I think Reuters, like many other news agencies in recent years, have replaced their staff with unpaid interns or something. Example:

U.S. Army backtracks on gay discharges, no moratorium

For two days now I’ve been reading about “gay discharges”, with the most revolting images of drippiness going through my head. Let’s think… they could have used firings, dismissals, or pretty much anything else. I really don’t want to be envisioning gonorrhea when I’m reading Reuters.

How about this one:

Black farmers eye next move in bias lawsuit

I know I’m not the only one who wondered how the poor farmer got the black eye.

by Art Lindsey III

On her Christmas in Washington special on ABC last night, Oprah Winfrey asked President Obama to grade himself.

“Good, solid B-plus,” the president said.

Explaining, he said, “we have inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt
.
“We stabilized the economy, and prevented possibilities of a Great Depression or a significant financial meltdown. The economy is growing again.”

“We are on our way out of Iraq. I think we’ve got the best possible plan for Afghanistan.

“We have reset our image around the world.”
-

Well, who here feels better now? I know I certainly do
.
President Obama’s fondness for referring to himself is well documented, but this is one of his most stunning displays of arrogance yet. The proper answer to this question is, “That is not for me to decide. That is up to the American people.

This is why we don’t grade ourselves in school. (At Least not yet, but who knows. It may not be far down the road. First, teachers aren’t allowed to use red pens, so it seems logical that “self-assessment” may soon follow.) According to a New Rasmussen poll, Obama’s approval rating has dipped to 44 percent, and it should be noted that this is one of the fastest drops in US presidential history.

Now, I don’t know about any of you, but when I went to school, if I saw a “44” on my paper, that meant I got a big, fat “F”. In fact, I had to get a “90” to even get a “B”.

How can a man who approved a $787 billion spending bill (which for all intents and purposes has failed) sit idly by as congress is about to approve nearly another $2 trillion in spending? Seeing that the only “successes” that his administration can seem to tout is that “we didn’t lose as many jobs this month as last month”, shows that he lacks basic math skills. Such a claim is not an indication off success in a sane world. Logic would dictate that at some point, the job loss numbers would have to decrease simply because we are running out of jobs to lose. Somebody has to work. If nobody worked, society would collapse.

So, if by “stabilizing the economy” he means holding the unemployment numbers at a nice bouncy, round number like 10 percent, then yes, he is doing an outstanding job. If by “resetting our image” he means bowing and scraping to every would leader he can get a photo-op with, he’s earned a spot on the Dean’s List.

President Obama is so disengaged from reality that he either doesn’t hear what comes out of his own mouth or worse yet, the multiple failures he has presided over or instigated are perceived as achievements in eyes, regardless of what the data may suggest.
He has turned America into a poorly controlled science fair project, and the media that he has a “teacher’s pet” relationship with is giving him a passing grade.

One could argue that this is akin to cheating, and in the end, cheaters always get caught, don’t they?

Dear Barbara Hall, Chief Commissar of the OHRC: Piss off!

Actually, Barbara, let me elaborate: Please take your politically correct, do-goody-good bullshit and shove it up your big, fat, censorship-loving ass.

Not really much I can add to that sentiment, except perhaps to point out that much of our press in Canada - nay the world - has chosen already not to be free. They have sided time and again with tyrants, to the exclusion of everyone else.

What Hall proposes is merely to put it in writing. Nothing would really change.

Natasha Richardson, Tony award winning actress, was taken off life support today and pronounced dead. All this after a fluke skiing accident on the bunny trails at Mt. Tremblent in the Quebec Laurentides.

For about 90 minutes the words “natasha” and “richardson” were the main trending topics on Twitter. Now it’s “idol” because the average American cares more for American Idol than they do for dead movie stars. At least they will for about an hour. Then it will be something else. A few hours back it was “dodd” for Chris Dodd.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re so plugged in now, we get so much news thrown at us throughout the day via the internet, that stations like CNN and Fox News who just recycle the same 15 headlines over a 24 hour period are pretty much useless. What was supposed to provide us with obscure and remote stories from around the world all day, and keep its content fresh, has failed to do both. The talking heads change from hour to hour, but the content remains static.

We would do better to have a 24 hour streaming Google News channel instead. Or just sit on Twitter.

In any case, RIP Natasha. You were great in Handmaid’s Tale.

This week’s issue of J-Source has a lot of talk about huge layoffs in Canadian mainstream media. It also has a loooong article on that made-up disease (like peanut allergies, post-partum depression and lactose intolerance) - “Islamophobia“. For those of you unclear on your psych jargon, a phobia is an irrational fear of something. Got that? Irrational. Whereas my fear of Muslims is pretty rational, thankyouverymuch!

Anyway, like all such articles on “Islamophobia”, this one comes out just days after Muslims kill a whole bunch of Jews and foreigners in Mumbai. Sweet.

So attention Canadian Journalists! Your genre is dying because you are retarded and because you are sleeping with the enemy! Perhaps if you spent more time dealing with the real problems, instead of making problems up that insult your readership while you attempt to make them feel bad about themselves for something they are not actually doing anyway, well - maybe then there wouldn’t be so many layoffs.

Wherein I offer grudging respect. And become terribly distracted by blue eyes.

Are you a mouth-breather? Are you idiocratic? Do you believe in democracy in its truest sense? Think Gutenberg did a good thing bringing books to the people?

Well, the National Editor of the Ottawa Citizen hates you.

The Players: AP - Andrew Potter, National Editor; KO’M - Kady O’Malley; SR - Scott Reid (beer & popcorn guy)

AP: What worries me, though, is that we’re seeing the “democratization” of politics, in the most literal sense of the word: The people — the great idiocratic mass of mouth-breathers out there frantically swiping the drool off their keyboards as they Google around for “dirt” — are running the campaigns now. There aren’t war rooms anymore, directed by parties with smart, educated, responsible adults in charge — it’s Hobbes’ state of nature as imagined by Mike Judge.

And Scott Reid thinks all bloggers are hard-up virgins. I think we’d be kinda hard pressed to convince anyone of my virginity, after selling tail in my 20’s. Can I be a born again?

AP Exclusive: Hit squads training in Iran

War shows that Putin is running things in Russia

…running around the globe waging jihad.

Phil Bennett, the Washionton Post’s managing editor, speaking at UCI Monday about the lack of Muslims working in American newsrooms.

Just when you think the MSM can’t get any more dispicable…

But yesterday Julie Etchingham was left to ponder how quickly triumph can turn into humiliation after the most embarrassing gaffe of her career.

She did not realise her microphone was still on when she joked during a David Cameron speech that Conservatives favoured a policy of “extermination” on immigration.

Red-faced bosses at Sky News, which Etchingham, 37, leaves in a matter of weeks to join ITV, apologised over the incident yesterday branding it “regrettable”.

Conservative insiders were particularly annoyed as it was Mr Cameron’s first major speech on immigration, feeling it had turned him into a laughing stock.

Viewers saw Cameron saying: “Let me outline the action that a Conservative government would take. As we have seen, some of the increase in population size results from natural change - birth rates, death rates. Here our policy should be obvious… ”

At which point Etchingham’s voice was then clearly heard to say: “Extermination.”

Forty-nine Iraqi “criminals” have been killed in three separate raids in Sadr City in the capital, Baghdad, the US military says.

That’s a headline on the BBC website. Note the scare quotes around the word criminals.

“The operation’s objective was an individual reported to be a long-time Special Groups member specialising in kidnapping operations,” it said.

Iraqi sources said women and children were among those killed, but the US said it was not aware of this.

Iraqi sources? What kind of sources? Is it the Iraqi government? Not exactly…

An official loyal to Moqtada Sadr said the attack was “simply barbaric”.

“Most of those killed and wounded were women, children and elderly men which shows the indiscriminate monstrosity of the attacks on this crowded area,” Abdul-Mehdi al-Muteyri told Reuters news agency.

The BBC feels the burden of proof should be on the American military to prove that those killed were indeed “criminals”, but has no trouble at all believing the henchmen of a known thug and terrorist. Disgusting.

The Toronto International Film Fest has descended on the city once more, bringing with it pet causes, star fuckers, and sycophants of all sorts. It also brings with it the inevitable press conferences. After all, why travel to this backwater if not to do lots of press and promote your latest (most likely anti-American) film?

Mr. Right and I made the mistake of going downtown last night, rather desperate to eat at our favorite Indian restaurant, and not caring about the throngs. At least, not till we were in them. Mr. Right’s mood started to go downhill as we pushed through the Yorkville crowds (mostly Japanese tourists with Prada shoes and top-of-the-line digital cameras, crowded around the doors of the hotels, waiting for someone of interest to pop their heads out like cuckoo clocks), and he began to notice the stickers on the newspaper boxes, “9/11 was an inside job!” My own mood hit the dumpster when I saw the stage set up outside the ROM, all set for some type of glitzy SAVE DARFUR tragi-comedy. I knew that could only mean the George Clooney hadn’t flown out immediately after his premiere on Friday night. Dammit, why will that man not just go to Darfur and stay there??

We took a hard right down Bay Street, hoping to get out of the madding crowd. Instead we were treated to a veritable swarm of media types, all headed from a press conference, I can only assume at the Sutton Place where Sean Penn made the grave mistake of smoking a butt last year - that devil. Of all the things to malign Sean Penn for, I can’t believe the media focused on his smoking. Ugh. So there they all were, overdressed women and badly dressed men, with their press passes hanging around their necks on Starbucks lanyards. And then I was attacked. She came through the crowd, in an obvious hurry, tripod slung over her shoulder in its sheath. WHAM. The tripod nailing me hard in the wrist, my cry of pain, and she didn’t even stop. The mainstream media, folks. The media that cares about the pot-bellied war child of Darfur, but attacks the people of their own city. Suffice it to say I wasn’t surprised.

After a couple of cocktails in a very busy restaurant on the strip, and a lovely hot curry meal, we were a lot calmer and ready to head back out in search of dessert. Only to come face to face with a Truther. Up at the corner of Yonge and Dundas (I suppose we could count ourselves lucky that it was only a Truther, and not some homey with a gun), he stood there in his 9/11 truth.org t-shirt, handing out his pamphets of hate. I had to be restrained by Mr. Right and two tourists who happened to be walking by.

What has this city come to? Have we fallen through the looking glass? People come from all over the world to suck the collective dick of American filmmakers who loathe their own country, and find kinship in the loonies who believe the president of the free world murdered 3000 of his own countrymen on their way to work one morning and destroyed his own economy, just so he had an excuse to do what? Go to Iraq? Give Halliburton a war contract? What? Somebody tell me why?

Antonia Zerbisias is on a tirade about how Rosie O’Donnell got fired because she was fat, ugly and loud (Full Disclosure: This has happened to me a time or two before). Really, with friends like Zerb, Rosie doesn’t need enemies.

Rude, lewd, crude Rosie O’Donnell was leaving ABC’s daytime talk show The View.

Naturally, King was obligated to seek out The Combover Which Talks, Donald Trump.

“She’s a disgusting person,” said Trump, who has been trading insults with O’Donnell since January. “She’s a slob.”

Alright, now that everyone has stated the obvious, let’s look at where Zerb went wrong in this article (since up till now I agree with her).

More dangerous than taking on Trump, who was followed on CNN by another outsized, outrageous woman: Roseanne Barr, also known for her crotch-grabbing and blunt talk.

Unlike all the blond-trophy-second-wife types flanking old men co-hosts all over the TV grid, neither Barr nor O’Donnell shut up and look pretty.

Not a single mainstream media news show is hosted by a woman who is aggressive and candid, the way that Bill O’Reilly is on Fox, or Joe Scarborough or Keith Olbermann are on MSNBC. There is no female David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel or Bill Maher.

Oprah Winfrey, as revealed on Bill Moyers’ outstanding post-mortem on the pre-Iraq media last week, shut up audience members who questioned the Bushies. Ellen DeGeneres hasn’t uttered a controversial word since she yelled, “I’m gay!” on her sitcom 10 years ago.

Has no network found the courage to offer, say, Sarah Silverman or Janeane Garofalo a platform? Or will O’Donnell’s replacement be Red State straight?

I don’t know which fallacy to deal with first. Let’s start with the noisiest: Janeane Garofolo. Garofolo was practically given her own radio station, and there was no market for her bullshit. Air America tanked.

Sarah Silverman plays both sides of the political sphere, and that’s why she’s loved and hated by all. Good for her - excellent career ahead of her.

Greta van Susteren - arguably the ugliest woman on television, is one of Fox News’s biggest draws.

Tammy Bruce (a lesbian) and Michelle Malkin (a minority) regularly appear on or even guest-host Bill O’Reilly’s show. They are Republicans. How wicked of them, going against the grain like that.

Antonia, I must ask if you’ve ever even watched Fox News, or if you are like those blinkered pro-CBC types who wanted Fox banned in Canada? Because there are plenty of loud, opinionated and even somewhat unattractive women doing very well out there. They just happen to be conservatives.

Maybe the problem is that no one wants to buy the message you’re selling.

H/t: Kathy

What the hell took them so long to catch on? The mainstream media has always been anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and playing the woe-to-the-poor-uprooted-Palestinians violins all the damn time. But now that it looks like one of their own may never return from the clutches of evil in Gaza, the press may have finally cottoned on to the fact that Muslims can’t be trusted.

“Up until now there has always been the assumption that there will be protection from the Palestinian authority or from Arabic and Islamic customs on treating guests. Now that trust is gone.”

Isn’t there a fable that goes something like this?

Ever notice that in addition to not labelling terrorists as terrorists, that our dhimmi media also refers to many towns in the Middle East (except Jerusalem) as “the holy city of…”? Or how about how Mohammed is always referred to as “The Prophet Mohammed”? I’m surprised they don’t write “PBUH (Peace Be Upon Him)” after each mention, but I’m sure it’s coming. It’s only a matter of time.

If this has already occurred to you, I apologize for being slow about it. I just noticed it while reading this, and seeing that all the photo captions had “holy city of…” It’s a little annoying.

Via LGF:

The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain’s youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

Would those be the same members of the audience who would have rioted has Britain used it’s dusty spine to free its sailors instead of humbly accepting them as a “gift”? Would those be the same members of the audience who protest holding signs that say “Behead those who insult Islam”? Because I assure you, it would not be the members of the audience whose fathers and grandfathers fought for Her Majesty themselves. It would not be the average middle-classman who understands that the freedoms they enjoy did not just spring up from a wild mushroom or something.

“The BBC has behaved in a cowardly fashion by pulling the plug on the project altogether,” said a source close to the project. “It began to have second thoughts last year as the war in Iraq deteriorated. It felt it couldn’t show anything with a degree of positivity about the conflict.

“It needed to tell stories about Iraq which reflected the fact that some members of the audience didn’t approve of what was going on. Obviously a story about Johnson Beharry could never do that. You couldn’t have a scene where he suddenly turned around and denounced the war because he just wouldn’t do that.

“The film is now on hold and it will only make it to the screen if another broadcaster picks it up.”

Here’s hoping a more patriotic station backs it. The so-called “British” Broadcasting Corporation has no room for the good news out of Iraq. Only the bad.

Back then it was a random act of violence - obviously well planned, but random nonetheless. Those we counted on for information - our leaders, our press - let us down by not assisting us in linking the events. Those of us who were young, or ininvolved didn’t bother making the connection. Munich. The Iran hostage taking. And on this day in 1993, the bombing of the World Trade Center.

It would take nearly nine years for those buildings to come down at the hands of the same people before we would finally start linking together all the news events that shaped our lives for the previous twenty or thirty years. The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The murder of 14 girls at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. The genocide in Rwanda. The genocide in Darfur.

All of these events may seem unconnected, but there is an underlying cause at the root of all of them: Islam. The ummah, or global Islamic village. Hatred of the west and what we stand for. A burning desire to bring us to heel; to make us submit.

Even now, our press is hesitant to call a spade a spade or a terrorist a terrorist. We have this bogeyman of Al Qaeda, and we blame them for everything. “…has links to Al Qaeda…” “…was associated with Al Qaeda….” They want us to believe that a half-dead desert zealot is responsible for all the evil in the world, without admitting that he’s telling us the truth. Islam preaches our murder. Islam will take over. Demands are made in the name if Islam. So much easier to blame one man - be it Bin Laden or Bush - than it is to face the real disease. Islam.

I never thought I’d see the day that I read something at the Huffington Post that didn’t make my skin crawl. Not only that - I agree with every word.

After all, both entities - the left and terrorists - seem to share the same desire: to put the US, humiliatingly, in its place.

But I would be wrong to say such things. Very wrong. Of course, “dissent is patriotic,” and the left is only critical of America because it simply loves our country much more than I do.

That’s why calling them terrorists would be intolerant and pretty shameful.

But what about “patriotic terrorists?”

That’s kinda neat.

What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy’s success against said country.

Go read the whole thing. And then play “Count the Strawmen” in the comments by the raving loons… uh, I mean Patriots, uh Patriotic Terrorists.

Thank you, Mr. Gutfeld, for having the balls to call a spade a spade, and in rather unfriendly territory no less.

So MustControlFistOfDeath and I are sitting at The Ten Spot on Thursday night, sipping on martinis and having our toes painted (hers are pink, mine are ra-ra-red), when she turns to me and says “Wanna read something hilarious?” She dips into her covet-worthy bag and pulls out a broadsheet called Women’s Post. The subtitle in the upper right corner is News Is Emotional, which of course is blatantly untrue. News is news. Women are emotional. Sometimes we get emotional about the news, but unless we’re reading or watching something very skewed like CNN, the news itself is NOT emotional.

She directed my attention to an article entitled The choice in green leaves something to be desired. The environment. That old chestnut. From start to finish the article was full of half truths and downright bullshit. My favorite part though was

I think it all boils down to the astounding fact that I can’t buy a hybrid car.

Honey, there are several days a month when I can’t afford to buy food, so I really don’t give a flying fart about whether or not you can buy a hybrid to ease your conscience.

Now, to be fair, Ms. Nickson wasn’t alluding to price. If you can get your hands on the hard copy of the article, it is significantly longer than the online version. If there’s one thing Ms. Nickson isn’t concerned about, it’s price. No, she’s upset that she can’t offroad to the cottage in a Smart Car. She laments that there are no 4WD hybrids to choose from. You see, she drives an SUV - but she has to. She’s forced to, because nothing else can get her to her far-flung place of refuge from the great unwashed in the city.

There is one area where Ms. Nickson and I do agree, though:

Put aside global warming, of which our auto emissions cause 30%; with every gas dollar you and I spend, we are funding Islamic terrorism

It’s truly enough to make RightGirl go green.

So if you want your news not only emotional, but elitest, mostly made up, and condescending too, Women’s Post is the way to go.

Having said that, check out Michael Coren’s article. Hidden agenda, indeed.