Clearly the time away from the spotlight has done nothing for Mr. Lawrence O’Donnell’s maturity level. He’s still got the manners and professionalism of a 3-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. Ed Morrissey takes note of his latest little meltdown on the “Morning Joe” show over on MS-NBC where it got so bad that Joe Scarborough had to call an end to the segment and say he’d continue the interview “by myself.”
O’Donnell is a misbehaving little brat, something he proved to us long ago when he was incapable of any level of civility during an appearance (on MS-NBC, again) opposite John O’Neill of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth back in 2004. Unable to simply shout down the truth, he watched his favored candidate John Kerry lose the Presidential elections to George W. Bush by over 3 million votes. Again displaying the maturity usually seen on daycare playgrounds, he got on national television and suggested that Bush’s victory should cause serious consideration of secession by the blue states in that election.
So why does this guy warrant anyone’s consideration of being a person with a perspective on any matter of politics that’s worth adult time to air? The guy hasn’t gotten any more lucid or worthy of attention in the last 5 years since he was in the public eye, his appearance on Morning Joe makes that clear. Perhaps now we can simply let him fade into the obscurity he deserves and keep him off the broadcast media. O’Donnell’s a twit and he clearly always will be.
On-again, off-again left-wing attempt at a national talk radio outlet Air America has announced it’s ending its run. It quit its live production yesterday and will bleed out its re-runs until Monday the 25th.
“This very difficult environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business,” Chairman Charlie Kireker said in a memo to employees that is posted on the company’s Web site. “This past year has seen a ‘perfect storm’ in the media industry generally.”
Yeah, well, that “perfect storm” wasn’t around for 6 years of foul-mouthed leftist spewage that failed miserably to ever connect with an audience capable of supporting a business. Air America had continuing issues with both market share and finances for much of its lifespan and there were reasons for that that have nothing whatsoever to do with the economy. When you’re pushing a flawed product that looks, sounds, and acts like any other MSM outlet you can’t be surprised when people look at you as just another same old, same old. Witness the collapsing subscriber rate of the print media. The consuming public no longer looks at newspapers as a reliable source of news and much of it recognizes that the opinion pieces masquerading as news items are slanted left.
And someone thought it would be a good business model to replicate that in talk radio? Not so much.
Conservative talk radio is successful due to a combination of factors. The on-air talent is engaging and thoughtful, the topics are well researched and reasonably argued, and the conservative viewpoints discussed – and not immediately ridiculed – aren’t displayed in any other MSM medium. Air America is just the New York Times/DNC on a radio dial. And that is why they fail.
(Thank you, Randy Minchew, for the link to the WaPo story.)
The efforts at sending aid to Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit early last week are slowly ramping up to speed. NGO’s such as Catholic Charities were already there when the quake hit and supplies and money are both coming in. The Red Cross is putting a massive amount of money and people on the ground there as quickly as can be done. The US military is either already on the scene or soon will be – the USS Carl Vinson, one of America’s Nimitz class supercarriers, arrived 2 days ago – bringing not only supplies but desperately needed transportation and the ability to secure the area.
The American people are stepping up, too. With special collections at Sunday Masses and the huge response to the Red Cross’s innovative “text-to-donate” program Americans are proving once again that they are some of the most compassionate people on the planet. Other nations are throwing in, yes, but we can be justly proud of our response.
Stories are coming up about anger rising in Haiti from people who have been waiting days for relief supplies and assistance. One thing I’m not hearing this time is a rising chorus of people here in this country blaming the administration for the lack of speed. Jerry Fuhrman at From On High puts it nicely in his post, “An Object Lesson in Disaster Relief“:
I think it’s instructive for those who blamed George W. Bush for failure to respond to the Katrina hurricane disaster in Louisiana promptly to see how Obama’s dealing with a similar crisis in Haiti. Surprise: It’s just not that easy to mobilize a national effort at bringing desperately needed relief to a population that has lost everything – including infrastructure:
…
Despite the efforts of the Obama administration to mount a massive relief effort, thus far that effort has failed miserably. But he won’t be blamed.
And he shouldn’t be. This stuff takes times, whether you’re willing to accept it or not.
Maybe it’s time to reflect …
Indeed it is. President Obama is putting quite a bit of this nation’s capability on the table to help out in Haiti but warp drive ain’t one of the tools in his bag. It takes time to assess and give the right orders. It takes time to carry those orders out. Just like last time. Reflection would be the appropriate response. An apology would be, too, but I’d settle for some acknowledgment that it was tougher than some people gave it credit for.
Imagine for a moment that a Republican administration wanted to get support behind some program or legislation they wanted to push and decided the best way to do that was to get prominent people to write glowingly about the topic? Then after said person wrote about it this administration decided to tout the fact that the article had been written as support for their program. Imagine further that it then comes to light that the person doing the writing was paid to do so by the administration and that this paid relationship was deliberately withheld from the public, allowing us to think that it was an unbiased article when, in fact, it was a paid-for PR product.
Think there might be a stink raised about that?
Well, it turns out you don’t need to imagine it. Back in 2005 a man by the name of Armstrong Williams was paid by the Department of Education in the Bush Administration to write helpful articles regarding President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program. They left this little factoid out of their proud references to Williams’ writing on the program and when people found out about it, there was some pretty intense coverage of the matter. I myself wrote on the topic and I was none too pleased with Mr. Williams’ actions nor with those of whomever at the DoED it was who made the payments. The coverage was widespread and saw print and air in all the major media. Yes, that included such bleeding-heart liberal outlets as Fox News and the Washington Times.
Fast forward a few years into a new administration and a new program/legislative effort dealing with the massive re-organization of the nation’s healthcare systems. From Sonicfrog Dot Net:
What is it with academics, politics, and honesty? First we had Climategate - Now we have Grubergate! Grubergate? Grubergate???? What the hell is Grubergate?
Well, just like Climategate, if you get most of your news from the MSM, you’ve never heard of it because they’re not reporting it and ignoring the story. It involves MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, who was paid gobs of money by the White House controlled Dept. of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to write a report on health care reform. The report was favorable. The problem is, the report is not publicly available, and, more damning, it was sold to the public as an independent analysis of the administrations health care initiatives.
At that point, he introduces an article dealing with the subject – by Jane Hamsher writing at The Huffington Post. Hamsher goes to town not only on Gruber but on the Obama administration and on the news media because, quite unlike their pursuit of the Armstrong Williams story, the news media have been nearly silent on the matter. And not just the news media, all of the major Democrat / left-wing blogs who were all over the Williams issue have let this matter slip right on by without comment.
Folks, writing pro-anything prose for hire and then representing yourself as an independent agent on the question is unethical, period. I don’t care which side of the debate you’re on and I couldn’t care less about the topic, it’s just dishonorable and dishonest. If what Hamsher is saying is true, then Gruber’s analysis is pretty much the lynchpin of all supporting argumentation for Obamacare. If he wrote this as a paid contractor for the White House – and he did, it is confirmed – then he can hardly be cited as a credible, unbiased source. And the media are covering for him. It says a lot that the White House needed to pay someone off to write the glowing report on Obamacare and none of what it says speaks well for either that legislation or the White House pushing it.
Wow, you don’t see this happen on CNN every day. (Hat tip: Hot Air.)
Transcript:
How dare they? President Obama, Democratic leaders have decided to bypass a formal House and Senate conference committee in order to reconcile those two health care bills. Instead, White House and Democratic leaders will hold informal — that’s another word for secret — negotiations, meant to shut Republicans and the public out of the process.
What a far cry from the election, when then candidate Obama pledged to — quote — “broadcast health care negotiations on C-SPAN, so that the American people can see what the choices are” — unquote.
President Obama hasn’t even made a token effort to keep his campaign promises of more openness and transparency in government. It was all just another lie that was told in order to get elected. The head of C-SPAN wrote a letter, asked Congress to — quote — “open all the important negotiations, including any conference committee meetings, to electronic media coverage” — unquote. When White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked whether the administration would support televising the negotiations, he refused to answer, instead mumbling something about, well, I haven’t seen the letter.
That wasn’t the question, Mr. Gibbs. You either support openness or you don’t. The Democrats insist this is all on the up-and-up, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying — quote — “There’s never been a more open process for any legislation.” — unquote.
Really? This is the same Nancy Pelosi who you may recall, after becoming speaker in 2006, promised the Democrats would have — quote — “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history” — unquote.
Here’s hoping the voters remember some of this crap when the midterm elections roll around later this year.
The last 48 hours have seen a most amazing situation revealed regarding the highly controversial topic of global warming. As reported over at Watts Up With That? and continued in various locations around the ’sphere, servers ar the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were hacked and a tremendous amount of data – files and e-mails – was taken and leaked to the Internet. The documents show that several of the leading lights of the global warming advocacy – such luminaries as Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, and more – engaged in efforts to mask data that did not support their preferred conclusion and they knew full well that’s what they were doing. From John Hinderaker at Power Line has undertaken the project of going through all 62 megabytes (compressed) of data that was posted on the public FTP site. His initial assessment:
Before the documents disappeared from that location, several people had downloaded them and posted them in other locations. I downloaded all of the material earlier today and have begun to review it. The emails are stunning. They are authored by many of the leading figures in the global warming movement: Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Stephen Schneider, and others. They are remarkably candid; these individuals talk to each other with the knowledge that they are among friends.
The emails I’ve reviewed so far do not suggest that these scientists are perpetrating a knowing and deliberate hoax. On the contrary, they are true believers. I don’t doubt that they are sincerely convinced–in fact, fanatically so–that human activity is warming the earth. But the emails are disturbing nonetheless. What they reveal, more than anything, is a bunker mentality. These pro-global warming scientists see themselves as under siege, and they view AGW skeptics as bitter enemies.
Emphasis mine. I suppose that depends on what you consider a knowing and deliberate hoax. If, by that, you mean that the persons suggesting something know it to be false then I would agree – they’re clearly not of the opinion that AGW is a falsehood. But that only lets them off on the “hoax” part. The e-mails show their efforts to conceal data not supportive of their position are quite deliberate and they know full well they are hiding the facts and, thus, obscuring the truth. References are made in some of the e-mails to performing “tricks” on the data and adjusting it to “hide the decline” in temperature trends. Concern is expressed over the fact that trends aren’t matching their theoretical models and desires are expressed to find ways to “reduce” “blip[s]” in order to affect global mean temperatures.
This is not science when people deliberately seek to alter the data to support their desired outcomes. It’s politics, plain and simple and that’s not supposed to be what these people are engaging in. In fact, they are quite loud about their disdain for “politicizing the issue.” And yet, here we are with over 10 years of data showing them doing exactly that. Which raises the question in my mind of what they’ve managed to successfully “hide” and perform “tricks” on without being detected.
Were this to happen to some group of scientists expressing skepticism over AGW – that it was shown they were engaged in a pattern of data manipulation and obscuring of the facts in order to support their conclusions – I have no doubts that the reaction among the global warming faithful would be loud, continuous, and outraged. As well it should be – I’d likely be among those offended by such an event. When those who set themselves up as scientists interested in illuminating the facts so we can know the truth of the world engage in this kind of deception, we all suffer. The debate over what to do and when to initiate action suffers. And the outcome we hope for suffers. It’s inexcusable for people who call themselves scientists to do this. I wish the AGW advocates would consider it that way, too, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
It’s also inexcusable that so-called unbiased media would choose to virtually ignore such an event. Fox News didn’t ignore it, but you won’t find the story over at CNN or MSNBC. Why is that? Because those 2 organizations are in the tank for AGW groups, perhaps? You can’t prove that assessment false based on their silence on a story reported this widely in the ’sphere and in the foreign press.
These scientists – and the East Anglia CRU, for that matter – have been shown to be untrustworthy in their science on global warming. What they report now can no more be considered conclusive (or even accurate) than any anonymous website on the Internet. Transparency in investigating this matter and a complete exposure of all of their data to widespread review are the only fixes for their credibility meltdown. I hope they move to make the repairs and do so quickly.
As the incessant political calls to our homes over the past 6 weeks proved, firms that perform surveys and polls are finding their services in increasing demand during election cycles. However, simply calling people up and asking questions is not the measure of a successful firm. Pollsters are prized based on their accuracy. It’s been said repeatedly that the only poll that matters is the one taken on election day so how accurate a survey firm is can be objectively measured by the results at the polls. Riley over at Virginia Virtucon looks at all of the firms that released polling results for the VA Governor’s race and rates them in order of their ending accuracy. It’s an interesting list.
The top pollster in terms of accuracy was SurveyUSA. They called the winner of the Governor’s race as Bob McDonnell with 58%, 18% over Deeds. The actual results were McDonnell at 58.6% with a margin of 17.4%, a difference of just 0.6% on each measure. That’s some mighty fine shooting, folks. Rassmussen showed a 9% difference, the WaPo 11%, and ole’ Kos was off by 12%.
Keep that in mind when you’re deciding whom to trust when the questions get asked. Have a look at the link for the full list.
That the defenders of Roman Polanski are dismissing the fact that the man raped and sodomized a 13-year-old girl – after drugging her, I might add – says a lot about them. What it says isn’t good. The staggering double-standard was described perfectly today by Father Tom Reese, Society of Jesus. A “Father Polanski”, guilty of exactly the same thing, would be in jail.
“Imagine if the Knights of Columbus decided to give an award to a pedophile priest who had fled the country to avoid prison,” Father Tom Reese, S.J., points out. “The outcry would be universal.”
Writing for the Newsweek/Washington Post website, he adds that “Victim groups would demand the award be withdrawn and that the organization apologize. Religion reporters would be on the case with the encouragement of their editors. Editorial writers and columnist would denounce the knights as another example of the insensitivity of the Catholic Church to sexual abuse.” And then he adds: “And they would all be correct. And I would join them.”
So would I. And I’m a Knight myself. In fact, I’d be willing to go out on a limb and say most of my fellow Knights here in my council would call, write, or march to New Haven, CT personally to make sure the Supreme Knight got the message loud and clear.
But Hollywood sees it differently. Even though this isn’t an “alleged” anything, even though the crime definitely occurred and was admitted to in court, they just can’t see their way clear to hold one of their own accountable for his sexual assault on a little girl. Like Ed Morrissey, I am adamant that he should be held accountable not only for the original crime but for fleeing justice and enjoying his freedom for the 32 years he was a fugitive. I couldn’t care less that he’s 76 years old. As has been mentioned by others, Hollywood would be calling for the man’s head if he were a plumber or a conservative talk-show host. I hope they’ll remember this when the day comes that it’s one of their daughters recovering from rape and sodomy.
If you’re a resident of Loudoun County then you’ve received this week’s print edition of the Loudoun Independent and the story I first wrote about on Monday (and then revisted on Wednesday) is in your hands. Our neighbors who don’t follow blogs and on-line news sources are reading this story just tonight for the first time and they are doing so without the benefit of the discussions that have taken place both on the loudouni.com site and throughout the blogosphere. The editor at the Independent, John Geddie, Jr., has seen fit to deny requests made by several of us to withhold printing the article until solid research has been done. To make matters worse, he dedicates his editorial space to a poor excuse of a justification for this journalistic malpractice. It is a matter of adding insult to injury, and it’s even a two-fer at that: he not only insults Tag Greason’s honor and integrity he insults the intelligence of the rest of us.
The very title of the editorial is preposterous: “Does It Matter?” If it didn’t matter, why print it? Is Geddie’s day so empty, his paper’s pages so unused that he has to dive into the dung heap and pull out vicious gossip to fill the inches? Geddie’s entire premise – that such an event, truely or falsely accused, shouldn’t matter to the voters in determining who represents them – is ludicrous enough on its own. But the editorial does everything it can to keep the notion alive that hey, you know, he might have done it! – even in the face of the most obvious evidence that he didn’t. The. Charges. Were. Dismissed.
Geddie says right up front that Greason has denied the event occurred “and there are certain details that support this.” There aren’t “certain details” that support it, the attorneys in the US District Court found no merit to the accusations whatsoever and dismissed the charges. That’s the only “detail” that matters and to suggest that “certain details” “support” that it was a bogus accusation is to imply that certain others don’t. Which ones? Feel free to read the entire article but don’t get your hopes up. There are no details that do not support the dismissal. Geddie’s “reporting” on the matter has absolutely nothing to support the accusation but that’s not stopping him from continuing to suggest otherwise. Read on:
There are very few us of who did not make mistakes at 24. Most of us made mistakes much older. Being imperfect is a facet of being human and if mistakes serve a purpose, it’s to help us grow. In general, that’s why you should always listen to the advice of those who have a few years on you—the wisdom they have is likely hard-won.
A bit too often, today’s society appears to be looking for something perfect—modern incarnations of our founding fathers, who were likely as flawed and human as we are. If their ideas have survived longer than any personal foibles, then that’s because it was their ideas that were important.
Taken in the context of this discussion – and that’s Geddie’s intent, clearly – Geddie is obviously suggesting that Greason did, in fact, do as he’s been accused. Hey, after all, we all make mistakes, right? We’re all human! No one’s perfect! Even those guys with the wigs way back when were probably guilty of something, too, right? So, hey, you shouldn’t worry that this Greason guy acted in a totally unprofessional, unethical, dishonorable fashion back then. I’m sure he’s gotten over that behavior by now.
The clear problem with Geddie’s position is the same one as the original accuser – zero proof that any such thing ever occurred. She had her shot at the accusation, it was investigated, and there was nothing to it. It’s a rumor, gossip, an unsubstantiated accusation, a fabricated charge. Why’d she do it? Good question. Of course, we’d need to know who she is, first, and that’s information Geddie thinks we don’t need to know. Funny, that, considering he claims that’s not his job:
The story on page 3 is news. It’s our considered opinion that there are readers who would want to be informed of the alleged incident, whether the charges have a basis in fact or not. As a news outlet, it’s our job to deliver the news to you—not to decide what news is appropriate for you to read.
The story on page 3 is not news. It’s a rumor passed along by someone in a position to spread it far wider than most people can. And by a person who claims to be operating within the standard ethical practices of journalism, to boot. It’s my considered opinion that if someone dropped a tip on Geddie’s desk that Dave Poisson had, a few years ago, been involved in trafficking child pornography but had no evidence of any kind to back up such a ridiculous claim that Geddie would never dream of printing that accusation. Not without proof. You see, that’s the critical issue, here. It’s not a matter of the absurd statement he makes about not deciding what news is appropriate. (Of course he does, he’s the editor and he decides what stories run in his paper. What, he runs every story reported anywhere? I don’t think so.) It’s about deciding what’s news and what’s gossip.
What’s the news value in running a baseless accusation determined to be without merit or truth years ago? As close to zero as it gets.
What’s the propaganda/political value? I’m guessing it’s much more. The real news, now, is who planted this story with Geddie? Who’s he helping out and why? Who is he protecting while he facilitates their political attacks? These are important questions and the answers would be valuable. I’m certain that there are readers who would want to be informed of this stuff. For some reason, I no longer believe that John Geddie or the Loudoun Independent are very interested in what their readers what to be informed of. It’s disappointing to see the Independent choose to change formats to a gossip-rag. Disappointing and so very sad.
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