the business of Los Angeles. The Weekly also remains one of the last bastions of true film criticism left in the country, this despite the departure of true film critic extraordinaire Manhola Dargis.
In contrast, we have the “reporters” at the Los Angeles Times.
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
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