Archive » 2004 » September

Junkyard Blog has the scoop on the liberal media’s discovery of open borders–and questions the timing of Time’s much-buzzed-about article.
Peter Brimelow praises the article on VDARE.com’s new blog:
[T]he Time piece is a superb piece of journalism and I strongly commend it even to VDARE.COM readers, to whom much of it will not be news (see [...]

Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities imagines a blogger pajama party. Check out the fantasy duds.
(Hat tip: Rusty).
Update: Michele Catalano in her jammies. Sweet!

So, President Bush is on the campaign trail and the headline is this:
Bush: Kerry Wants to Expand Government
Every self-respecting fiscal conservative will gag upon reading:
Seeking to gain ground against Sen. John Kerry, President Bush said Thursday that his Democratic opponent “wants to expand government” in education, health care, taxes and virtually every other area of [...]

A month ago, I spotlighted the Adopt A Sniper program. Brian K. Sain, advisory member of the American Sniper Association and Police Marksman Association, sends along a new movie about the important role snipers have played in American history. Watch it here. It’s very moving.

Why have we not heard a peep about Rathergate from Mary Mapes?
Mapes, a senior producer (one of CBS’s “most highly regarded,” according to Associated Press) for Dan Rather, worked on the disastrous 60 Minutes II segment and obtained the dubious Killian docs, which were reportedly faxed from a Texas Kinko’s. Newsweek reported that Mapes met [...]

Gave a book-related lecture earlier tonight at Johns Hopkins. Many thanks to the JHU College Republicans for a good time. There were a few unhinged malefactors, but it was otherwise a low-key event (especially compared to this). Was excited to meet Gregory Kane, a lonely voice of sanity at the Baltimore Sun. If you haven’t [...]

5:45pm. All eyes on CBS. The sound of the stopwatch on 60 Minutes has taken on a whole new context. Tick tick tick tick…
Jeff Quinton is liveblogging here.
Send Allah some money while you’re waiting. And spare a few minutes on this good read from Bryan Preston, in response to Orin Kerr’s pooh-poohing of Rathergate. More [...]

Wow. The irrepressible Lucianne.com has a link to an “Unfit for Command” comment board run by the Borders Books Employee Union, whose members kvetch and moan about the “rabid” people coming in to buy the book. Here’s a choice post:
You guys don’t actually HAVE to sell the thing!
Just “carelessly” hide the boxes, “accidentally” drop them [...]

My new column is here. Intro:
Dan Rather, Professional Journalist, and CBS News, Professional News Network, want us to keep believing that they are the ordained purveyors of truth. They are the mature and responsible mavens of media ethics. They are the information gatekeepers with unparalleled judgment, dedicated to the high principles of The Craft [...]

WorldNetDaily reports that the Six Flags adventure park in Jackson, N.J., is scheduled to hold a “Great Muslim Adventure Day” this week in which the park will be open only to Muslims.
The Muslim Youth Division of the Islamic Circle of North America and the Muslim American Society, two of the largest Muslim organizations in America, [...]

Still digging out from e-mail since getting back from a business trip last week, I missed this important announcement from Strengthen The Good, the bloggers’ micro-charity to which I belong. The group has chosen another charity to highlight–The Brent Woodall Foundation For Exceptional Children, founded by a 9/11 widow who had planned to start an [...]

Via Wizbang, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman comes clean:
Let me admit that I have written for the Internet in my pajamas.
Looks like Howard has joined the Jammies Brigade. Welcome to the club!

It’s a real e-mail address. No joke. Send ‘em your thoughts!
(Hat tip: West Coast Conservative.)

Vitamin peddler Almon Braswell, who received a pardon from Bill Clinton, was sentenced this week for conspiring to evade millions of dollars in corporate income taxes for his Marina del Rey, Calif.,-based mail order business.
From the AP:
Almon Glenn Braswell, 60, admitted in March that his Gero Vita International Inc. underpaid its taxes by $4.5 million. [...]

Credit: Jeff Miller at The Curt Jester
Inspired by Rathergate, Jeff Miller has created Microsoft Forger, with handy features for future CBS sources, including:
Output machine selection - Select from a variety of emulators for everything from manual typewriters, IBM Selectrics, early model word processors such as Wang and many others.
Font selection - Once you have selected [...]

Contrast the latest coverage of Rathergate by the New York Times, which can’t bring itself to even acknowledge the path-breaking role that blogs played in blowing the whistle on CBS in its 1,208-word article, with the coverage by the New York Sun, which reconstructs how four independent blogs–Powerline, Little Green Footballs, INDC Journal, and Allahpundit–led [...]

I received an e-mail from BoycottCBS.com calling on the Federal Election Commission to hold CBS/Viacom in violation of federal election law. Their argument is that the media exception to McCain-Feingold does not apply in cases of fraud and does not cover “electioneering coordinated with a political campaign.”
BoycottCBS.com’s heart is in the right place, but they [...]

Dan Rather and his supporters are spinning so hard and in so many different directions that they are starting to contradict each other.
Rather says the bloggers who broke the Forgerygate story are savvy “partisan political operatives” presumably affiliated with the Bush campaign and/or RNC, but Jonathen Klein says they are a bunch of guys sitting [...]

CalStuff has excellent coverage of the event, including photos of both protesters and supporters, the news media, and campus police (who, by the way, did a great job maintaining order).
Great column by Melanie Smith at the Cal Patriot. An excerpt:
Prior to the event, I asked a few prospective protestors what they thought of Ms. Malkin’s [...]

Today, libraries in King County, Wash, will commemorate the third anniversary of September 11, 2001, by sharing touchy-feely “ideas about democracy, citizenship and patriotism” as part of “The September Project.”
Here’s what some of the participating libraries are doing:
* At Bellevue and Federal Way libraries, a theater group called Book-It All Over! will present a production [...]

Being caught up in my book tour, I neglected to post a link to this week’s column. An excerpt:
The third anniversary of Sept. 11 is upon us. We remain at war — and the media remain in denial.
How many times have you picked up a newspaper and read about terrorist attacks perpetrated not by [...]

Bill Hobbs e-mailed Instapundit pointing out the conspicuous absence of stories about Forgerygate on Romenesko’s site. Romenesko’s biases have been noted by Jonah Goldberg (sorry, can’t find the link) and others. He hardly ever links to right-of-center critiques of mainstream media coverage.

Powerline’s servers went down yesterday after they got a Drudge Report link to one of their posts on Forgerygate. I had similar difficulties a few weeks ago, despite the laudable efforts of my web hosting company.
The Drudgealanche phenomenon is a wonderful thing to experience but it is also a problem–one that is likely to grow [...]

Thanks to the great work of FReepers and bloggers (especially Powerline), it is just a matter of time before CBS News admits it relied on forged documents in its “scoop” about President Bush’s National Guard service.
Once CBS news executives acknowledge their error, they will have a tough decision to make: whether to name the people [...]

A subtle but telling example of media bias:
Just before I arrived in Berkeley, a headline in the news section of the San Francisco Chronicle referred to me as a “right-wing pundit.”
In last night’s speech I mused that if New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd came to the Bay Area, no Chronicle headline would refer to [...]

Last night’s speech at U.C. Berkeley is covered here and here. It was a remarkable event. Many thanks to the Berkeley College Republicans and those who came, and heartfelt apologies to the hundreds of supporters who could not get in to the lecture hall due to the limited number of seats. Pre-event [...]

This is a must-read.

What are they so afraid of?

On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee published a thought-provoking op-ed piece about homeland security in an age of terror by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The major points of the piece are that “the ongoing global terrorist threat poses the greatest challenge to the American future since the Cold War and the [...]

Law professor Eric Muller’s critiques of my book, which began reasonably enough in early August, have degenerated into irrationality.
Muller’s descent began shortly after I pointed out copious factual errors and mischaracterizations in his posts–errors that remain uncorrected and unacknowledged to this day.
A few days later, Muller signed the hysterical letter by the newly-formed “Historians’ Committee [...]