Archive for the ‘Media Watch’ Category

San Bernardino Gunman “Devout Muslim”

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015

Evidently the two San Bernardino gunmen were Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, both now dead from police gunfire. Farook’s name came up early from Twitter users listening to the police scanner.

Farook was evidently a state environmental employee.

To the surprise of absolutely no one except liberals, Farook was a devout Muslim. Says his father: “He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back. He’s Muslim.”

Also: “Co-workers said Farook had traveled to Saudi Arabia and returned with a new wife he met online, according to reports.”

Yes, his motives are an insoluble mystery.

More than one observer noted that this attack doesn’t fit many classic patterns. And indeed it doesn’t.

But “workplace violence” incidents don’t end like this one did. “Honey, San Bernardino County has insulted me for the last time! Let’s both of us load up with guns and our already-prepared pipe bombs and go down there and shoot every last one of them, leaving our baby behind!”

Jim Geraghty has similar thoughts. “There was nothing impulsive about this.”

A law enforcement source told Fox News that the couple were each carrying an AR-15 rifle and a pistol when they were shot and killed by police after a brief chase in their black SUV about 2 miles from the initial shooting site. The source said the vehicle also contained so-called “rollout bags” with multiple pipe bombs, as well as additional ammunition. The couple also had GoPro cameras strapped to their body armor and wore tactical clothing, including vests stuffed with ammunition magazines.

“That’s a military tactic for a sustained fight,” the source told Fox News of the rollout bags.

That’s the sort of thing you bring if you want to make videos to terrorize other people, and rally others to their cause or ideology… it also would explain why they left the scene instead of staying to shoot it out with police at the social services facility. They intended to live to tell the tale, at least for a while.

This was a jihad attack Farook had obviously been planning (or at least contemplating) for a long time.

Blathering about climate change, passing pointless gun control legislation, and letting in more “Syrian refugees” will do absolutely nothing to prevent the next Syed Farook from going out in a blaze of radical Islamic martyrdom.

CNN Reporter Took Marching Orders From Clinton’s State Department

Wednesday, November 25th, 2015

Our free, independent press does what our free, independent always seems to do: take marching orders from the Democratic Party:

Thanks to some fabulous work by American Commitment’s Phil Kerpen digging through on Tuesday e-mails from Clinton State Department staffer Philippe Reines, he found that suspended CNN global affairs correspondent Elise Labott had communicated with Reines on multiple occasions to the point of taking marching orders over what she tweeted.

Amidst the e-mails obtained by Gawker (which included Politico’s Mike Allen promising soft pieces on Chelsea Clinton), Kerpen unearthed a series of instances where Labott (in words of Kerpen) “tweet[ed] on request” for the Clinton camp, ranging from so-called acts of transparency in her State Department to when exactly Clinton would depart her post in 2013.

This will no doubt be a great shock to anyone who didn’t already consider CNN an extension of the Democratic Party…

This Week in Jihad Part 2

Tuesday, November 24th, 2015

More links from the big bucket of Jihad news:

  • Obama’s Pentagon: We’re winning the war against the Islamic State! Whistleblowers: That’s because you’re cooking the books.
  • Scenes from the Pretend War: Obama blocks 75% of airstrikes against the Islamic State. Forget dying for a mistake, Obama is willing to risk American lives for a sham war he has no intention of winning.
  • Greeks say that it’s virtually impossible to screen terrorists out among incoming “refugees.”
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali says that feminists are focused on “trivial bullshit” rather than fighting real threats to women like radical Islam.
  • Third Paris stadium jihadist identified as a “refugee” who came through Greece.
  • Syrian refugees: neither Syrians nor refugees. Discuss…
  • Obama’s approach to the Islamic State is entirely too wimpy for that noted right-wing troglodyte war-monger Dianne Feinstein.
  • MSNBC’s poster boy for how horrible the no-fly list has been arrested in Turkey for being part of an Islamic State cell. It’s almost as though the liberal media have been lying to us about Islam being a religion of peace…
  • Must be frustrating for the Islamic State to repeatedly detail the Koranic justifications for their actions, only for liberals to go: “No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
  • Larry Correia doesn’t foresee a happy ending:

    Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.

  • Cornyn in the Klan? Bullshit.

    Tuesday, November 3rd, 2015

    The latest MSM rumor in the “too good to check as long as it smears a Republican” file is the accusation (supposedly from the hacker group Anonymous) that four Republican Senators, including Texas’ John Cornyn, are secretly members of the Klan.

    Bullshit.

    I’m not a huge fan of Cornyn, whose turned into bit of a squish, but I’m not even remotely buying that a guy who was born in 1952, and who went to school at Trinity University and St. Mary’s Law, got anywhere near the Klan, which was already a joke by the 1970s. Even assuming Cornyn was An Evil Racist (he’s not), unlike West Virginia in the early 1940s, the Klan was not on any ambitious politician or lawyer’s plans by the 1970s, and the only people joining by then were strictly white trash rural losers.

    Moreover, we’re given to understand that these names were culled from email membership lists, which suggest that Cornyn joined, when, 1995 or so? When he was already on the Texas Supreme Court? Because joining a bunch of white trash losers was totally more important than avoiding scandals and winning elections.

    Double bullshit.

    Mediaite further debunks the idea:

    To begin with, the Ku Klux Klan is pathetically small compared to the overall white male population of the South and Midwest. Membership estimates range from 3,000 to 5,000. The likelihood that four separate members of the Klan could find their way into the ranks of the Senate are astronomically low, even if you assume that your average Klansman is coherent enough to manage it (spoilers: they aren’t).

    Or to put another way, you’d have to believe that a Klansman is roughly 10,000 times more likely to become a senator than the average American. Or, put even another way, there are supposedly twice as many Klansmen as Princeton grads in the Senate. Now that’s an alumni network.

    But even a cursory look at the lives and voting records of the accused should have clued people in. One, for example, voted for Martin Luther King Jr. Day to become a national holiday, a proposal that a sizeable minority actually opposed back in 1983. Why would a Klansman go out of his way to vote for a holiday that promotes racial harmony, instead of joining the 90 Congressmen who voted against it?

    Another of the accused senators is Catholic. While the Klan’s anti-black activities are much more rampant and widespread, they are also virulently anti-Catholic.

    Oh, and did I mention one of the accused mayors is openly gay? I don’t think that’s the kind of “flaming crosses” the Klan has in mind.

    As Ayn Rand once noted: “The Ku Klux Klan is not a Republican issue or problem; its members, traditionally, are Democrats; for the Republicans to repudiate their vote would be like repudiating the vote of Tammany Hall, which is not theirs to repudiate.” As far as the historical record shows, Sen. Robert Byrd (Democrat, West Virginia) is the only U.S. Senator elected after World War II to have been a member of the Klan.

    Even the most base liberal propagandist should be ashamed to spread such pathetically laughable bullshit…

    LinkSwarm for October 30, 2015

    Friday, October 30th, 2015

    Right now Austin is enjoying our traditional “two weeks of flooding following three months of drought” fall. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • “In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him.”
  • Paul Ryan elected Speaker of the House. If Ryan decides to govern as an actual Republican, he could be a very effective Speaker…
  • The IRS has Stingray cell phone surveillance gear. Get ready for a whole new round of Tea Party audits…
  • Speaking of the IRS, the House of Representatives is justified in impeaching IRS chief John Koskinen.
  • At the most recent Republican Presidential debate, Sen. Marco Rubio said the H1-B visa program is badly in need of reform. One tiny problem: Sen. Rubio’s own H1-B bill doesn’t implement any of the reforms demanded by Presidential Candidate Rubio. “It does not require recruitment of American workers. It does not require employers to ‘pay more than you would pay someone else’…Rubio’s bill would provide Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his comrades ‘a huge increase in the supply of lower-cost foreign guest workers so they can undercut and replace American workers.'” Indeed, Rubio’s bill “would triple the number of H1-B foreign workers admitted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Get ready for steep ObamaCare price hikes for 2016.
  • Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition is starting to come apart thanks to the refugee crisis.
  • Venezuela is selling gold to cover bond payments. (Hat tip: Commonsense and Wonder.)
  • Al-Shabaab Islamic militant group in Somalia pledge loyalty to the Islamic State.
  • The Islamic State schools ban: “math, music, philosophy, history, French and geography as incompatible with Islam.”
  • Not news: Journalist in Sweden gets stoned. News: The wrong kind of stoned.
  • Teacher’s hate Common Core. The only people that seem to love it are Washington bureaucrats and Jeb Bush…
  • Speaking of Jeb, He has not succeeded this year, and there is no particular reason to believe he will…Jeb just isn’t very good at this.”
  • “Even beyond the fact that Bush has spent almost a year and ended up among the statistical noise despite all of his organizational and financial advantages, this all but proved that he’s simply not a good enough candidate to run in the general election.”
  • Jeb Bush’s campaign also hasn’t knocked on any doors in Iowa.
  • Ben Carson’s campaign is working with other Republican Presidential campaigns to extract their debates from the liberal clutches of the MSM.”
  • How to fix the Republican debates: “First, cancel the rest of the debates. Instead, announce that the RNC will host the debates and pick the panel of questioners. Allow any news organization that wishes to broadcast it.”
  • A look at the Russian BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicle.
  • John Wiley Price trail delayed again.
  • Reminder: Most acts at SXSW don’t get paid.
  • Feminism is “a War Against Human Nature aimed at using the coercive power of government to bring about an androgynous ‘equality’ that ignores the actual differences between men and women. Feminism is a totalitarian movement to destroy civilization as we know it — and feminists say so themselves.”
  • Salon’s pro-pedophile agenda:

  • How to stamp out Cultural Marxism in a single generation.
  • Flash is dying. Netcraft confirms it…
  • Ted Cruz Hits Homerun Slamming MSM

    Thursday, October 29th, 2015

    Ted Cruz hits one out of the park at the latest GOP debate by slamming the MSM’s promotion of trivia over substance:

    Frank Luntz (insert grain of salt caution here) says the line received the biggest positive response of any debate line since he started polling focus groups in 1996…

    How SNL Fluffs the Hillary Campaign

    Monday, October 19th, 2015

    Saturday Night Live did a skit on the Democratic Presidential debate:

    On the surface it’s a skit that ostensibly takes a shot at everyone equally (and even touches on Hillary’s email scandal). However, take a look at one central visual fact:

  • Hillary Clinton, who is 67 years old (68 on October 26) is played by Kate McKinnon, who is 31 years old.
  • Bernie Sanders, who is 74, is played by Larry David, who is 68.
  • So Sanders is played by someone Hillary Clinton’s age (old), and Hillary Clinton is played by someone half her age (young). The skit is constructed to reinforce the false Sanders old, Clinton young impression, which suggests the reason why SNL choose non-cast-member Larry David to play Sanders. David did write for the show during the 1984—1985 season (where he worked with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who he would later cast in Seinfeld); to put it another way, David worked on SNL the same year McKinnon was born.

    LinkSwarm for October 16, 2015

    Friday, October 16th, 2015

    Enjoy a complimentary Friday LinkSwarm, on me!

  • Kentucky ObamaCare exchange goes out of business, the fifth one to do so nationwide.
  • Or maybe the sixth, since Tennessee’s is pining for the fjords as well.
  • Why Hillary’s email scandal (still) matters: “Ignoring the fact that ordinary people are deciding that Hillary Clinton is an untrustworthy liar won’t actually make that issue go away for the Democrats.”
  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz continues to work her special brand of magic at the DNC. “I’ve begun to deeply question whether she has the leadership skills to get us through the election. This is not just about how many debates we have. This is one of a series of long-running events in which the chair has not shown the political judgment that is needed.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Bernie Sanders supporters are shocked to find their pro-Sanders/anti-Hillary comments being deleted from CNN.
  • A majority of American Muslims want Sharia law, and 60% of young Muslims are more loyal to Islam than America.
  • You’re a Muslim scholar who lost to a Christian in debate. Do you: A.) Shrug, B. Practice, or C.) Kill the Christian?
  • Has the Obama Administration noticed that Iran’s parliament has actually rejected the text of his treaty? (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
  • Obama withdraws last U.S. carrier group from the Middle East. Evidently even pretending to fight ISIS has just gotten too hard for him…
  • Why does does the town of Alvin, Texas (population 25,000) want to put it’s property holders on the hook for $1 billion to build the most expensive schools in the state?
  • Another anti-gay hate crime turns out to be a hoax. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Journalists continue their lazy, inaccurate reporting on #GamerGate.
  • LinkSwarm for October 9, 2015

    Friday, October 9th, 2015

    If you want to attend tomorrow’s blogshoot/meetup/tweetup, try to drop me a line (lawrenceperson at gmail dot com) so I’ll know how many will attend.

    Now the LinkSwarm:

  • ObamaCare co-ops are going bankrupt.
  • Thanks to The Magic Power of Socialism™ and an estimated 800% inflation rate, Venezuela is now the most expensive place to live in the world, at least going by the official exchange rate. “Depending on which exchange rate you use, Venezuela can either be one of the cheapest countries in the world, or the most expensive.”
  • Democrats last year: “All those gun-toting white racist redneck freaks from Jesusland will be lining up to vote for Hillary!” Pollsters this year: Not so much.
  • Hillary Clinton now totally opposes the very Tran-Pacific Partnership she helped negotiate.
  • “Let’s take Malcolm Turnbull at his word that it’s only “a very very small percentage of violent extremist individuals”. What is the actual percentage? In the aforementioned Malmo, where up to a thousand mostly young male “refugees” arrive each day, suppose the “very very small percentage” is two per cent. That’s 20 brand new “violent extremists” per day. During the Northern Irish “Troubles”, MI5 estimated that there were no more than a hundred active members of the IRA at any one time – that’s to say, people actively involved in shooting and killing. So Malmo is taking in the equivalent of the entire IRA every week.”
  • How spree killers get their weapons. Or, once again, the New York Times twists facts to fit the narrative.
  • Speaking of the Times, this is what happens when the professional editors and proof-readers edit and proofread professional writers.
  • Wendy Davis thinks the reason she lost is she didn’t talk about abortion enough. Sure, Wendy, that’s it. Go with that… (Hat tip: Perry vs. World).
  • The Nairobi mall attack revisited. If this report is to be believed, armed civilians actually contained the threat, then army and security forces showed up and promptly managed to start shooting each other.
  • “In zombie world, the man who relies on the government for his safety will be zombie chow in short order…In zombieland, there are three kinds of people: those who know how to use guns, those who learn how to use guns, and zombies.”
  • Remembering the Yom Kippur War.
  • LinkSwarm for October 2, 2015

    Friday, October 2nd, 2015

    How about a short LinkSwarm to get the Friday LinkSwarm back on Friday?

  • Bernie Sanders roughly matches Hillary’s fundraising total. Man, she’s going to need to start raking in a lot more foreign bribes…
  • This just in: Jeb Bush’s poll numbers suck.
  • “So we know that 99% of the data has been adjusted, and we know that over 80% of the reported warming in the lower 48 States over the entire 20th Century was due to adjustments – the raw data simply do not show this warming.”
  • Mark Steyn offers another dispatch from post-Jewish Europe. Bonus: Facebook is going to “do more” to suppress anti-“refugee” posts.
  • Islamic State fighters start defecting because ISIS can’t make payroll. Time to consider marrying Len Trexler…
  • Obama Administration grants asylum to 1,519 foreigners with terrorist ties.
  • Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he’s no longer bound by Oslo Accords. Because why should you let a little piece of paper get in the way of the all-important task of exterminating the Jews?
  • Dear Brookings Institute scholars: Please note that you’re not allowed to have opinions different from those of Elizabeth Warren. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
  • The Oregon shooter was a mixed race skinhead who targeted Christians. By the time the media gets done, he’ll be an “angry white man.”
  • Five benefits from owning guns. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll on Instapundit.
  • Eight members of Iran’s women’s soccer team are actually men.