harmonicminer

JSF planes for settlement delay?

The list of defense-related and other gifts the U.S. administration is willing to offer to Israel in exchange for three months of construction freeze in the settlements raises suspicions that someone has gone mad. An additional extension of the freeze, which he has previously rejected out of hand, may spell a political and ideological headache for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – but the offer by U.S. President Barack Obama is very enticing. The addition of 20 F-35s to the package discussed two months ago tips the balance very clearly. From Israel’s point of view, it is an offer that cannot be refused.

Since Obama entered the White House two years ago, he has not given the impression – at least in terms of foreign relations – of being a particularly tough negotiator. Nonetheless, this time the administration appears to have gone overboard, even though in Washington they know full well that the freeze is a highly symbolic gesture, which the settlers have already managed to avoid in the past.

This, of course, raises suspicions that there are much broader and substantive issues at hand, and not merely a few housing units in Samaria or Gush Etzion. Not only may there be a genuine Israeli willingness to move forward in a substantive way in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, but perhaps some sort of deal on the Iranian question is afoot. Could it be – and this is only conjecture – that Obama is trying to persuade Israel to commit to desisting from any independent action against the nuclear installations of Iran, in exchange for a substantial future reinforcement of the Israel Air Force?

I hope not.

The F-35 deal signed last month was controversial in both defense establishment and political circles. The debate did not stem from the quality of the stealth aircraft, but from the price tag accompanying it: Generals and minister believed that when the price per unit is more than $130 million, there are better ways to make use of the U.S. military aid package. But, according to the prime minister, the U.S. is now generously offering to double the number of aircraft without the funding for them being taken from the future military aid package.

This is an enormous gift, which nearly makes the debate on the need for the F-35 redundant. According to reports, there will also be significant benefits elsewhere in the gift list for Israel.

In spite a great deal of bad mouthing about him, the U.S. president has proven no less committed to Israel’s security than his predecessor.

What planet does THIS writer live on?

To date the security package has included emergency stores that are available to the Israel Defense Forces, a $205-million grant to purchase Iron Dome systems, and a significant stepping-up of joint missile defense training programs. The list of items to come, at least on paper, is impressive.

Hmmm….  NO quantity of JSFs will protect Israel from a nuclear-tipped Iranian missle, or simply a nuclear truck bomb, snuck in through one of the tunnels.

So I have to wonder if Netanyahu can be bought off this easily.

This report is sickening.

I am glad the warriors were “vindicated.”  But it is outrageous, beyond outrageous, that the regulations exist that put them in any legal jeopardy in the first place.  Did the wee little terrorist get a split lip?  Did he get a punch in the gut?

Apparently it is now safer to be a terrorist in the custody of the American military than to walk home from school in a tough neighborhood in Kansas City. 

I saw plenty of kids get worse on the school bus 45 years ago.

Some people in our media, our academic circles, our courts and our government have lost all sense of proportion, and all sense of seriousness about the war on terror.

They will be reminded of just how serious it is at some point.  They won’t enjoy the reminder.  And when that day comes, it will make all this concern about white glove treatment of murdering terrorists seem risible, verging on suicidal.

‘Media Malpractice’ Filmmaker John Ziegler on Film’s Wide Re-release

Media Malpractice, John Ziegler‘s 2009 film that turned the media narrative of the 2008 election on its head, played like a Rocky movie on crack to conservative audiences when it was released. However, the film, despite featuring newsmaking exclusives with then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, didn’t find much of an audience beyond that.

Two years (and one midterm election) later, an updated version of Ziegler’s film is set to be re-released to retail stores, and will be available on demand to 80 million cable subscribers. We talked to Ziegler about his hopes for the film to find a wider audience in post-Tea Party America, and what it might mean for the film’s de facto star, Sarah Palin.

The new version of the film includes 45 minutes of updated material, including many of Ziegler’s haymaking interviews (complete with commentary), and carries the Sarah Palin seal of approval. In fact, Ziegler says that Palin even had her ghostwriter watch the film before starting work on her bestseller, Going Rogue.

Upon the film’s initial release, Ziegler says he was in talks with Vivendi-Universal to distribute the film, but the political climate at the time wasn’t right. “In Hollywood, you can take a chance on a liberal film all day long, but if you try and fail with a conservative film, you get fired.”

Still, Ziegler hit the road to screen the film for various conservative audiences, and sold enough copies of the film (around 40,000) to roughly recoup the film’s original $250k production budget.

Since then, though, Palin has evolved, from mere politician into a being of pure media energy whose every Facebook utterance makes headlines, while President Obama has become the scapegoat for huge midterm losses for the Democrats. Add to that the simmering speculation over a possible Palin presidential bid, and suddenly, the climate is a lot friendlier for Media Malpractice.

Shameless plug.  If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to in order to understand what really happened in the 2008 election coverage from the media.  And the music is listenable, too.

Keith Olbermann returns to MSNBC on Tuesday

 

just two days after he was suspended “indefinitely” for contributing to three 2010 candidates without prior consent from the network.

“After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night’s program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy,” Griffin said in a statement. “We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night.”

I knew it was too good to last.

What’s interesting is how many right-leaning commentators thought Olbermann had been mistreated.  But I think they just wanted to keep him around for laughs…  which is about what he’s good for.

The suspension brought into the focus the ongoing tensions between the nonpartisan NBC News and the partisan hosts on MSNBC.

Even though Olbermann is paid for opinion, the undisclosed donations presented a clear conflict of interest for someone who recently anchored an election night. MSNBC already received some criticism last week for having its liberal hosts and commentators anchor election night.  So the news that one of them also donated to Democratic candidates only gave more ammo to conservative critics of the cable network.

Now we’re getting to the real issue, which is not Olbermann as such, but the MSNBC management’s decisions to confuse its news anchors with its opinion-spouters. They used Olbermann and Matthews to provide “news” coverage of the 2008 elections, conventions, etc. 

Maddow talked of a double standard where Fox News allows Republican hosts like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee to take a role in politics that goes beyond journalism and into advocacy. For Maddow, the incident showed how MSNBC is different in suspending Olbermann for giving to candidates while Fox didn’t take a similarly hard line when it came to Hannity’s contribution to Michelle Bachmann.

“Let this incident lay to rest forever, the facile, never-true-in-any-way, lazy conflation of Fox News, and what the rest of us do for a living,” Maddow said. “Everybody likes to say, ‘Oh, that’s cable news. It’s all the same. Fox and MSNBC, mirror images of each other.’ Let this lay that to rest forever.”

Maddow continued: “Hosts on Fox raise money on the air for Republican candidates. They use their Fox News profiles to headline fundraisers. Heck, there are multiple people being paid by Fox News now to essentially run as Republican candidates. There is no rule against that at Fox. They run as a political operation. We’re not.”

Maddow obviously has trouble making basic distinctions between news reporters and opinion journalists.  To my knowledge, FOX has not used Hannity, Beck, etc., as anchors for major political news events in providing basic coverage of those events.  The pretense that Olbermann, Matthews, Maddow, et. al., aren’t primarily political advocates and partisans is what is so silly here.  MSNBC makes no apparent attempt to distinguish between news reporting and opinion journalism.  That could be the reason why Maddow and company can’t understand the distinction when FOX does it.

Not to be self-serving, but order MEDIA MALPRACTICE at the link in the upper right of this page and you’ll learn all you need to know about how objective MSNBC wasn’t in the 2008 election, as well as a good deal else.

In the meantime, based on ratings, at least, it’s clear that FOX is trusted by MANY more listeners than MSNBC, by nearly an order of magnitude.  Maybe there’s a reason.

Gunmen block roads after Mexican drug lord killed

Gunmen used buses and trucks to block roads in Reynosa, a Gulf cartel stronghold across the border from McAllen, Texas, and west of Matamoros, where marines on Friday shot dead gang leader Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” Cardenas.

In an apparent riposte from rivals, gunmen from the Zetas gang hung messages between trees and over bridges in Reynosa and in cities across northeastern Tamaulipas state, mocking Cardenas’ death. “Once again, the Gulf traitors’ destiny is evident … there’s no place for them, not even in hell,” read one banner that was signed by the Zetas.

Try to imagine the response of US authorities if rival armed gangs were blocking roads in, say, Kansas.  Or San Diego, for that matter.

Then consider that those gangsters are running free in Mexico, and ask yourself what that means, and what it bodes.

Brown.

Boxer.

Over the cliff.

Holding hands.

If you own something in California, sell it fast, before the price drops even more.

We appear to have decided officially to become a third-world country.

As industry moves out, guess who’s moving in?

It’s pretty obvious, as one of the background speakers in this video points out, that had this kind of behavior been exhibited by a Republican, it would have been all over the nightly news. The perpetrators would be likely to have been arrested, given this kind of behavior in front of watching cops. But here we have some out of control anger, expressed by tearing down signs and shouting obscenities at peaceful Republican campaigners, who are simply sitting on their own property holding signs in support of their candidate.

UPDATE:

Intelligent commentary on the “racist” hypothesis as an explanation of Republican sentiment.

UPDATE #2:

The angry man’s candidate lost.  Cosmic justice?

Rewriting history…..  all over again.

Howard Zinn would be proud.

Remember during the 2008 election, the big-brain Republicans told us we shouldn’t say Obama is a socialist, because that might discredit us? Because since everyone knew he wasn’t REALLY a socialist, calling him one was just giving ammo to the left to call us crazy? I distinctly recall many of us saying that if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck….. but the brilliant Republican elite just couldn’t quite get there, somehow.  Apparently, things have changed:

The Stanley Kurtz Interview

during the election campaign, I was certainly a critic of President Obama. I looked into the radical connections in his past. I wasn’t shy about saying that, but the socialism charge seemed to me to be a bridge too far. I mean, how do you define socialism? That’s a big problem right there. So my inclination when I started this research was to just bracket the whole thing, set it aside, and focus on the fact that Obama is ultra-liberal, much further to the left than he claims to be. But for example, I started to change my mind when I ran across the programs of the Socialist Scholars Conferences that Obama clearly attended when he lived in New York City between 1983 and 1985. And those programs really shocked me, because they included a number of people from Obama’s current political world. And they even included James Cone, who is the theological mentor of Jeremiah Wright. And when I saw that, I really had to rethink my attitude toward the socialism issue. And the more I followed it out, the more I saw that Obama at minimum lived deeply in the midst of a world of socialist community organizers. You know, people can read my book and they can agree or disagree with the idea that Obama himself was a socialist community organizer. But one thing is certain. There are a lot of socialist community organizers. They intentionally keep their socialism secret. And they were Obama’s mentors and colleagues.

That like “walk/look/quack like a duck” logic to me. At the end of the day, arguing about whether Obama IS a socialist is stupid. It is indisputable, and was in 2008, that he had always supported socialist perspectives and policies, and surrounded himself with self-described socialists. Who cares if he had the word stenciled on his t-shirt under his suit?  What was obvious then, and has been proved since, is that he would govern like a socialist.

It’s nice to hear the Republican intelligentsia coming around….  finally.