Why doesn’t Diane Sawyer spend a night in Zuccotti Park? Why don’t Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews or anyone at MSNBC or CNN spend the night before they go all glassy-eyed with awe and wonder over this “important” movement again. Better yet, if they’re so sure it’s all happy and hippy dippy, maybe they should send their own children for a look-see.

New York Post reporter Candice Giove is sympathetic to some of what the movement stands for and decided to put here money where her mouth is.

Here is her harrowing tale:

(more…)

(more…)

Someone hacked their Twitter.

(more…)

This headline exists:

(more…)

For the past two years the Establishment Media, the White House, the Democratic party, countless pundits, and entertainers have tried to cast the entire tea party as a group of gun-toting, Constitution-thumping, white supremacists. So it should come as no surprise when, minutes after the tragic Giffords shooting in AZ, Paul Krugman, the White House, the Daily Kos, the New York Post, and dozens of other media outlets racially-profiled the the shooter Jared Loughner, and quickly determined that he was a Tea Party member.

White man plus gun plus violence must make him a right-winger.

Of course! He must be a tea partier…he’s white! He used a gun! He mentioned that the Congresswoman betrayed the Constitution! He loves Mein Kampf! Ergo, he’s a tea partier.

(more…)

Good on the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin for batting away the warnings of “Islamaphobia” in the wake of the 911 mosque:

Hate crimes are up 14 percent across the state, but those against Muslims are a tiny fraction. Of the 683 reported to police in 2009, only 11 targeted Muslims. Yes, 11. In 2008, there were eight.

Compare that with the 251 against Jews, or 37 percent of the total. Anti-black crimes were down slightly, to 144, or 21 percent of the total.

The biggest rise was in crimes against gays, from 70 to 107.

Remember those numbers the next time someone, maybe someone in City Hall or the White House, warns against a rising tide of Islamophobia. Use the facts to shut them up.

I hope the White House reads this. There have been more honor killings or other related violence, perpetuated by Muslims, in the United States as NYC Muslim “hate crimes” yet I don’t see the President warning of such violence – in fact, Eric Holder can’t even identify terrorism as being statistically associated with Islam.

(more…)

The New York Post reports that President Obama’s purpose in including more than 250 business executives in his vast entourage in Mumbai is to promote job-hatching, cross-continental business deals.

Another story, from the New York Times, adds that this export-promoting (and, as others opine, excessively costly, luxurious, even “imperial”) sojourn in Asia is also “an attempt to ease tensions with America’s chief executives, many of whom spent the recent campaign accusing the White House of being antibusiness.”

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, explains why we should take the president’s lavish, “pro-business” pageantry with a grain of salt.

(more…)

Over the past couple of months, a lot of readers of my website, AtlasShrugs, have been asking me why I go on these consistently belligerent TV shows to discuss Islam, knowing that:

• It is going to be a hostile environment;
• I will be debating liars, deceivers and Islamic supremacists;
• I will be defamed, smeared and slandered;
• The playing field will be grossly unfair;
• I will be interrupted, cut off, and rebuked;
• I will be given much less time than my opponent.

I will tell you why. It is an opportunity, however compromised. Voices like mine, Robert Spencer’s, Wafa Sultan’s and Ibn Warraq’s are never heard in the mainstream media. The truth is hidden from the masses, and the media’s criminal negligence is cloaked in good intentions. Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is guerrilla warfare in the information battlespace, in the war of ideas. These media opportunities were hardly perfect, but they were something. Why make perfect the enemy of the good? They were better than the traditional blackout on our freedom- defense initiatives. It was a shot, and I was taking it and running with it, no matter how disgusting it all was.

From the media’s perspective, the Ground Zero mosque was an historical phenomenon. For the first time, a major news story became the most important national and international news story without the media. Think about that. Unlike the fringe pastor in Florida, who tweeted a Qur’an threat and the media descended like locusts to a Florida backwater to create a news story, a narrative, the Ground Zero mosque was not shaped by the media, not covered by the media — not at first anyway. (more…)

Michael Bloomberg has had a busy summer.

The NYC Mayor has been waging a pitched battle against the 71% of New Yorkers who want the Cordoba House mosque moved from its present site.  That event has gotten plenty of media coverage.

But that fight may be nothing more than a part of a second, larger contest between Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg LP — a private company of which Mayor Bloomberg controls 85% — over control of financial news reporting  in the world of Islamic finance.

The stakes in the Bloomberg-Reuters Middle East Islamic Finance war: The nearly 300 Islamic banks and financial institutions worldwide whose assets are predicted to grow to $1 trillion by 2013.

“We have an aspiration at Bloomberg to become the most influential news organisation in the world.”

Peter T. Grauer, Chairman and CEO of Bloomberg, July 31, 2010

“…. the growth of Islamic finance has been phenomenal in spite of the current difficulties that seem to be indicative of the situation visa vi the international economic community, the financial world seems to be turning its attention to Islamic finance.”

Former Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Musa Hitam, Chairman of the World Islamic Economic Forum Foundation, CNBC interview, August 18, 2010

(more…)

William Buckley achieved notoriety, if not celebrity, with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. The book was asuccès de scandale. In it Buckley attacked the undergraduate education on offer at Yale for its hostility to Christianity and its adulation of collectivism; he also sought to dispel the indifference of Yale alumni to their supervisory responsibility. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review as the voice of the conservative movement. Recall, as John Judis does in his biography of Buckley, that the fortunes of the American Right had never appeared dimmer; the principal right-wing organizations were anti-Semitic and neo-isolationist throwbacks to the thirties and forties. Recall also that in the Publisher’s Statement of National Review’s first issue, Buckley defined conservatism as the willingness to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who do.” He was an outrageous character.

Dartmouth English Professor and long-time National Review senior editor Jeffrey Hart captured Buckley in his glory at the moment National Review was about to make its debut:

A debate had been announced, to take place in Harvard’s Lamont Library, between Buckley and James Wechsler, the diamond-pure liberal editor of The New York Post… What happened on the appointed night in an auditorium at Lamont Library gave a preliminary indication of at least one of the many qualities that would render Buckley famous and National Review successful: Buckley’s bravura… At the podium, after thanking the host for his introduction, Buckley observed, with an elfin grin (soon a signature feature), that he was very pleased to see Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., there in the audience. Then he added, “His many books would be dangerous if they weren’t so boring…”

Whatever sober points Wechsler might have made, he was obliterated by the stylistic contrast and, ink-stained wretch that he obviously was, slunk back to the then-liberal New York Post. Right there, I saw the conservative movement being born, and liberalism made otiose. Right there was the esprit that caught the attention of early National Review readers — especially the young. This was no stuffed-shirt or classroom policy wonk. This had nothing to do with the dismal science and its green eye-shades. This was great theater.

Considering his esprit as well as well as the splash of his Web sites, it seems to me that Andrew Breitbart may be the Wililam Buckley of the Internet Age — part journalist, part showman, part conservative visionary and ideological entrepreneur. He has an instinctive understanding of the media environment that is the base of the left’s cultural monopoly and he means to do his best to overthrow it. (more…)

Newspapers and their online cousins are the new science textbooks. At least that’s where the students in my introductory geology class at Brooklyn College appear to be learning about global warming, pollution, and other science issues of general interest.

The students do, however, have strong views on which news sources are reliable. Semester after semester the majority of the students in my class tell me that they trust The New York Times as a source of information far more than they do The New York Post or Daily News, primarily based on their belief that the latter two are overly sensationalistic. But can their belief withstand closer scrutiny?

The Quiz

As a means of challenging my students’ views, I present them with two newspaper excerpts, without identifying their origins, that paint starkly different pictures of the same issue, the safety of tube wells in Bangladesh. (These shallow wells are used to obtain water for drinking and irrigation.) One excerpt, referring to the wells, reads: (more…)

Did MSNBC’s prime time clean-up hitter go crazy in the locker room last week? That’s the story bouncing around the web and even the New York Times.  Olbermann has denied derailing the Donny Deutsch train, but he admits doing nothing to stop Deutsch’s early dismissal from the 3 p.m. time slot.  As the Left likes to say, silence is consent, Mr. Olbermann.

What could be so offensive that would have Keith Olbermann (allegedly) going “full diva,” demanding Deutsch get put on double-secret probation?  Simply this: the most famous graduate of Cornell Cow College’s name was mentioned in a segment about some of the loudest media voices on the first episode of “America The Angry.”  Remember, Keith Olbermann is the guy who spends an hour a night, calling other people names, on a show featuring a segment where he nominates and crowns someone the “Worst Person In The World.”

Perhaps Olbermann’s rage is fueled by fears of his own demise?  According to the ratings, Mr. Olbermann’s spot atop the MSNBC Star Chart is in danger: (more…)