The Sensational Story That Wasn’t: Reports Of ‘Stoning’ Death Of Ukrainian Girl Turn Out To Be False

[Link: www.rferl.org…]

Next time you see that honor killing or sharia stoning to death story you might dig into it a bit more before you panic that Western Civilization is ending. If you look at just the facts the police are reporting you find that this girl was strangled, struck once in the head with a rock, raped and robbed in the woods. The police have a single suspect from a family of Crimean Tatars, who are mostly non practicing Muslims. Of course none of the SIOE or SIOA Euro Supremacist blogs foaming at the mouth about this are going to print any retractions.

The circumstances around the death of Kateryna Korin, a 19-year-old Ukrainian student on the Crimean peninsula, appeared to point to a made-for-tabloid tragedy: a young beauty-pageant contestant brutally killed by her admirer, a radical Islamist who chose to stone her to death under an unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law.

via LGF Pages – The Sensational Story That Wasn’t: Reports Of ‘Stoning’ Death Of Ukrainian Girl Turn Out To Be False.

A Compendium of Crazy – Keith Olbermann on the Tea Party

Normally I wouldn’t post something from Keith since he’s sorta like the left’s Glenn Beck lite in the hyperbole department,  but nobody else has collected all of the craziness from the Tea Party candidates in one spot. Once you watch this you won’t wonder anymore why the Tea Partiers are dodging the media at all costs. I trimmed the intro a wee bit so you can get to the red meat right away.

For the record I am one of those abandoned Republicans, now registered Democrat for the first time in my life.

If You are a Glenn Beck Viewer Then there’s this bridge I have…

I saw ads for ambulance chasing Lawyers, Psychics, Gold Pimps, and emergency solar generator pimps. It really is either a sign of how far downhill Fox has run, or it tells you the real supermarket tabloid type audience that Glenn has managed to gather in one niche.

If you’re not interested in my bridge, well I’ve also got this newly recovered land near New Orleans…

Let’s face it, Glenn Beck’s audience has to be the biggest group of rubes ever collected – every Carney Barker on the midway can see them coming several miles before they pull into the parking lot, and since Glenn’s watchers believe our President is a sekret muslim, has no birth certificate, and is a communist love child born in Kenya then selling them Gold at highly inflated prices is just a breeze.

While watching Fox during my physical therapy session today, (thankfully with the sound off since he was at his blackboard during part of my exercise session,) I saw ads for ambulance chasing Lawyers, Psychics, Gold Pimps, and emergency solar generator pimps. It really is either a sign of how far downhill Fox has run, or it tells you the real supermarket tabloid type audience that Glenn has managed to gather in one niche. Consummate snake oil salesman that he is, Glenn seems to even be fitting product placements in — at one point I saw him waving a coke can around, probably in protest that Obama is coming to get our soda pop or something ridiculous like that.

Wikileaks Underwhelms

After skimming articles and looking at some of the data from the Assange/Wikileaks Afghanistan leaks I’m achieved a state of underwhelmed anger. There aren’t new smoking guns or revelations that I’ve found, and beyond a few journalists being able to say “See I told you so” again it’s about as current and relevant as The Bronski Beat.

The major allegations (ISI helping the Taliban and other terror groups, Civilian Casualties, Corrupt Government, USAID and other dev money mispent ) are all claims that have ample evidence to back them up without Assange’s leaks.

I wrote a lot about Hamid Gul’s ISI old guard Al Haq factions way back in ’06, and I wrote about Musharraf’s Pakistani government openly supplying terror groups and camps through October 2006 when the announcement was made and that stopped in theory but not in practice (as Roggio, I, and others have mentioned.) E.G. When the HuJI assassination attempts were made on Musharraf himself way back when they probably did not have to steal the missiles and .50 cal machine guns.

The big question is what the heck is the point? Assange can whine all he wants but he has jeopardized lives – lives of those aiding the war efforts in a country where most are fence sitters.  Real names of real people really in the theater right now are in those reports, real names of people trying to make a better future for Afghanistan. When their headless bodies start showing up in village squares should those photos be leaked directly and personally to Assange?

How many are going to willing to come down from the fence in the future after seeing these names published worldwide?

When the Reporter Becomes the Story

Like Dan Rather we see a purported journalist not just twisting or exaggerating truth to show an angle of a story, but rather inventing it almost whole cloth from some perversely reversed worldview.

Breitbart bashing in the wake of the true story of Shirley Sherrod plowing across the media landscape is all the rage, so far be it from me to forgo such a healthy community event. Like Dan Rather we see a purported journalist not just twisting or exaggerating truth to show an angle of a story but creating it whole cloth from some perversely reversed worldview.

“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him” – Cardinal Richelieu

Breitbart turned Shirley’s story of how she overcame her own initial xenophobe reactions to help a white farmer save his farm into its exact fun house mirror/ horror show opposite – he made it into an example of reverse Racism.

He did that to feed the Tu Quoque need of some whites to play their own victim card and say “See, we are victims of racism too!” This is a favored tactic at white supremacist sites from Stormfront to VDARE and it’s used often by the populist pus head pundits who host those sites. Andrew has always had a “but they do it too!” childlike approach to political discourse, but mainstreaming the white victimhood of the white nationalist sites is really a new low for him.

By vigorously pushing this BIG lie to attack a black woman Andrew Breitbart has amply demonstrated that everything the NAACP said in their resolution about the tea party and the far right was right on the money. There are extreme racist elements in the movement and their first handle on any issue is always going to be blood, religion, or skin color.

The story here isn’t Shirley anymore, rather it’s how a reporter became so narrow in vision and purpose that they forgot the truth. It’s a story of selling one’s soul to the devil in a Faustian political bargain, it’s a story of madness and how someone who was once a rising star went mad. It’s also the story of everyone associated and contributing to Andrew’s “BIG” sites, and how they won’t be able to get that shithouse loon smell off themselves as long as they are there.

As this Breitbart race to the bottom unfolds it will bear watching – after losing cred journalists and websites almost always end up in crazytown, and there’s only limited real estate there. It’s all very well staked out – so you can’t really poach Alex Jone’s turf, or Whirled Nuts Dailey’s dominion very long before you just become them – just like Hotair recently found out from Salem Communications.

Photo Credit: Life

When Creationists Put on Their Angsty Panties

You can bet that Fox news will cover it since it continues their “Culture Wars” theme and keeps their bile-fed elderly market share pumped up and angered enough to watch. Christians are being persecuted daily after all and there are lions waiting around the corner for every one of them… (ok — so I’m not practiced at snarkasm and that didn’t work well but let’s continue anyway…) I have to have some humor here because otherwise I might cry in frustration at how some humans misuse their time by trying to get books banned.

At the intersection of science and superstition

In the latest incident you find a fundamentalist creationist Christian upset because a biology text had the temerity to state that 7 literal day creation is “Myth.” Since only fundamentalist creationists believe the bible to be “inerrant” and the majority of Christians view the Bible as inexact, or allegorical, or subject to interpretation and translations errors by humans over the past 20 centuries, you have to wonder why Fox pimps such a minority view of Christianity.

On the other hand if you’ve been following the infamous Discovery Institute created culture wars for a while then you know exactly what’s going on. In Discovery Institute’s view if you are a tolerant, non fundamentalist sort then you aren’t really a true Christian, and not a true Culture warrior — and you certainly aren’t feeling persecuted enough yet.  You are “CINO”. Christian in name only. Leave it to Fox news to further the fundamentalist’s faux outrage.

Looking at the Text book in question you see that it gets pretty rave reviews and even seems modern and up to date with the latest real discoveries and controveries.

“Asking About Life” Allan Tobin and Jennie Dusheck

[remaining question: do angsty panties come in red and are they hair lined?]

Update: More at Little Green Footballs and Video of Fox and Friends

Remember When Republicans Were the Adults in the Political Debate?

I’m a life long Republican — I really wish I could counter any of Rachel’s points here with some hard hitting reality – but I can’t because what she is stating is true. That’s a sad statement about the creeps running the right at present.

The Last Hurrah of the Holy Horde

and this is why you saw Glen Beck skate along the edge of the New World Order conspiracy theory chasm at several points during his speech. The fundamentalist right loves that stuff. When you look at Beck you have to say “There but for the grace of a bigger microphone and a bit of polish goes Alex Jones…”

Once again I have woken early on a rain dark morn while a distant train blares it’s horn across the plains as it hauls its hundreds of carloads of coal to the reactor for burning. This time I’m not pondering  mortality but rather the depths of depravity that my political party  has sunk to.

I watched bits and pieces of CPAC over the past few days in alternating bouts of despair and disgust. This is not the Republican party of the past, where people were pro capitalism, pro defense, and pro-liberty but generally minded their own business otherwise. This is the barking ugly underbelly – with Birchers invited openly, and even rumors that Nick Griffin of the openly Supremacist BNP was going to attend. (you can find reference to those unsubstantiated rumors at Stormfront, Amren, and in a press release from the newly formed “Sons of Liberty” at MSU – I refuse to link to those batshit sewers of hate and paranoia – if you don’t believe dig yourself, there are enough keywords in this parenthesized section to find what I’m referring to through Google easily enough.)

I’ve already spoken about what I think of politicians who would speak at this forum here , and here, but now it’s time to talk about the pudding head pundits who appeared. I watched Glen Beck play Kermit the doomsayer, and I watched him hearken back to one of our greatest presidents while trashing other great Republicans in direct opposition to Reagan’s dictum of never speaking ill of another Republican. Meanwhile Andrew Breitbart brayed in the lobby still fending off the accusations against him and his wannabe Alinksy-Right political operative, James O’Keefe.  The Oil and Coal lobbies were certainly well represented on the Global warming panel, but reason and science were entirely absent as one courageous questioner from the audience had the temerity to point out.

Early on in the conference Michelle Malkin was congratulated over the sale of Hot Air to Salem, and now there’s few voices on the right who are not owned lock stock and barrel by the religious right. This is why you see Jerome Corsi and the whirled nuts daily crowd widely accepted while the other right wing blogs make faint disclaimers to the general press (wink wink, nudge nudge.) This is why you see the nativist Vdare and Birchers accepted with open arms, and this is why you saw Glen Beck skate along the edge of the New World Order conspiracy theory chasm at several points during his speech. The fundamentalist right loves that stuff. When you look at Beck you have to say “There but for the grace of a bigger microphone and a bit of polish goes Alex Jones…” Then when you look at one of the spokespeople for Young Americans for Freedom, Ryan Sorba, you have to say “WTF, is that a member of Westboro Baptist?” At some point you have to ask yourself “if Glen Beck, Ryan Sorba, and James O’Keefe represent the future of the Republican party, what kind of debacle are we headed for?”

I’ve lived through dim times for the Republicans before. It was a disheartening day when political operatives nick-named “The Plumbers” tarnished the whole party and caused the resignation of a sitting Republican President. It was dark times when the only widely heard voices on the right were populist piss and vinegar pundits like Joe Pyne, and his obverse, the overly erudite William F. Buckley who turned average Americans off. I fear we are headed to those days again as I look at the plumbers who are now widely embraced by the right, and the Tit for Tat tu quoque  instead of direction and principle from the major outlets of the right. I see those days coming again as I watch Christians lie for the cause and throw principles and morals overboard in search of ends that justify their evil means.

It doesn’t phase me much, because I know that truth does win out over time and the American public will see through phonies like these eventually – for these hypocrite holy and culture warriors cannot help themselves from going many steps too far, and their support and funding will be drying up over the next few years since the fully fundamentalist loons are truly a dying demographic. At some point in the next decade or two the old curmudgeons will all be dead, and there’s going to be as many pundits on the right who wished they hadn’t destroyed all of their credibility during this period as there are people on the left regretting that tattoo they got. Personally although I choose neither, I’d rather have tattoo regret than to know my life was one big lie after another.

Update: More on Sorba the geek at The Atlantic

Boondock Stooges

James O’Keefe & Co. have reached the nadir of their fifteen minutes, and from here it is downhill. You can read about his arrest, etc here, here, here, and in this video:

Many are characterizing him as a self-styled James Bond or “Junior G-Man” however I don’t see it that way. James O’Keefe’s long conservative activism for pro life causes coupled with his overuse of the Latin “Veritas” suggest to me that he sees himself instead as a real life Holy warrior cut of the same cloth as the brothers in the fictional “Boondocks Saints”. I would wager he’s seen the movie more than once, and wonder if he has a tattoo like the brothers in the ultra violent movie: “Veritas” “Aequitas” – or “Truth” and “Justice”. If you think my speculation is a stretch, page through O’Keefe’s Tweet feed — go back to October before the Acorn sting where you can see a few asides, and a link to an article adoring Franciscan monks.

Obama’s Hyberbole

President Obama decried the new Supreme Court ruling on corporate money in politics stating:

The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special-interest money in our politics … It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health-insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. — President Barack Obama

I disagree with the word “New.” Special interests learned to get their message out while accommodating the restrictions of McCain-Feingold and other limits in a manner that makes the “who” behind the money much harder to find. I like the Supreme Court ruling because I would rather know who is paying whom for what.

Instead of Corporations paying for message directly and the public knowing who is behind the latest meme, everything is indirect and several places removed. So you have a Union or Corporation paying a foundation, and that foundation paying a faux political action group, a Faux think tank, (aka “Stink tank” – Discovery Institute, Heartland Institute, ACORN, Worldwatch, etc.)

These in turn spin off chaff for highly conservative and highly liberal “news” outlets (e.g. Frontpage, Pacifica Radio, AFR, etc. etc.,) which in turn back candidates and causes. Their chaff in turn is re amplified by crowd sourcing the bloggers within the political spectrum, and I suspect there’s a bit of “paid promotional amplification” going on as well. (see this very interesting Berkman Center lecture, then think about comment Spam and it’s origination after.)

It’s very time consuming if you you want to track that buzz or meme or outrage of the day to true source, but more oft than not it can be followed back to a special interest group who is highly anonymous to the general public.

I prefer a political environment where anyone may freely speak or pay, but where every penny is associated back to true source and recorded online as part of public record within 48 hours. Americans are some of the smartest media consumers in the world and it’s counterproductive to create restrictions that demand subterfuge for communication because with each step removed from the original source of the sometimes valid argument additional hysteria, hyperbole, and sometimes outright lies get baked into the message. It’s very hard to have an adult conversation about true issues in that media environment. We don’t need to limit money or speech, but we do need to see who is signing the checks. In my opinion it’s well past time to update our restrictions on political speech to match the new media.

Update: more background on this law, other campaign laws, and conflicting claims at Politifact.