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Written by David, on March 2nd, 2012 Hearing about the death of Andrew Breitbart was a punch in the gut, and only now have I caught my breath and gathered my thoughts enough to write about it.
As one of the leading lights of the New Media, he had a confrontational, no-holds-barred approach to journalism that I could only admire. He used the institutional left’s own tactics against it, and as a result earned significant hatred and enmity. From making public James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting, to exposing Van Jones’s odious 9/11 trutherism, to showing that Congressman Lewis was lying about being spat upon and called n—er by tea partiers, his work was absolutely invaluable.
The institutional left in the news media, higher education, the entertainment industry, and government have spent decades shaping the narrative to portray anyone to the right of Woodrow Wilson as mean, racist, greedy, uncaring, and stupid, if not outright evil. Breitbart made it his business to expose the left’s moral posturing for what it is: a facade. A relative minority of left-wing individuals who do not respect individual sovereignty, who value confiscation over charity, who hold the rest of us in flyover country in seething contempt and seek to replace all of the mores and values that made this country great with a utopian fantasy of “social justice” should not control the entire country’s media the way it does. Breitbart understood that, and he had the foresight to realize that the great equalizer, the internet, was the only way to get this message across.
He fought them, and he fought hard. He relished the fight: the sort of man who retweeted the horrible things said to him and about him to show the world who he was fighting shows you how much he must have loved confrontation. That’s a kind of bravery few of us possess.
One of the reasons why I left off political blogging, for the most part, was because of the reaction to the Gabby Giffords shooting. Before anything was known about the shooter, before anyone understood the circumstances or reasons for it, the bright bulbs in the media blamed the murders on tea partiers and conservative rhetoric. They painted an appalling picture of their ideological adversaries with the blood of a dead nine-year-old girl. And even after it was shown that the killer, Jared Lee Loughner, was essentially apolitical and likely insane, they refused to walk back any of these truly disgusting claims. I honestly couldn’t believe it: a child was dead, other adults were dead, and a member of Congress was fighting for her life in the hospital, and the left did its best to make political hay out of it. That went beyond indecent. Have you ever gotten into an altercation with someone you start to think you shouldn’t have messed with? That’s how I felt. There was really no depth to which the left would not plunge. So I got out of it. Too dirty. I have a code of ethics, and part of that is to not deny the essential humanity of whomever I disagree with (as long as they aren’t trying to kill me).
It was a mistake. The left did the same thing to Rush Limbaugh in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing as they did to the conservative media after the Giffords shooting. They’ve had a stranglehold on the media narrative for so long that they’ll do anything to keep it. Breitbart was starting to break that hold. Talk radio is breaking that hold. The blogosphere and the New Media are breaking that hold. The left recognizes this now, and it frightens them. So they’ll try to silence us, whatever it takes.
I’m pretty sure that Breitbart would enjoy the left’s sickening orgy of dancing on his grave, and if there was any way to do so, he’d retweet their gleeful posts from the Great Beyond to prove how false their moral superiority really is. I’m personally disgusted by it (after all, he has a wife and four children), but not surprised: the left in this country has shown its hand. I can no longer pretend that my ideological opponents will play by the rules that come naturally to decent men.
So what do we do now? We have to fight, just like he did. We’re up against an entrenched, powerful enemy that will stop at nothing to maintain its hold on the media and higher education, and fights with tactics straight out of the Alinsky handbook. Don’t lose heart like I did once, and won’t do again. Pick up Andrew Breitbart’s standard, gird your loins, and wade back into the battle. We have a country to regain.
Written by Joshua, on January 25th, 2012 Today is David’s Birthday! Let’s all celebrate his day of birth with birthday cake!
Written by Joshua, on December 5th, 2011 Here is today’s political cartoon of the week, submitted by noted political cartoonist, I. P. “Ip” Freely.
Written by David, on November 9th, 2011 Michelle Obama echoes 2008 campaign:
 Michelle Obama told high school students taking part in a mentoring program at Georgetown University on Tuesday that being married to the president can be scary at times, because he makes the family get out of its comfort zone.
The first lady urged students not to let fear guide them after a student asked about being worried about going away to college.
“I mean this is scary,” she said. “Shoot, being married to Barack Obama? He’s got big plans. He’s always pushing us beyond our comfort zones, and I’m dragged along going, `What’s he doing now? No, not this.’”
It’s nice to see that someone else is saying, “No, not this,” to Obama’s plans to fundamentally transform the United States into another failing European socialist state. Remember this warning Michelle Obama hit us with in February 2008:
”Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed.”
I remember when our comfort zone was 7.8% unemployment. Sometimes the comfort zone isn’t so bad. Someone should tell Michelle Obama that.
Written by David, on November 3rd, 2011 Social scientist outed for “massive fraud”:
 When colleagues called the work of Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel too good to be true, they meant it as a compliment. But a preliminary investigative report released on October 31 gives literal meaning to the phrase, detailing years of data manipulation and blatant fabrication by the prominent Tilburg University researcher.
“We have some 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals where we are actually sure that they are fake, and there are more to come,” says Pim Levelt, chair of the committee that investigated Stapel’s work at the university.
Stapel’s eye-catching studies on aspects of social behaviour such as power and stereotyping garnered wide press coverage. For example, in a recent Science paper (which the investigation has not identified as fraudulent), Stapel reported that untidy environments encouraged discrimination ( Science 332, 251-253; 2011).
“Somebody used the word ‘wunderkind’,” says Miles Hewstone, a social psychologist at the University of Oxford, UK. “He was one of the bright thrusting young stars of Dutch social psychology — highly published, highly cited, prize-winning, worked with lots of people, and very well thought of in the field.”
Luckily, this time, he was caught out. This underscores very significantly why we need a great deal of oversight in the social sciences.
Written by David, on November 1st, 2011 Associate Professor of History Julio Pino got “political”:
The speaker at whom Pino shouted was Ishmael Khaldi, formerly the deputy consul general at the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. Khaldi, as a Bedouin and Muslim, lectures on his experiences as an advocate for Israel.
According to multiple press accounts, Pino posed a question to Khaldi after his talk, and then shouted “death to Israel” and left the auditorium. It is the latter statement that has set off the controversy.
This Pino character is a gigantic coward to shout something like that and run out. If you’re going to shout “Death to Israel,” anywhere outside of a mosque or just about every Middle Eastern country in the world, at least have the courage to stick around and deal with the consequences. But the most striking part for me was Cary Nelson’s reaction. Nelson is the president of the American Association of University Professors:
“Calling out a political slogan during a question period falls well within the speech rights of any member of a university community,” he said. “Expressive outbursts do not substitute for rational analysis, but they have long played a role in our national political life.”
 Think about it: calling for the death of the homeland of the Jews has just been relegated to the realm of political sloganeering. Like “Change we can believe in” or “Tippicanoe and Tyler too”. It’s just a political slogan. Pino shouldn’t be censured for it, according to this clown Nelson.
Imagine if Pino had shouted “Death to homosexuals!” It’s not an uncommon notion in Islamic countries. Is that just a political slogan? Anti-semitism has found a comfortable home on college campuses for quite some time now; that the president of the AAUP simply refers to an expression of it as a political slogan shows you how deep this cancer in American education has insinuated itself.
Written by David, on October 31st, 2011 Joseph Curl shows us some of Michelle Obama’s less temperate recent remarks:
Mad Michelle this week popped down to Davis Island, Fla., to hobnob with the very people her husband despises – the 1 percent. At a massive mansion on the bay, filled with the wealthiest of the wealthy, America’s first lady launched into a tirade about “them” – the Republicans.
 “Let’s not forget about what it meant when my husband appointed two brilliant Supreme Court justices, and for the first time in history, our daughters – and our sons – watched three women take their seats on our nation’s highest court. But more importantly, let’s not forget the impact their decisions will have on our lives for decades to come – on our privacy and our security, on whether we can speak freely, worship openly and love whomever we choose. That is what’s at stake here,” she said to applause.
She’s certainly taking her cue from her post-partisan husband with this kind of divisive rhetoric. I don’t remember the last few First Ladies engaging in such inflammatory talk on the campaign trail, but just as Michelle Obama has redefined beauty, she’s also redefining the role of First Lady.
Written by David, on October 29th, 2011 ABC News reported a few days ago:
At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.
“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.
 Interesting how ABC spun this: self-reliance as a bad thing. What Obama actually said was, “You are on your own.” This, to his supporters, is also a bad thing. This is what the American left wants: it wants you to be a ward of the state, a dependent sucking on the government teat. What they know and hope you’ll forget is that it’s extremely difficult to remove an entitlement once it’s been put in place. Self-reliance is a dirty word: just let us take care of everything, and you’ll be okay.
It’s shameful. It’s everything that the Founding Fathers were against.
UPDATE: Spendthrift Michelle Obama’s remarks on being “on your own.”
Written by David, on October 27th, 2011 Lately, it seems that the Democrats in Congress and Obama have been referring to Congress as “the Republican Congress” in public discussions. This is despite the fact that the Republican party is in charge of the House and the Democrat party is in charge of the Senate.
 It’s been suggested that this is a new meme being advanced: a way for the Democrats to further distance themselves from the horrible mess they’ve made (and continue to make) of the economy. Put it all on the Republicans, avoid responsibility, and claim that Congress’s terrible approval ratings are all because of the other guys, not them. This is likely the case, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
One of the most amazingly stupid things I’ve ever heard an Obama staffer say was when Valerie Jarrett claimed that the Obama administration was going to “speak truth to power” in its war on the Fox News Channel two years ago. In the interview, Jarrett was flailing; she didn’t have anything incisive to say, so she reverted to form: speak truth to power, hold those in authority responsible, etc. Valerie: you’re the one in power now. There’s nowhere else to pass this buck. The responsibility is yours. That’s the same thought process evident in referring to Congress as “the Republican Congress.” Out of ideas, flailing, desperately seeking excuses, the Democrat party is simply reverting to form. Sticking with the old expressions. Because they don’t have anything else.
Written by David, on October 25th, 2011 Apparently, Moammar Qaddafi was given the Abner Louima “Haitian Love Treatment” before being shot to death with his own gun.
Watch the video here. It’s not too graphic.
Written by David, on October 22nd, 2011 After speaking with Josh about it, I have returned to re-take managerial control over The Waterglass.
There will be gigantic quantities of civility served up, along with frivolity and jocularity.
Thank you.
Written by Joshua, on July 13th, 2011 According to the Japanese, a little radioactive meat won’t hurt ya:
A Japanese health official downplayed the dangers Tuesday after cesium contaminated meat from six Fukushima cows was delivered to Japanese markets and probably ingested.Goshi Hosono, state minister in charge of consumer affairs and food-safety, said he hoped to head off any overreactions.
“If we were to eat the meat everyday, then it would probably be dangerous,” Hosono said at a news conference Tuesday. “But if it is consumed only in small portions, I don’t think it would have any long-lasting effects on the human body.”
The meat, delivered late last month, has made its way to consumers and most likely has been ingested, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said Monday evening. This was preceded by another recent discovery of radiation in the meat of 11 cows delivered to Tokyo from the same farm.
Think positively!
– No need to have a dinner by candlelight: your meat glows in the dark!
– You may get superpowers from eating it. But I’m not sure.
– Be glad it wasn’t the milk (yet).
Written by David, on June 3rd, 2011 Today is National Doughnut Day. That’s not important. This piece about the New York Times being a religion is:
The Times has of late acted a great deal like a corrupt religious institution. This column has chronicled its often vicious and dishonest attempts–both on the editorial page and in the news sections, which Abramson will head–to shore up its own authority by trying to tear down its competitors. Examples:
• In January, the Times responded to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by instigating a witch hunt against “Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media,” as an editorial put it–even though by the time the editorial was published, it was clear that suspect Jared Loughner was not motivated by politics.
There are other examples in the piece. The Gray Lady is dishonest, and it’s hard to take anyone who respects it seriously.
Written by Joshua, on March 21st, 2011 Yay! Hobbit movie!
Filming on the two Hobbit movies has begun following months of delays caused by funding problems, a row over actors’ wages and surgery for its director.
Filming is taking place at Stone Street Studios, Wellington, and on location around New Zealand.
Production on the films, starring Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, is expected to take up to two years. The first is due out in late 2012.
In January, director Peter Jackson had surgery for a perforated ulcer.
Studios Warner Bros and New Line had previously considered taking the production away from New Zealand after acting unions threatened to boycott the films in protest over payments.
The films had earlier been stalled by problems including rows over distribution rights and the exit of original director Guillermo del Toro.
The film, which also stars Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, Andy Serkis as Gollum, Elijah Wood as Frodo and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, is based on JRR Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel.
The Hobbit films act as a prequel to Jackson’s trilogy of films based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
Written by Joshua, on March 21st, 2011 Nothing can be said to be “good” news:
Rikuzentakata fire chief: ‘I spend all day looking for the bodies of my firemen’
Electricity has been restored to three reactors at the Japanese nuclear plant wrecked by fire and explosions after the 11 March quake and tsunami.
However the cooling systems are not yet operating, and the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, says the situation remains very serious.
Some workers at the stricken facility were evacuated on Monday after smoke was seen rising from reactor No 3.
The official death toll from the twin disaster has now risen to 8,450.
Nearly 13,000 people are still missing.
Food contamination
Engineers have restored power to three reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and hope to test water pumps soon.
Workers have been battling to cool reactors and spent fuel ponds to bring the radiation-leaking plant under control.
A plant spokesman says some workers were evacuated from the complex after smoke or vapour was seen rising from the No 3 reactor.
Villagers living near the plant have been told not to drink tap water due to higher levels of radioactive iodine.
“There have been some positive developments in the last 24 hours but overall the situation remains very serious,” said Graham Andrew, a senior IAEA official.
“We consider that now we have come to a situation where we are very close to getting the situation under control,” Deputy Cabinet Secretary Tetsuro Fukuyama said.
The BBC’s Chris Hogg in Tokyo says the government is expected to announce new measures later to try to prevent produce and goods containing radiation reaching the market.
Over the weekend spinach and milk produced near the Fukushima nuclear plant was found to contain levels of radioactive iodine far higher than the legal limits, although not at levels that would be a risk to human health.
Radioactive materials three times higher than the legal safety limit were detected in the water there.
At the moment local governments are asking producers of spinach and milk in the affected areas not to send their goods to markets.
The government is considering whether additional precautions may be needed.
Humanitarian crisis
Bad weather forced Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan to cancel a planned visit to emergency workers near the Fukushima plant.
It is also making the recovery work a much more grim and difficult task.
Search-and-relief efforts in the prefecture of Miyagi, where the police chief believes the final quake-tsunami death toll could reach 15,000, have been delayed by driving rain.
“We basically cannot operate helicopters in the rain,” Miyagi official Kiyohiro Tokairin said.
“We have been using helicopters to deliver relief goods to some places but for today we have to switch the delivery to places that we can reach by road,” he said.
More than 350,000 people are still living in evacuation centres in northern and eastern Japan, says the BBC’s Chris Hogg.
There are shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine in the shelters, our correspondent says.
Some aid from foreign countries has started to arrive. The government has begun the process of finding temporary housing in other parts of the country for those made homeless.
Nearly 900,000 households are still without water.
In a rare piece of good news, an 80-year-old woman and her grandson were found alive in the rubble of their home in Ishinomaki city, where they were trapped for nine days.
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