Poet Ogden Nash knew the score:

…if called by a panther, don’t anther.

And that’s exactly what America’s liberal agenda-setting media has done. It has not answered the “New” Black Panther’s call daring it to report on voter intimidation by two paramilitary dressed Panthers, one of whom was brandishing a club, outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.

Bartle Bull, a former civil rights lawyer and publisher of the leftist The Village Voice, a paper in which I have been published, said it’s “the most blatant form of voter intimidation I’ve ever seen.” Worse, our media agenda setters cower in silence behind their constitutional protection at the prospect of digging into the corroborated sworn testimony of Department of Justice whistle-blower Christian Adams that the Obama DOJ won’t prosecute those Panthers because it has embraced a politically correct policy of not charging blacks for civil rights violations. (more…)

Not so long ago, writers, editors, concerned world citizens and deep thinkers of all kinds were consumed with the idea of a coming global catastrophe that seemed implacable and virtually unavoidable. When it comes to covering today’s debates on global warming, we might want to take a step back and recall this earlier, somewhat chillier 1980s obsession with the fate of the earth – that is, of course, The Fate of the Earth, the title of a three-part series by Jonathan Schell first published in The New Yorker, then republished as a popular book by Alfred A. Knopf in 1982.

Jonathan Schell

This influential series was all about the unstoppable, world-ending consequences of nations (especially the United States) clinging to their nuclear weapons. The fate of the earth, according to Schell, was to be nuclear annihilation, human extinction, the end of all life. Game over. You’re dead. We’re all dead. Your children are dead. Your dog’s dead. Your children’s children won’t exist. Finito.  It was a very popular idea at the time, much discussed at cocktail parties, sidewalk reefer breaks, and editorial meetings. Schell had caught the ear of the culture.

(To judge by this piece in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times by Schell’s older brother, Orville, pessimism seems to run in the family.) (more…)