J

ust in case you are casting about today for more evidence of the self-serving immorality and unethical behavior of the labor union movement, look no further than the usually union-loving NY Times, which reports from the middle of nowhere:

When a company called Ausra filed plans for a big solar power plant in California, it was deluged with demands from a union group that it study the effect on creatures like the short-nosed kangaroo rat and the ferruginous hawk.

By contrast, when a competitor, BrightSource Energy, filed plans for an even bigger solar plant that would affect the imperiled desert tortoise, the same union group, California Unions for Reliable Energy, raised no complaint. Instead, it urged regulators to approve the project as quickly as possible.

One big difference between the projects? Ausra had rejected demands that it use only union workers to build its solar farm, while BrightSource pledged to hire labor-friendly contractors.

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

Come to think of it, this is also a wonderful example of how environmental laws are exploited by special interest groups – unions, NIMBYs, environmentalists – for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment.

Always ready to tell real thigh-slappers for his client’s benefit, Marc Joseph, a lawyer for California Unions for Reliable Energy, told the NYT:

“We’ve been tarred and feathered more than once on this issue.  We don’t walk away from environmental issues.”

Uh huh.  The chairman of the union group was more frank:

“You only have so much land that can accept solar power plants.  So the question is, should that land be used for low-paid jobs or should that land be used for high-paid jobs?”

How about using it for jobs that will allow the project to be profitable, and that are gained fairly, not through regulatory extortion?  How about not burdening potential future employers with 144 data requests,  as the union group did recently with one company that refused to sign a union labor agreement. The requests asked questions like how many man-hours would be dedicated to tracking desert tortoise, and which role each individual on the tracking team played – all matters of great interest to any union.

For every charge of “astroturf” community relations campaigns by corporations, there are a dozen “greenmailing” schemes like these – but greenies, NIMBYs and union thugs usually get away with them. Kudos to the NYT for covering the story.

7 Comments »

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

T

hat’s the lead of Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today – a column you just knew was coming.  You can imagine the gleeful smirk on his face as his fingers smashed away at his keyboard.  But Krugman’s just turning over his liberal outrage engine; the howling rpms build from there, as he rushes to build the “conservative political establishment” as junior Von Brunns:

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Interestingly, Krugman’s column is almost identially mirrored by Alex Kingsbury in U.S. News:

A month before a suspected white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in downtown Washington and opened fire, the Department of Homeland Security warned that domestic right-wing extremism was the most pressing domestic terrorist threat that the country faced.

Conservatives were outraged that the DHS analysts had singled out antiabortion and antitax radicals for scrutiny. But the report was part of a series that DHS compiles on domestic dangers from all sides of the political spectrum, an area that’s taken a back seat to overseas threats.

A series of recent incidents shows the prescience of those reports and illustrates the worrying reality that terrorism often comes from inside the homeland.

And that’s hardly the end of it.  Just check out the piling on by the Left at Memeorandum.

While Kingsbury mentions the assassination of Pvt. William Long, an act of terror most mainly marginalized media managed to report without mentioning the word “Islam,” Krugman fails to mention Long at all.  To his credit, Kingsbury approached the subject pretty fairly and didn’t go on to condemn mainstream Republicans, as Krugman did.  I thought this excerpt from Kingsbury’s piece was particularly even-handed:

In another recent high-profile incident, George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed legal abortions, was shot and killed last Sunday as he stood in the aisle of his church. Scott Roeder, the man charged in Tiller’s murder, echoes the DHS report on right-wing extremism. Believed to have been a member of an antigovernment militia in Montana during the mid-1990s, Roeder had a history of railing against taxes and abortion, according to news reports. “We can see from these incidents that the U.S. is not immune from these types of attacks and that a lone gunman or cell can kill just as effectively,” says Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “But it also shows that those operating outside an organized terrorist network lack the training and tradecraft to make their attacks either sustained or a systemic threat.” After the killing, the U.S. Marshals Service was instructed to increase security at the country’s abortion clinics.

There was no call to reinforce security at military recruiting stations, however, after Abdulhakim Muhammad allegedly shot two soldiers smoking cigarettes in the parking lot of an Army center in Arkansas. Pvt. William Long was killed and another soldier was wounded. Muhammad was reportedly angry over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Kingsbury should have reported that Muhammed has said his act was jihad, and he (Muhammed) should not be deemed guilty because Islam requires such actions.  Still, he’s no Krugman.  Here’s the NYT columnist’s evidence that we are dangerous:

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

Where was Krugman for the last eight  years?  Where was his concern when the Left called Bush a baby killer? When they launched conspiracy theories from Haliburton being behind the war in Iraq to Bush being behind 9/11 – the same whacked out theory that was part of Von Brunn’s lunacy? Did he condemn the film about Bush being assassinated?

No. When the Left attacks the Right, it’s all good, justified and exactly the sort of thing Jefferson was thinking about when he wrote that a little revolution is good and necessary from time to time.  Let Code Pink harrass military recruiters and block the entrance to recruiting stations, but never, never, allow abortion protesters to be anywhere near an abortion clinic.  This is logic, leftist style.

Krugman has particular villification for Glenn Beck, but probably has never written a critical word of Keith Olbermann.  He says Rush Limbaugh has “joined hands with the lunatic fringe.” He accuses the R.N.C. of of somehow being unstable because it wants to change the leadership of the nation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So he’s a hypocrite.  So he can’t stand looking in mirrors.  So he trumps up fear where no fear need be.  No matter.  He’s got a trump card:

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously.

Oh, yeah.  We’re all racists and we wouldn’t be so angry if Obama were just white.  What a masterful example Krugman has given us of the Left’s ability to use hate speech in order to ignore the issue at hand – whether it was global jihad under Bush, or unconstitutional economic lunacy under Obama.

3 Comments »

I

t’s as if the last eight years never happened. There was no George W. Bush. There were no deranged liberals making all sorts of hysterical claims about what was happening or would happen under W’s watch. We just went from Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America to today’s tea parties.

At least that’s the fantasy Paul Krugman is promoting this morning as he takes a look at the tea party movement.  He professes that he doesn’t want to “make fun of crazy people,” but then goes on to say of anyone who doesn’t skip and sing merrily under the smile of the Great Obama is “the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so,” that they represent “standard practice” in the GOP, which is wont to make “bizarre claims about what liberals are up to.”

The rallys themselves are not spontaneous, grassroots campaigns in Krugman’s eyes, but rather, “AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects,” in this case, Dick Armey and “the usual group of rightwing billionaires.”

It must be wonderful to live Krugman’s life, blind to the excesses of his own and hypercritical of anyone who has the timerity to think thoughts that are not his.

How nice to be able to ignore George Soros and Peter Lewis, leftwing billionaires who funded human waves of crazed anti-Bushies who relentlessly attacked the GOP while the Dems were out of power.  But they do exist, they have names, they have track records, they leave bodies in their wake – more so than any “rightwing billionaires” Krugman can conjure but not name.

How nice to be able to ignore current events, like how citizens like Keli Carender and Amanda Grosserode spontaneously organized tea parties following Rick Santelli’s unscripted rant, and how TCOT and Twitter and Craig’s List and Facebook are the tools of this movement – yes, new media used by gasp! conservatives – and how Armey’s tagging along, not leading.

How nice to be able to ignore the wrongs of your own party, with its ad hominem attacks and crazed policies, by just poking fun at the sincere and concerned opposition.  Here, for example, is Krugman explaining how silly it is to call Obama a socialist:

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

Bizarre is reducing the now-rich Obama record to the tired canard about tax rates on the wealthy.  Krugman’s coddled world will not allow him to mention massive government intervention into the private sector, like Obama’s firing of GM’s CEO, or the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, or cap and trade, or the Omnibus Public Land bill’s stripping of property rights, or the planting of the seeds of nationalized health care, or the massive new national debt or the power grabs by every branch of the federal government that have been going on since Obama took office.

How nice to live in a world where living, and writing, the lie gives one the fame of a New York Times column and the adoration of leagues of liberals who share Krugman’s psychotic fear of the real world that surrounds them.

If you’re not sure you’re going to attend a tea party this Wednesday, do it for Krugman.  Make us impossible to ignore.

No Comments yet »

L

iz Robbins, writing on the NY Times’ “The Lede/Notes on the News” blog, is by all indications a woman. As such, I’m sure she finds the cause of fighting domestic violence worthy of promoting tp the NYT’s readers. Heck, she can even focus on the particular problems the Muslim community has with men degrading their wives:

Even as Mr. [Mozzammil] Hassan, 44, [who beheaded his wife Aasiya] sits in jail under a suicide watch that has been considered only a precaution, said his attorney, James Harrington, the gruesome murder has provoked some soul-searching within the Muslim-American community about the role of women and domestic abuse within Islam.

Soul-search they must, as they’re believers in a religion created, expanded and propagated by men who treated women as not much different than livestock. (No wonder females are becoming popular as suicide bombers – they hurt the enemy with no discernable loss to the terrorists’ side!)

But Robbins must soul-search herself as well because she is giving Islam a pass on the larger issue of the despicable act of “honor” killing. Without even bothering to find a compliant Muslim to quote directly, she writes:

The Muslim-American community in Buffalo and around the United States has reacted with outrage over suggestions that this was a religiously motivated killing, an “honor killing” brought on by the shame of Mr. Hassan’s wife seeking a divorce. The Hassans were originally from Pakistan. Although some Muslim fanatical extremists have justified “honor killings” because of shame brought on a family, Islam is a peaceful religion, and does not condone such violence, Muslim-American leaders have repeated in the last week as the case drew more attention.

Not to put too fine an edge on it, but screw the Muslim-American community in Buffalo and around the United States. Who do they think they are, killing two daughters in Texas, one daughter in Georgia and now disgracing our shores by beheading a wife in New York just because they refused to become compliant cows? The Texas girls, shown here, dressed wrong so their dad shot them both.  The Georgia daughter wanted to divorce an abusive husband, so her dad killed her.  And Muzzammil Hassan, rather than face his own shortcomings (this would have been his third divorce), hacked off the head of the woman who, were he a Christian, he was bound by oath to God to protect.

We are America, not Pakistan or Yemen or some other sorry excuse for civilization. If our wives or daughters stray from the straight and narrow, we don’t kill them in the name of our righteous God . (Yes, all too often wives die at husbands’ hands in America – but in the name of anger and ego, not God, and we certainly don’t say their murder honors our God; we call it what it is – a vile and disgusting sin.)

We also don’t think much of newspapers that are so swift to attack the Catholic church for child-abusing priests, but are so completely unable to confront the evil in Islam.  Fortunately, the 50+ commentors on Robbins’ post aren’t buying her coddling of Islam; overwhelmingly they are tired of this religion and those who make excuses for it.  For example:

“Many Muslim-American organizations insist that honor killing is ‘Un-Islamic.’” Yet, many scholars of Islam equally assert that the Qu’ran as well as custom permits grave punishment for “disobedient” women.” The argument that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ has grown so tiresome in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. – MPCT

True enough.  To true for the NYT.

Hat-tip: Soccer Dad

1 Comment »

O

ne week too late, the New York Times has finally published a story on the brutal beheading of Aasiya Hassan by her husband, owner of a TV network dedicated to proving that Islam is indeed moderate, a faith that’s ready for prime time in a civilized world.

The coverage starts off well, but rapidly deteriorates. Here’s the lead:

A man who founded a Muslim-American television station to help fight Muslim stereotypes is to appear on Wednesday in a suburban Buffalo court on charges that he decapitated his wife last week.

Kudos to the NYT; they put the newsworthy significance – beheadings and Muslim stereotypes – right in the lead, casting the story as it should be cast.  But then the story breaks down into a senseless defense of positive Muslim stereotypes:

The gruesome death of Ms. Hassan prompted outrage from Muslim leaders after suggestions that it had been some kind of “honor killing” based on religious or cultural beliefs.

Dr. Sawsan Tabbaa, a Muslim community leader who teaches orthodontia at the State University at Buffalo, said, “This is not an honor killing, no way.”

Dr. Tabbaa added, “It has nothing to do with his faith.”

They are not outraged that she was beheaded. They are not outraged that Islam tolerates such behavior – it is, after all, the only religion in the world whose followers routinely behead people in the name of its god. They are merely outraged that someone would consider Aasiya Hassan’s death an honor killing.

But let’s look at it, shall we?  Aasiya was divorcing Muzzammil, and that’s just not allowed in enlightened Islam.  Men can divorce women easy as pie, but women divorce men? No way.  So she – she, a mere woman – was bringing shame to Muzzammil.

Now, he could have shot her, or strangled her, or crushed her skull with a tire iron or done any of a number of other well established American ways to kill in a fit of passion.  But instead, he did something almost unique to Islam – he beheaded her.  This is no easy feat.  It’s time-consuming, difficult, and very, very personal.

You behead someone not to kill them, but to send a message.  And the message Mazzammil Hassan was sending was simple:  I will not be dishonored!

The NYT, after waiting a week to cover the story, has made itself complicit in covering up the true nature of the crime.

10 Comments »

E

arlier in the week, I heard that Pres. Bush’s approval rating had climbed to 34 percent from the previous ratings in the low-20s, and thought how kind America is to think a bit better of the man as he prepares to leave office. Here’s the lead of the news item, as it appeared on the CBS Political Hotsheet blog on the 14th:

President Bush’s approval rating is rising as his presidency draws to a close, a new Gallup poll finds, and now stands at 34 percent. Sixty-one percent now disapprove of his performance.

But this morning, on CBS’ The Bush Legacy page, we see this:

President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush’s final approval rating at 22 percent. Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.

For those who went to schools funded by the federal government, that’s a 12 point drop in popularity and a 12 point increase in unpopularity.  And for those who went to the Pollyanna Institute of Higher Learning, no,  the second CBS story does not make a reference to the earlier, more favorable story.

Here’s the Gallup question that generated 34 percent support:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

And here’s the CBS/NYT question:

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush has handled his job as President over the last eight years?

The only difference between the two is temporal, with Gallop asking generally how they approve, and CBS/NYT asking over an eight-year scope.  That will result in some difference in polling – I expect it could be as much as a two point swing – but it won’t explain a 12-point swing.  Gallup asked its questions between the 9th and the 11th, and CBS/NBC asked between the 11th and the 15th, so the only difference there is that the CBS/NBC folks may have heard Bush’s farewell address, which should have pushed his numbers up, not down.

The only way to explain such a difference in just three days is the methodology.  Gallup’s results are based on telephone interviews with 1,031 adults nationwide, but does not provide data on the make-up of the pool.  CBS/NYT does:

Total Republicans – 281
Total Democrats – 416
Total Independents – 415

Any questions about deeply ingrained media bias?  Anyone think CBS/NYT, if they wanted to, would have been able to put together a polling sample that more accurately reflected the political make-up of America?

7 Comments »

W

hen the NY Times offered Bill Kristol a slot as an op/ed writer, it was hardly a solid endorsement of Kristol’s conservative positions.  No, instead they gave him a one year contract.

The contract is now running out … in fact, today is Kristol’s one-year anniversary.  Over the last year, Kristol has written solid and provocative pieces in the grayer and grayer lady, offering a point of view that is not often presented to the NYT’s liberal readership.  Will he be able to continue?  There’s no word yet on that, but the NY media-tracking blog Fishbowl NY decided to run a survey asking, “Should he stay or should he go?”  Actually, they weren’t quite that unbiased in asking the question.  Here’s it in its entirety:

It’s hard to imagine them keeping Kristol, though they did hire him in the first place, so stranger things have happened. What say you readers? Should he stay or should he go?

Here’s what they said, as of 10:45 a.m. PST today:  26% “Yep, I’d keep him” vs. 74% “No way! Good riddance!”

Well, at least the tolerant and open-minded left wished  him good riddance … although I don’t think the stats would have changed very much with a “No way! May he rot in Hell!” option.

No Comments yet »

T

he Mainly Marginalized Media are hesitantly stepping up to the plate on the B-Rod scandal, noting the depth of B-Rod’s depravity, the longstanding, close-enough relationship between Obama and the scum-gov of Illinois, and the crossed messages within Camp Obama.  Just witness this morning’s headlines, courtesy of memeorandum:

• Obama tries to stay out of Blagojevich Fray – WaPo
• Obama:  Steered clear of scandal – ChiTrib
• Questions arise about the Obama/Blagojevich scandal – ABC

But the NY Times, for lack of a better expression, is busy this morning putting lipstick on a pig, proclaiming in its lead headline that Obama is really the hero of the story! Oh joy! Oh stretch!

Obama’s Effort on Ethics Bill Had Role in Governor’s Fall

In a sequence of events that neatly captures the contradictions of Barack Obama’s rise through Illinois politics, a phone call he made three months ago to urge passage of a state ethics bill indirectly contributed to the downfall of a fellow Democrat he twice supported, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

Mr. Obama placed the call to his political mentor, Emil Jones Jr., president of the Illinois Senate. Mr. Jones was a critic of the legislation, which sought to curb the influence of money in politics, as was Mr. Blagojevich, who had vetoed it.

I know, I know. It was a federal prosecutor and the FBI that busted B-Rod, not some state guys enforcing a state ethics law. Heck, there were enough federal laws violated to ensure headlines and punditry around the globe. So what’s with claiming a role for the Prez-O?  The NYT, which has sold the Brooklyn Bridge a few times in support of Obama’s cause has it covered: B-Rod sped up  his scamming in order to rake in as much cash as possible before the new Illinois ethics law went into effect Jan. 1.

But shucks, folks, with Congress starting up shortly after the first, the assumption was that B-Rod would fill the seat by the end of the year all along, ethics law or no ethics law, take or no take.  No problem; if there’s a positive point to make about Obama – no matter how obscure – the NYT stands ready to make it.

Providing nifty cover for its hero seems to be what the NYT is all about nowdays, and it’s better at it than any other news outlet. So in a way, it is still the leader in journalism.

1 Comment »

Zombieland is at it again, this time with a speculative but fascinating reconstruction of Barack Obama’s “mystery days” in New York – a reconstruction that shows it’s likely, or at least possible, that Obama knew Bill Ayres as early as 1981.

He begins with a piece of math we all – MSM included – should have done long ago:

Barack Obama would have you believe that the bombings by the radical domestic terrorists known as The Weather Underground were something that happened “when I was eight years old” and with which he had absolutely no connection. And while it is true that their bombings started when Obama was eight years old, they actually continued until he was twenty years old.

And that means they continued until Obama’s mysterious New York years – and that he was in New York when Ayres & Co. set off one of their last bombs!

And, incredibly, the life of Barack Obama and the terror campaign of the Weather Underground nearly intersected on the evening of September 26, 1981 at an anti-Apartheid protest which turned violent at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

I’m tempted to say they may have intersected, rather than just “nearly.” But I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that Obama had the same political interests as the final remnants of the Weather Underground at the exact same time in the exact same place. That as an adult he was living in the same city where and when they conducted their second-to-last terror attack, which was a protest against the Apartheid polices of South Africa — the very topic to which Obama has said he was devoted at that time. So because of all this, Obama must have known about the Weather Underground and their tactics while he was still in college. So when he met Weather Underground founder William Ayers 13 years later, Obama certainly had to have known exactly who Ayers was and what he had done.

Especially if he (Obama) is as bright as he wants us to believe he is.

Zombieland’s piece is an investigative tour de force, complete with analyses of phone books, various radical student organizations, and what is known of Obama’s life and interests while he was at Occidental, then Columbia.  It also digs into what Ayres and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were up to at the time, and concludes:

They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
They lived near each other.
The went to school near each other.
They had the same political interests.
Their circles of friends and associates intersected.

By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected.

Or was it not a coincidence at all?

It’s the sort of work the New York Times should have done, but its analysis of Obama’s NY years was basically a quick shrug and a “Dunno.”  If the NYT had done this research and had hounded Obama like its hounded Palin, we might know for a fact that Obama and Ayres have known each other for 17 years, and that they met as fellow radicals waaaay back when.

But they didn’t, so we don’t.

hat-tip:  Okie on the Lam

3 Comments »

Cloward-Piven, Obama And The Fall Of America

J

ust drop everything and click on over to American Thinker and James Simpson’s Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.

The article delves into the Cloward-Piven strategy, spawned in 1966 by two radical socialist professors from Columbia University, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy was promptly – and accurately – described in The Nation, a publication that would like to put an end to our nation:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

The strategy’s first big success came in 1975, when New York City was forced into bankruptcy by Cloward-Piven acolytes who stormed welfare offices demanding their “rights,” quickly overburdening the welfare system. Simpson makes the point that the current financial crisis appears to be a classic Cloward-Piven strategy, this time with the poor and underqualified demanding their “right” to homownership.

There are so many hard-left radicals linked in the article that at times it seems you’re reading more blue type than black – and all these names link ultimately to one Barack Hussein Obama:

As Simpson says:

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who’s who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.

Remember “Obama, the empty suit?” This article shows that the suit Obama wears is not empty; rather, it is a Trojan horse, filled with the most vile ideas about – and plans for – America.

Don’t believe it? Well, what if we told you that the Dems want to set up the financial bailout so radical left wing groups like Acorn get any funds generated through bailout paybacks? It’s true.

hat-tip: Okie on the Lam Continue Reading »

1 Comment »