The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Shorter @DylanByers: ‘Hurry Up, FBI, So We Can Start the Media Blame Game!’

Posted on | April 16, 2013 | 62 Comments

So, my three most recent stories for Viral Read were about:

  1. A dead 8-year-old boy;
  2. A dead 29-year-old woman; and
  3. A press conference where the FBI said they are conducting a “wide open” investigation into the Boston bombing.

While doing a search for more coverage to include in my updated aggregation, I happened upon this ghoulish blog post by Politico‘s media critic Dylan Byers:

For many journalists I’ve spoken with today, this ignorance is tortuous. The identification of the attacker(s) and the reasons for the attack will likely have enormous political (and potentially geoplitical) ramifications, which will vary greatly depending on whether the attacker(s) is domestic or foreign, acting alone or as part of an organization. We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.

To translate: By “a very important national conversation,” of course Dylan Byers means, another chance to turn a horrible tragedy into a political talking point.

I agree with Jackie Wellfonder: “Be still and know.”

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers! Do you remember the guy in that horrible picture who got his legs blown off? His name is Jeff Bauman Jr. and he’s in stable condition.

 

 

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Category: Media Bias, Terrorism

Terrorism, Journalism and Other Crimes of ‘Workplace-Related Violence’

Posted on | April 16, 2013 | 22 Comments

Still scrambling today to keep up with the latest developments in the Boston Marathon bombings. Last night I got to bed about 1 a.m., woke up about 8:15 a.m. and had my first story at ViralRead online shortly after 9 a.m., updating with the FBI press conference and new leads:

UPDATE: ‘We Will Go to the Ends of the Earth’
to Solve Boston Marathon Bombing,
FBI Agent Says; UPDATE: ‘Blood All Over’
at Bombing Scene

Just in case I missed anything, as of 12:30 p.m. ET today, here was the headline stack on top of the Drudge Report:

Remember: When this story broke yesterday, Joe Biden was on a conference call with gun control groups. Obviously, the administration will need to update their agenda. We must ensure that high-capacity pressure cookers don’t fall into the hands of dangerous criminals.

Speaking of dangerous criminals, we so far don’t know whether the Saudi national highlighted in early accounts is actually a suspect in the crime. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air links a report by a disreputable right-wing Islamophobic blog called “CBS News,” including this video:

“Domestic terrorists,” Chris Matthews says.

“Homegrown anarchists,” Geraldo Rivera says.

We don’t know jack shit yet, I say.

And yes, I’m still wearing my pajamas.

 


Category: Crime, Journalism, Massachusetts, Terrorism

When You Report Breaking News, Be Like Joe Friday: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’

Posted on | April 15, 2013 | 32 Comments

People doing live breaking news on TV have to fill hours and hours of air time. We understand this. But do they understand this?

At different points during the day, I had the TV on three different cable channels: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. None of them have covered themselves in glory — Allah has video of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yammering pointlessly — but Chris Matthews was atrocious beyond description.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to stick to the facts at Viral Read. Kinda busy being Editor in Chief on a day like this. It involves lots of cussing.

 

Category: Journalism, Terrorism

The Hope Industry

Posted on | April 15, 2013 | 4 Comments

What? You thought this was about philanthropic humanitarianism?

A boldfaced Obama name can rake in upward of $25,000 per month from a client just by dialing into a conference call and drafting a memo from time to time. Four clients means more than a million dollars a year with virtually no overhead. “You can run a business like that on an iPad and a cell phone,” says the former administration official. The godfather of this approach is ex-Clinton strategist Doug Sosnik, famous for conducting his business meetings in jeans from coffee shops and hotel lobbies.2 David Plouffe and Stephanie Cutter have both adopted the Sosnik model.

Has anybody found out whatever happened to Peggy Joseph?

Category: Barack Obama

Why Is the New York Times Now Campaigning for Anthony Weiner?

Posted on | April 15, 2013 | 10 Comments


First, the dishonest puff-piece feature, now a transparent “news” plug for Congressman Meat-Tweet. What’s going on here? I’ve got a few hunches about their motives, but no time to explain my theory just now. But there was time for Neutral Objective Journalism at ViralRead:

The New York Times has attempted to assist Weiner’s political rehabilitation, publishing an 8,000-word profile feature about the Democrat who resigned in June 2011 after he was caught sending photos of his bulging underwear to women via Twitter.That article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine was denounced by popular conservative blogger Ace of Spades as “a deliberate lie from start to finish” because of how the story by Jonathan Van Meter obscured the role of the late Andrew Breitbart in exposing Weiner. Breitbart.com was the first news organization to report on the so-called “WeinerGate” scandal. Van Meter’s article disparages Breitbart as a “not entirely reputable right-wing blogger.” Monday, Breitbart.com featured on its front page a lengthy account of WeinerGate excerpted from Andrew Breitbart’s book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World.

 

 


Category: Andrew Breitbart, Anthony Weiner, Democrats, Media Bias, New York Times, Scandal, Sex

How the Left’s Online Meme Machine Helped Create a Murder Myth in Texas

Posted on | April 15, 2013 | 42 Comments

MSNBC’s Martin Bashir interviews SPLC’s Mark Potok, April 1

Officials in Kaufman County, Texas, have arrested Eric Lyle Williams, a former justice of the peace, who is expected to be charged with the murder of three people — a crime to which MSNBC’s Chris Matthews devoted an eight-minute segment of his April 3 show, portraying the murders as the work of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.

How did this happen? On Sunday night, March 31, Kevin Krause of the Dallas Morning News filed a story that reported this:

The killing of the Kaufman County district attorney and his wife is likely to turn up the heat on the notorious Aryan Brotherhood of Texas prison gang.
Suspicion already had fallen on the Aryan Brotherhood after Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was gunned down Jan. 31 near the Kaufman County Courthouse.
Now, with the slaying of District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, at their home near Forney, law enforcement sources say authorities will pursue any possible connections between the cases and the violent white supremacist gang. . . .
An official with the U.S. Marshals Service recently said in a widely circulated email that the Aryan Brotherhood was the focus of its investigation into Hasse’s death.

So this was an actual suspicion, and we don’t yet know the name of the official who sent this “widely circulated email,” but that’s OK: You can contact Kevin Krause on Twitter and ask him to follow up, to figure out why taxpayer resources were wasted chasing that wild goose.

Let’s talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has amassed a $256 million bankroll through constant fear-mongering since 1971:

[The SPLC] has transformed itself into an all-purpose antihate crusader, labeling 1,007 different organizations across America at last count as “anti-gay,” “white nationalist,” “anti-Muslim,” “anti-immigrant,” or just plain hateful (one SPLC category is “general hate”). The SPLC put the FRC on its list of “anti-gay” organizations in 2010, and the SPLC’s “Hate Map” page, whose banner displays men in Nazi-style helmets giving Sieg Heil salutes, lists the [Family Research Council] among 14 hate groups headquartered in the District of Columbia.

Ask Anna Maria Hoffman what it was like that day last year when SPLC-inspired terrorist Floyd Corkins came to kill her and her friends. And then ask yourself, “Why did it take more than two months after the murder of Mark Haase for officials to arrest Eric Williams? Why was Williams left free for 10 weeks — during which Mike and Cynthia McLelland were also murdered — while investigators reportedly chased a wild-goose theory about the Aryan Brotherhood?”

On Jan. 31, the day after Haase was killed, Mark Potok posted a 1,300-word article entitled, “Texas Prosecutor ‘Involved’ in Aryan Brotherhood Investigation is Slain.” And on April 1, the Monday after the McLellands were murdered, Potok appeared on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC show:

BASHIR: “Speculation has quickly turned toward white supremacists. . . . Is this gang solely based on racial hatred? And how do you think they might be linked to these killings?”
POTOK: “Well, like most of these race-based prison gangs, they are fundamentally a criminal enterprise. . . .”

Now, I raise the subject of this interview for a specific reason. On Sunday night, March 31, when Kevin Krause filed his report at the Dallas Morning News, this was the headline:

Texas prison gang to get scrutiny
in double slaying, sources say

At 4 p.m. the next day, Aviv Shen posted an article at Think Progress with this headline:

The White Supremacist Group That May
Be Targeting Law Enforcement For Revenge

Notice a difference in those two headlines? Shen’s Think Progress article cited — you guessed, didn’t you? — Mark Potok’s Jan. 31 article, and Potok appeared that same day on Bashir’s MSNBC program which airs daily . . . at 4 p.m. ET. These coincidences are just so amazing, eh?

And within minutes of the publication of this Think Progress article, the story was picked up by other liberals online:

White supremacist group possibly
involved in slaying of Texas DA
— Emma Margolin, 4:36 p.m. ET

Aryan Brotherhood Of Texas Believed
To Be Behind DA Killings
— Alan Colmes, 4:51 p.m. ET

So by 5:10 p.m. ET, this was the Memeorandum thread:

If the latest news out of Kaufman County, Texas, is to be believed, this whole theory about “white supremacists” was entirely wrong — a complete waste of time, a misdirection from the actual culprit:

The day after the bodies of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife were found, an anonymous email went to county officials threatening another attack if the writer’s demands were not met.
Law enforcement authorities have since traced the threat to the personal computer of Eric Williams, a former justice of the peace who is now the prime suspect in the slayings. He is expected to be charged with capital murder as early as Tuesday, law enforcement authorities said Sunday.
Authorities on Saturday found numerous weapons inside a Seagoville storage unit linked to Williams as well as a car similar to the one seen leaving the McLellands’ neighborhood on the morning of the Easter weekend slayings.
“It’s a very good feeling when the pieces start to fall into place,” one law enforcement official said Sunday.

The pieces might have fallen into place earlier — Mark Haase’s murder might have been solved, and Williams arrested before McLelland was killed —  if law enforcement hadn’t wasted time chasing the “white supremacist” wild goose, when the D.A. himself tried to tell them who murdered Mark Haase:

County Judge Bruce Wood said Sunday that McLelland repeatedly told him that McLelland believed Williams was behind Hasse’s slaying. The first time was in the emergency room in the hours after Hasse was shot down by a mysterious gunman dressed in black.
“He was distraught,” Wood said. “He very pointedly said to me, ‘I know who did this.’ I said, ‘Well, who, Mike?’ He said, ‘Well, Eric Williams.’”
McLelland, who worked for years as a diagnostic psychologist, described Williams as “a narcissistic psychopath” during that conversation and others. Wood said McLelland never elaborated on why he thought Williams was involved.
On March 27, Wood said he met with McLelland in the county judge’s office. “I said, ‘Are you still convinced that it’s Eric Williams?’” Wood recalled. “He said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Mike McLelland was shot dead four days later, which gave Mark Potok a chance to go on MSNBC, but I guarantee you that Martin Bashir and Chris Matthews won’t say another word about this crime now that we know the truth. Because they don’t give a damn about truth.

 

Category: Crime, Media Bias

Teenage Girls on Trial in Canada for Running Prostitution Ring

Posted on | April 14, 2013 | 11 Comments

You think kids are bad in America? In Ottawa, three teenage girls are accused of running a prostitution ring that victimized nine other girls, some as young as 13:

The three Ottawa girls, two who were 15 and one who was 16 when they were arrested, have pleaded not guilty to a total of 74 charges that include:

Human trafficking.
Abduction.
Procuring for prostitution.
Forcible confinement.
Robbery.
Sexual assault.
Assault.
Uttering threats.
Printing and publishing child pornography.

It took about 20 minutes to read the charges on the trial’s first day.

How bad was it? Here are just a few paragraphs from a news article in the Ottawa Citizen:

The two accused 15-year-olds also provided alcohol and marijuana to a 14- and 15-year-old. The 14-year-old remembered being passed out in a bathtub and was photographed naked; the 15-year-old was taken to a basement where her clothes were ripped off and she was photographed nude and in her underwear, Lalande alleged.
The 15-year-old victim was also beaten so badly that her injuries were still visible in police photographs weeks later.
“Ain’t no problem like a hoe problem,” tweeted one of the 15-year-old accused that night. “I’ve got hoe problemssss.”
In earlier Tweets, the same 15-year-old accused claimed she was the “female bill gates.”
“I’m getting to tha money, n tha money getting to me,” she boasted. . . .
Ottawa police Det. Carolyn Botting testified police found clothes, a resumé and other belongings from one of the complainants in the bedroom of one of the 15-year-old accused.
The purple walls were covered with messages written in marker, including “sex is like chocolate” and “money over everything $.”

From the feminist blog Jezebel:

The accused allegedly used social media to lure their victims to an apartment in  a social housing complex, according to evidence obtained from the girls’ phones  and computers. Once the victims arrived, they would strip them, steal their  belongings, and then photograph them, beating them if they didn’t comply. The  accused would then force them, through threats or physical coercion, to meet  with johns. At least two of the victims were raped by johns . . .

Samantha Escobar at The Gloss notes that “the teen pimps’ identities were an ‘open secret,’ meaning hundreds of other teens knew  about the violence and assaults.” Escobar is amazed that these Canadian girls didn’t seem to know right from wrong, as if we didn’t have any problem like that in America, and not just with teenage girls.

 

Category: Canada, Crime, Culture, Sex

GO, NICK SEARCY, GO!

Posted on | April 14, 2013 | 23 Comments

Because I seldom watch TV except for news and documentaries, when Ace of Spades started going on about Justified star Nick Searcy, my reaction was like, “So what?” My indifference ended today when I saw how Searcy opened up a giant-sized can of whupass on pro-choicers claiming to be shocked by the Kermit Gosnell case:

Category: Abortion, Celebrities
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