27 February 2009 @ 8:27AM >>
Last week, I covered the Borders bookstore in Dallas which appeared to have a display of various Barack Obama items under a “Religion” sign in the children’s section.
It turns out those pictures were authentic, as Borders has now admitted.
After seeing the photos, reader T. Williams contacted Borders, and he forwarded their response to me. I followed up by contacting Borders and verifying their e-mail, which they acknowledged:
Dear Evan,
Thank you for contacting Borders.
That email in fact did come from Borders.com, I have forwarded a copy to you.
First, let me underscore that Borders is politically neutral—we take no political stand whatsoever and remain committed to providing our customers with a deep selection of titles that appeal to a wide range of views, tastes and interests. We stand by our customers right to choose what to read and what to buy.
We have no displays in our stores nationwide featuring books about Barack Obama under the heading of Religion in our Childrens sections or anywhere else. What is captured here in the photo is a simple display error made by one store and one store only. In this particular location, the staff expanded the display of childrens books in the category of History and Social Studies horizontally across two display areas and simply did not realize that they had left the Religion category sign up above the newly expanded display, which happened to feature titles related to President Barack Obama. Once alerted to this error, the store promptly removed the Religion category sign. This was a simple oversight and is no way indicative of any political slant on the part of Borders nationwide or even in this particular store. I am sure now that you are aware of the facts, you will agree that it is misleading to continue to circulate this photo and state that it is indicative of a political stance or campaign on our partthat just isnt so. It is my hope that you’ll come back and visit us again soon at your local store and see for yourself.
26 February 2009 @ 8:59AM >>
For the last few years, and especially during the presidential campaign, the Guantanamo Bay detention center was held up as evidence that America had become a modern-day Nazi Germany.
Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday the Guantanamo detention center is a well-run, professional facility that will be difficult to close - but he is still going to do it.
[...]
Closing Guantanamo, he said, “will not be an easy process. It’s one we will do in a way that ensures that people are treated fairly and that the American people are kept safe.”
Exit question: if Guanatano is a professional, well-run facility whose occupants are just going to be moved to other facilities anyway, what is the purpose—other than pure symbolism—of closing Guantanamo?
25 February 2009 @ 8:56AM >>
I’ll be at CPAC tomorrow on a panel at the Conservatism 2.0 Conference. We’ll be discussing bias in the media and higher education.
Saturday, February 21st @ 3:00PM
Monday, February 23rd @ 5:00PM
Tuesday, March 17th @ 9:00PM
Wednesday, March 18th @ midnight
Wednesday, March 25th @ 5:00PM
Monday, March 30th @ 2:00AM
(all times Eastern)
The Documentary Channel is available on the Dish Network as well as on some cable carriers. In addition, some public television stations simulcast the Documentary Channel during certain parts of the day.
For example, I found out after the last Documentary Channel run of Indoctrinate U that the PBS affiliate WNYE (cable channel 25 here in New York City) aired the film. WNYE carries the Documentary Channel on Monday nights and Saturday afternoons. One of the other large simulcasters is KBDI in Denver. Check your local listings against the times above for more information.
In accepting the film, the festival’s reviewers wrote:
Well-edited, good looking titles, technically pulled together well so there’s no major problems that distract you from looking at it. Content: About the problems of political correctness on college campuses today and how they often impinge on professors and students’ individual rights of expression. Great story and content with plenty of examples to draw from, mostly talking heads interviews with archival footage cut in, well-shot film that could easily play on PBS or something along those lines. A wry, hard hitting documentary about the effect of the campus culture wars on individual rights, diversity of opinion, and the life of the mind in American higher education. Very professionally made. Great subject matter, we found it very interesting.
Indoctrinate U will be shown at the festival on Tuesday, March 24th at 6:00PM at the Village East Cinema at 2nd Avenue and 12th Street.
19 February 2009 @ 9:05AM >>
More reporters than usual are going into politics and government these days, and—surprise, surprise—they usually end up serving Democrats. But of course, this has nothing at all to do with the reporters’ ideology:
In three months since Election Day, at least a half-dozen prominent journalists have taken jobs working for the federal government.
Journalists, including some of those who’ve jumped ship, say it’s better to have a solid job in government than a shaky job - or none at all - in an industry that’s fading fast.
But conservative critics answer with a question: Would journalists be making the same career choices if John McCain had beaten Barack Obama in November?
“Obama bails out more media water-carriers,” conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote upon hearing that the Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman is taking a job with the Obama administration.
[...]
As for other reporters making similar moves, Zuckman said that she didn’t think there would be so many “if the industry were stable.”
But it isn’t, and there are.
On Tuesday, Cox’s Scott Shepard joined Sen. John Kerry’s office as a speechwriter, becoming the second journalist this year to take a job under the Massachusetts Democrat. Investigative reporter Doug Frantz is now chief investigator under the Kerry-helmed Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A week before Zuckman announced that she’s headed for Obama’s Transportation Department, her Tribune colleague Peter Gosselin signed on as speechwriter for Obama’s treasury secretary, Tim Geithner.
In December, Jay Carney relinquished his perch as Time’s Washington bureau chief to become Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director. Warren Bass left the Washington Post’s Outlook section to write speeches and advise Dr. Susan Rice at the United Nations. Daniel W. Reilly left Politico to become communications director for Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) Linda Douglass left the National Journal for the Obama campaign back in May and is expected to become assistant secretary for public affairs in the department of Health and Human Services.
[...]
“I didn’t leave journalism easily and I’ll always think of myself as a reporter, with a notepad tucked in his back pocket and a lot of unanswered questions,” Frantz told Politico last month.
But even if Frantz views himself as a reporter, he’s no longer working for the Newhouse, Sulzberger or Chandler families. Instead, a Democratic politician signs the paychecks.
Frantz isn’t alone in downplaying the partisan aspect of his new job. Maybe it’s based on a lifetime of nonpartisan conditioning, but many of the reporters who’ve made the leap to government seem hesitant to admit that they’re no longer impartial observers.
“This is a Democratic administration; we’re obviously on that side of the aisle, but I don’t see this as a partisan job at all,” Carney told the Times a couple weeks back.
18 February 2009 @ 9:02AM >>
Islamic law is gaining ground all over the globe. It’s not just happening in places like Pakistan, where Sharia is now the law of the land in some areas, or in India, where a newspaper editor was arrested for offending Muslims.
The founder of an upstate New York TV station aimed at countering Muslim stereotypes has been arrested on suspicion of killing his wife, who was beheaded, authorities said.
Because there’s no better way to counter Muslim stereotypes than to behead someone.
CNN adds that the man, Muzzammil Hassan, has confessed to the murder of his wife, who had filed for divorce a few days earlier.
On the anniversary of the interview in which [the Archbishop of Canterbury] Dr Rowan Williams said it “seems inevitable” that some parts of sharia would be enshrined in this country’s legal code, he claimed “a number of fairly senior people” now take the same view.
He added that there is a “drift of understanding” towards what he was saying, and that the public sees the difference between letting Muslim courts decide divorces and wills, and allowing them to rule on criminal cases and impose harsh punishments.
However critics insist that family disputes must be dealt with by civil law rather than according to religious principles, and claim the Archbishop’s comments have only helped the case of extremists while making Muslim women worse off, because they do not have equal rights under Islamic law.
[...]
[I]n July [the Archibishop] was supported by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, who was then the Lord Chief Justice, while it later emerged that five sharia courts are already operating mediation systems under the Arbitration Act, and that the Government allows Islamic tribunals to settle the custody and financial affairs of divorcing couples and send their judgements to civil courts for approval.
[...]
But Douglas Murray, the director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “He has started a process which is deeply dangerous, damaging to Britain and to Muslim women in Britain.
“It was a wicked move because it undermines the progressives and gives succour to the extremists.
“How does the Archbishop of Canterbury know, sitting in Lambeth Palace, that a woman in Bolton has volunteered to give up half her inheritance to her brother?”
Perhaps the creeping implementation of Sharia law explains why Geert Wilders, a Dutch Member of Parliament, is no longer allowed to even set foot in Great Britain. He was arrested on the tarmac and unceremoniously booted out of the country:
Wilders is a hate figure to Muslims in Britain and worldwide because of his 15-minute film, “Fitna,” which blames Islam itself for terrorist crimes by Muslim fanatics from the London subway bombings to the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
[...]
British governments have rarely used their arbitrary power to keep dangerous foreigners out of the country. Indeed, London has become known as Londonistan precisely because the Brits let Middle Eastern extremists establish and run their organizations there.
[...]
So why ban Wilders? His film may be misleading, alarmist or just plain wrong. But it merely runs images of Muslim-linked terrorism side-by-side with Koranic passages or speeches by Muslim clerics justifying such crimes. He isn’t inciting anyone to murder or riot.
You may object that “Fitna” is one-sided or the Koranic quotations are wrenched from their context. If such criticisms have merit, surely the correct response is to debate with Wilders, not ban him.
The government, however, surely considered instead the different likely responses of British Muslims and other Brits.
When the average Londoner reads in The Sun about how Abu Hamza turned the Finsbury Park mosque into a terrorist recruiting office, he doesn’t join a mob outside the mosque threatening to burn it down. He mutters that the world is going to the dogs and turns the page.
But mobs of extremist Muslims have marched through London in recent years inciting murder. And Labor peer Lord Ahmed’s alleged threat of disorder in this case - to lead 10,000 Muslims to prevent Wilders from showing his film in Parliament - was very plausible. So Wilders was kept out.
Don’t just blame the victim - punish him. In effect, the government has enforced a fatwa on “Fitma” - without, as the hapless foreign secretary admitted, even watching the 15-minute film.
All this reflects an entrenched establishment attitude that the Muslim community is highly combustible and must be appeased. And, because Muslim extremists know this to be the official view, they’re likely to keep inventing pretexts for threats and riots.
The Brits, asked to choose between multiculturalism and freedom, will choose by degrees to be unfree.
So while Wilders is not allowed in Great Britain for the crime of criticizing Islam, threatening to behead anyone who insults Islam is apparently not a crime in Britain at all.
17 February 2009 @ 8:14AM >>
The website Texas Rainmaker posted a couple of reader-submitted photos from a Borders bookstore in Dallas. Here’s a cropped version of one of them:
Apparently, this display was in the children’s section.
The photos do not appear to be manipulated and the particular store where the photos were taken was identified in the website’s post. Assuming the photos are real, I can only hope that whoever placed the Obama books in the Religion section has a highly developed sense of irony.
13 February 2009 @ 9:32AM >>
Stephen Bates at Slatesuggests a new business model for the faltering newspaper industry: declare itself a religion. Although he refers to this idea as “a modest proposal,” it is far less obviously satirical than the Jonathan Swift essay those words reference.
The media covers politics with all the objectivity of a missionary describing his faith, and they treated the election and inauguration of President Obama with the sort of dispassion you’d expect of disciples who just witnessed someone rise from the dead.
Our press has been a religion for years. They might as well admit it now so they can claim the tax breaks.
10 February 2009 @ 9:09AM >>
Being a member of the media isn’t much different from being an Obama campaign worker. The International Herald Tribunereports:
Republicans have long accused mainstream journalists of being on the payroll of President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, a common refrain of favoritism, especially from those on the losing end of an election.
But this year the accusation has a new twist: In some notable cases it has become true, with several prominent journalists now on the payrolls of Obama and Democratic congressional leaders.
An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.
I know it’s unfair to characterize the entire media as Obama sycophants. There are still some hard-nosed journalists out there, bravely speaking truth to power. For example, there’s Judith Warner of the “All The News That’s Fit to Print” New York Times:
The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.
The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes - because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”
[...]
Many women - not too surprisingly - were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.
Now that the Obama presidency has transformed venerable news outlets like the New York Times into a poor imitations of Teen Beat, and with a former SportsCenter newscaster now Obama’s main cheerleader on the cable outlet of NBC News, I guess it’s not that bizarre to discover the Washington Post has transformed itself into a sports publication.
Why else, during President Obama’s press conference on the economy, would the Post’s White House reporter waste a question by asking:
What is your reaction to Alex Rodriguez’s admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?
I’ve seen more serious reporting from Perez Hilton.
I don’t know why news outlets still bother employing political reporters. I guess the only reason is that there are still a handful of people in Washington who need oversight. They’re called Republicans, and they ain’t gonna bash themselves.
9 February 2009 @ 8:51AM >>
According to Financial Week, Congressman Barney Frank, the Democrat who serves as the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, wants to limit executive pay of all companies:
Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.
“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.
He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.
5 February 2009 >>
Evading taxes seems to be a prerequisite for being nominated to an Obama Administration position. Although a couple of recent nominees withdrew their names after getting caught with unpaid tax bills, one major appointee—Timothy Geithner—is now the U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Add this to names like prominent Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel—the subject of a recent Brain Terminal video—and it explains why Democrats reliably favor raising taxes: they don’t pay them in the first place.
Suckers like us, however, do have to pay taxes.
Now, a blog called Where’s the Change? has a novel idea for a little civil disobedience to express your outrage about this double standard. All U.S. currency bears the signature of the Treasury Secretary. The proposal is to overwrite Timothy Geithner’s signature on bills with the words “Tax Cheat” (or, as one commenter suggests, “Obama’s Tax Cheat”).
For high-volume disobedience, you can find a vendor and buy a customized rubber stamp. Otherwise, a thick felt-tipped pen will do the trick.
2 February 2009 @ 8:58AM >>
During the Superbowl last night, NBC News was running ads for the Today Show touting an interview with President Obama. The ads contained a revealing line saying that Obama would enjoy “home field advantage” during the interview. In other words, NBC News has finally admitting to being nothing more than Obama cheerleaders.
They are not alone.
On the night of the Inauguration, The New York Times did its part to rally the true believers by handing out buttons with its logo prominently displayed beneath the profile of the new president.
Not to be outdone, CNN is selling t-shirts with the caption, “Obama raises hand, lifts a nation.”
And the Detroit Free Press is asking you to “see Obama in yourself” and send them a picture of your face behind a half-cutout Obama mask.
Perhaps the editors of the Free Press were worried that Obama worship wasn’t quite cult-like enough.
I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. As Helen Thomas—a White House reporter since the 1950s—recently said, “I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, I’ll be one ‘til I die, what else should a reporter be when you see so much and when we have such great privilege and access to the truth?”
No surprise. Reporters are liberal, so they’ll favor a liberal president. But given the financial state of the news industry, perhaps political reporters can be laid off for the next for years, and the media can simply re-print White House press releases.
It would save a lot of money, and the resulting press coverage wouldn’t be any different.
1 February 2009 >>
Here’s a TV report from 1981 predicting the future of newspapers. What’s interesting is how much of it misses the mark...and how much of it doesn’t.
