**LINK FIXED**

The war on Christmas music has taken a strange turn, with the mainstream media finally up in arms at the overly PC handling of the holiday’s song lyrics.  But it isn’t the constant barrage from uber-sensitive atheists trying to eliminate every reference to Christmas from our schools and public places that has them fired up.

No, it’s an elementary teacher in Michigan that has raised their ire.

The flurry of controversy arose when the teacher, weary of hearing her students giggling every time they had to sing the words ‘gay apparel’ during their rendition of “Deck The Halls,” decided to replace the word ‘gay’ with ‘bright’.

The reception from the media, as you may have heard, was rather chilly.

What you may not have heard covered in the MSM was an essay penned by one Colin Curran, a 16-year-old high school junior from New Jersey.  Taking to the Huffington Post during this same time period, Colin told a story about a high school assignment which involved creating a music playlist for a young children’s holiday breakfast.  There was one catch – none of the songs could contain a certain set of offending words, such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Jesus, God, or Santa Claus.  The reason, Colin explains, is that the “principal does not want to offend anyone with belief-specific music.”

Google Colin’s name under the news section and it reveals a single hit, having nothing to do with the student from New Jersey.  Google ‘bright apparel’ and it’s a whole different ballgame.

Here is a sampling of some of the coverage:

The Daily Mail

“Parents thought the Cherry Knoll teacher had been naughty and not so nice when the elementary instructor replaced ‘gay’ with ‘bright’ after her students wouldn’t stop laughing when they sang the word.”

MSNBC

“Use it as a teaching moment or just tell the kids to pipe down and sing the song as written.”

Dan Savage

“Someone had to straighten out that carol – can’t have children donning gay apparel.”

Huffington Post

“A Michigan music teacher’s decision to censor the word ‘gay’ from a traditional Christmas carol is being met with a frosty response.”

Fox Nation

“A traditional Christmas carol is at the center of controversy at a TCAPS elementary school.”

Of course, the school’s principal, Chris Parker, didn’t miss an opportunity to crank the PC up a notch by calling this a ‘teachable moment’ for student and teacher alike.

In a report for ABC 57 News, Parker doubles down on his overreaction saying:

“We have an anti-bullying and discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation and so going forward, the teacher will be addressing ‘this is how we’re supposed to be reacting.  This is the way to be respectful about this.’”

The amount of attention being heaped upon the “Deck the Halls” nontroversy and the lack of attention being paid to the omission of Christmas altogether from a music playlist in New Jersey are striking.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

Is there a better way to bring in the weekend than by chatting with top newsmakers over drinks? Sure, the bar talk and news commentary device has been used before, but that was just a sound stage. Today Accuracy in Media introduces our new video series, Bar Stool Confessions, which offers a closer look at those who break and shape the news.

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Strangely, in this report from the Associated Press, the names of the suspects are not revealed. We repeat, their names are Mohammad Mamdouh and Ahmed Serhani. Strange that AP did not mention this in the report.

Here is the entire report from the AP:

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Peter Beinart is at it again. He, in his capacity as Senior Political Writer for the Daily Beast, has attempted to tar Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and, by association, his fellow Republicans with the stain of religious intolerance. If you weren’t aware, Rep. King is Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and has recently opened hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. Mr. Beinart starts out by claiming Republicans have left their accustomed wheel house, concentrating on “unfettered capitalism, traditional morality and bucketloads for defense” to slide into anti-religious fervor.

It’s at that point when Beinart starts building straw men.

“King isn’t holding hearings on domestic terrorism; he’s holding hearings on domestic terrorism by one religious group. Is most American terrorism Muslim terrorism? Actually, no.”

Well, the majority of terror attacks in America in the last decade were done by Muslims. Of course, he has to go through the regular list of home grown terrorists, from McVeigh to Kaczynski and on to, strangely, Jared Lee Loughner, whom, if I understand correctly is more of an insanity case then a terrorist. Curiously missing from the list are folks like the Weather Underground or the Speedway Bomber, but that might cause some embarrassment to people Beinart holds in high esteem.  In the end, if he is willing to accept the premise that American Muslims are statistically more likely to commit terrorism than non-Muslims, it’s wrong to point out their religion. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal is taking some PC heat for this cover photo. From Politico:

“It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge. Have you ever seen a picture of Clarence Thomas bowling?”

What do you think? Try to keep the baseball metaphors to a minimum, although we know you won’t.

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, not your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”                –Samuel Adams, 1776

Part 1: A Primer, Part 2: Foundation, Part 3: Execution

You would think that everyone wants to be free. You would think no one wants to be ruled by tyrants of any kind. Yet many people in the so-called free world are not only selling themselves out, they are selling out the rest of us, and our descendants. And so many of them don’t even know they’re doing it. They’ve been lied to. Tricked, fooled, played. And the agents of statism intend to keep it that way.

For 100 years the Big Government (BG) loving statists have been trying to convert the bottom-up United States into top-down society. They have managed to bring it very far along this course. There are still some matters they have to resolve, but they are closer than they ever have been. They never sought to win through insurrection because war is too costly and the results of any conflict are unpredictable. They used an approach the Nazis did to great effect in Germany. They gamed the system.

Like our progressive statists, the Nazis came to power legally. They got elected and then, once in positions of authority, corrupted the system and turned it into what they wanted. The old fascists did this in a short amount of time because Germany did not have a LG constitution like the US. Our system makes it very hard to turn the state into an autocratic dictatorship. Those progressives of the ’30s, who were at first enamored of the Fascists in Europe, wanted to take over the US in the same fashion. They had been doing it since Teddy Roosevelt was elected. Roosevelt began a war on corporations, including a bizarre crusade against Coca-Cola. It would echo later crusades by politicians against American industries, demonizing them and making them out to be evil incarnate. (more…)

On November 5, Major Nidal Hasan, an Army Psychiatrist, walked into the Solider Readiness Center in Fort Hood, Texas and shot 43 people. Thirteen died. While he fired at them he shouted Allahu Akbar, like a stereotypical Muslim terrorist. The military should have known it was coming. He had given away all his worldly goods beforehand. He’d been in contact with radical Muslim extremeists for months including Anwar al-Awlaki, an Imam known as the “Bin Laden of the internet.”

Naturally, the first reaction from the authorities was to tell everyone not to leap to conclusions. And of course, for days afterward they were saying it wasn’t a terrorist incident. Who can forget President Obama’s reaction to the shooting, giving a shout out to someone with a smile on his face before dealing with the matter as if, “Oh yeah, there were some people shot in Texas.”

The government bent over backwards to try to make it out to be a lone nut incident and there was no mention of Islam in the Army’s initial 86-page report.

When the facts came out it was revealed that the military already knew Hasan was a risk and did nothing out of political correctness, it created quite a stir. People had to die before the military would look at how absurd its policies have been. Apparently, they need to look into them some more: (more…)

No one fully understood how corrupted the American military had become by the corrosive influence of “political correctness” — which more properly should be call “fascism of the mind,” since it seeks to control thought by controlling speech — until the “Soldier of Allah,” Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, pulled a gun and killed thirteen American soldiers at Ft. Hood in Texas last fall.

And how did the Army react?  With the same supine, spineless cowardice that characterizes most contemporary government institutions, including those tasked with protecting Americans.  In the immediate aftermath of the murders, a disgraceful general named George Casey publicly fretted:

And frankly, I am worried — not worried, not worried, but I’m concerned — that this increased speculation could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers and I’ve asked our army leaders to be on the look out for that. it would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.

Well, yes — think of how much more effective a fighting force we would have had in World War II if, when Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, had we reached out to the National Socialist German Workers Party community here at home and affirmatively made them officers in the Third Army.  Think of the crack, Bund-approved German translators we would have had!

Well, General Casey: how do you like your precious “diversity” now?  From Fox News: (more…)

It would seem that the Associated Press wants to consider its January 25 story by Devlin Barrett (“Feds detail Christmas Day attack”; also saved here for future reference, fair use, and discussion purposes) the last word on what occurred in the hours immediately following Flight 253’s landing in Detroit on Christmas Day.

But if that’s indeed the case, Barrett’s report also serves to prove that the wire service had no business revising originally accurate reports to remove what were apparently inconvenient facts relating to the incident.

To refresh by way of my Big Journalism post on January 15, AP’s initial reports on Christmas afternoon and early Christmas evening told readers that “the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil,” and that it had even used the M-word (“Muslim”). But, I wrote, by the middle of the next morning, “The supposedly solid AQ connection somehow became tenuous and unproven,” and the M-word was gone.

This scrubbing conveniently gave the Obama administration precious time during the weekend that followed to regain its bearings after significant initial clumsiness. Ultimately, I noted that AP’s revisions “allowed the President of the United States to inform us (on the Tuesday after the attack), without challenge and as if it was a recent discovery, that — shazam! — the attack might have had something to do with AQ.” (more…)