Tom In Paine

CNN and tragedy: covering it or milking it?

2013-05-21T08:02:00.001-07:00

When tragedies hit it is obviously always toughest for those going through it,those directly affected by it and their friends and families and neighbors. But after that what becomes especially tough for everyone else in the country is having to watch it and get news reports and coverage from some of the most manipulative, self-serving, and purely exploitive people in the country -- journalists. Especially those on cable TV news outlets like CNN and MSNBC.

CNN pioneered the visually obnoxious practice of taking the same 6 or 7 seconds of news footage, like people crying, people hugging, a tornado bearing down, the same bloody face or whatever else it might be that they think will attract attention like they are presiding over a side show, and replaying it successively, over and over, in consecutive repetitive loops so constant and repetitive that it looks like a CNN director in the control room passed out and fell face forward on the "play" button with no one else there to help. This obnoxious nonsense started during the Monica Lewinsky frenzy when CNN replayed over 20 consecutive times the same six or seven seconds of footage of Monica Lewinsky getting out of the back seat of an SUV on her way to testify to the grand jury while some "analyst" droned on.

They still do it to this day. They did it after the Boston marathon bombing, replaying the same video of the instant the explosions took place over and over and over again no matter what they were reporting or who they were interviewing. They didn't just do it for days. They did for weeks. And they are doing it again with the coverage of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado.

This isn't journalism. This is sheer exploitation, almost voyeurism for their own ends. The same way CNN abuses the term "Breaking News". Because research shows that when they use that term, people tend to pay more attention and watch longer, even if the "Breaking News" is days old. The morning after the tornado in Oklahoma hit, CNN had the "Breaking News" legend on display and under it, "How the Day Unfolded". How the day unfolded is not breaking news. It is a summary. It is a review. it is NOT "Breaking News". But every item, every interview, everything anyone had to say from Oklahoma came with the prefix "Breaking News".

During the coverage of the marathon bombings, CNN saw its ratings jump 194%. Given how small CNN's ratings are on a daily basis ( somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 viewers) tragedies like this are a financial windfall for the network. And they know it. And it was clear when every anchor on the CNN payroll was doing their live shots from the same corner in Boston that they were going to milk it for all it was worth.

The best coverage of the events unfolding from Boston was on the networks, CBS and NBC in particular where people who acted like grown ups and with some gravitas and a sense of what it really means to be a journalist at a time when its needed most, did a better job at reporting the news and covering events than the almost comical response of a network like CNN who sent everyone but the cleaning lady to Boston to do stand up live shots on the same street corner and then stayed for weeks. Even when nothing was going on behind them and no news of significance was being reported and whatever news there was could have easily been reported from their studios in Atlanta or New York. But a decision was made to keep them there in Boston and it had nothing to do with journalism.

Perhaps shockingly, as bad and as dishonest and biased as they are when it comes to political and policy journalism, when covering live events that have no political slant or bias they can exploit, Fox News, of the three cable networks seems the least exploitive, most focused on communicating facts, reported by journalists on the ground who, unlike CNN and MSNBC don't seem to think that how they personally feel about what they are covering is news and needs to be told to the world.

In terms of reporting versus exploitation it also should be noted that during their coverage, CNN anchors tell people to go to CNN.com/impact to see how they can help the victims. When one goes to that page one sees two banner ads for Nissan, an ad for top stock picks, and an ad for Lifelock Identity Theft protection, and since ad revenue online is based on the number of people accessing a page (the site owner gets $5 per 1,000 hits per day) sending people to that page seems to have at least as much to do with contributing to CNN's bottom line as it does helping the victims of the Oklahoma tornado.

Wolf Blitzer added to CNN's embarrassment and further sinking into the morass of pandering and lack of journalistic standards ( as he always embarrasingly does) when he insisted on not just interviewing a tornado survivor but putting his own words in her mouth when he asked the survivor, "You've gotta thank the Lord, right? Do you thank the Lord for that split-second decision?"
The survivor as it turns out was an atheist who said so but didnt make any more of an issue of Blitzer's attempts at pandering to religious conservatives and that is exactly what he was doing given the part of the country he knew he was in. It isnt just that no reporter has any business insinutating whatever their personal religious beliefs might be into a story but in Blitzer's case given his history it wasn't even sincere but pure pandering.

It is significant that weeks after the Sandy Hook shootings, with CNN still anchoring their news coverage from Newtown, residents started appearing with signs that told CNN to go home. They finally did. Like an unwanted house guest who long overstayed their visit and finally had to be kicked out. How long before the residents in Moore, Oklahoma feel the same way is yet to be seen. Right now they have more important things to do.

Watergate, Watergate everywhere!

2013-05-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

It's ironic that back in 2008 as Executive Director of the Denver Group and an off shoot organization called Democrats For Principle Before Party, I did a group of TV commercials comparing Barrack Obama to Richard Nixon,attempting to warn Democrats of the dangers Obama would present as president to the Democratic agenda since it was apparent even if the media decided to look the other way,that he was every bit as underhanded, duplicitous, dishonest ,unprincipled and untrustworthy a presidential candidate as Richard Nixon. Nothing he said publicly could be trusted or taken at face value. Obama even had his own Helen Gahagen Douglas in Alice Palmer a woman who helped Obama get his start in politics who he later double crossed to win his first election.

In his first four years in office Obama lived up to the billing. But now, incredibly Republicans of all people are drawing unfavorable comparisons of Obama to Richard Nixon, comparing almost every accusation now being made against Obama and his administration to Watergate.

You know Republicans are desperate ( or terminally dumb) when they insist on reminding the American people that the worst abuse of power by a president and his administration in American history, a secret subverting of the constitution, abusing the office and powers of the presidency and running a criminal enterprise out of the White House which resulted in almost every member of a presidential administration going to prison for multiple felonies was committed by Republicans.

Nevertheless they can't stop comparing the latest unsavory revelations going on with Obama and his administration to Watergate.

Comparisons of Benghazi to Watergate are so laughable they are an insult to the memories of those killed because it is obvious that Republicans like Dana Rohrabacher, Lindsay Graham, John Boehner and others making the comparisons are trying to use them as political fodder. The recent release of emails show that while there were changes made to suggested "talking points" immediately after the Benghazi attack, they were all made by the CIA and had no political motive behind them. In one instance the CIA changed the word "attack" to "demonstration" and removed a reference to Al-Qaeda. Supposedly because while they suspected Al-Qaeda they had no proof at the time.

John Boehner, grasping for straws and making himself and his party look foolish again, seized on the emails to say see? the White House lied. They said only a word was changed and here we have two words. Maybe even six or seven words.

And all authored by the CIA. With the bottom line being that these changes by the CIA amounted to a big nothing. Nothing about these talking points given on Sunday morning talk shows by Susan Rice had even the smallest consequence regarding anything of importance or value. If the Republicans think its so important they can have those in the CIA responsible for making the changes appear before their phalanx of congressional committees to explain it. They wont do it because there is no political hay to be made by doing it.

None of this is to defend Obama who manages to sink to new lows almost on a daily basis, but none of those lows even remotely approach the neo-fascism and criminal conspiracies to undermine the constitution and American freedoms that was the administration of Republican conservative Richard Nixon and the series of scandals known as Watergate, named for the apartment and office complex in Washington that contained the offices of the chairman of the Democratic Party that Republican operatives burglarized with the knowledge of then attorney general John Mitchell, looking for dirt on Democrats. The ensuing cover-up which ensnared almost the entire Nixon administration in obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence was to cover up even worse abuses committed by these same people against American citizens.

We heard Lindsay Graham say the other day that Benghazi was worse that Watergate. Orin Hatch has said that the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups applying for 501(c)4 status was worse than Watergate (though none were denied the status they applied for). And the Justice Department secretly gathering phone records of AP reporters for a leak investigation was worse than Watergate.

On the last charge it was certainly the kind of thing Nixon would have done. But the difference is, Nixon and the Republicans did it illegally with illegal wiretaps and for personal reasons while Obama is just, well the usual unprincipled and grossly unqualified garden variety self promoting politician and president he's been since day one.

But Republican obsession with comparing Obama's miscalculations or incompetence with Watergate is now getting comical.

At the end of the commercials I did in 2008 for Democrats For Principle Before Party, in comparing Obama to Nixon, the question used most to disparage Nixon, was asked in the commerical about Obama: Would you buy a used car from this man?

No more than Id buy a used scandal from a Republican.

Why Obama's "outrage" over IRS and conservative groups is pandering: they deserved it.

2013-05-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

When news broke that the IRS had been singling out conservative groups for special scrutiny when applying for tax exempt status, it didnt take President Obama long to say "if true" the targeting of conservative political groups by the IRS "would be outrageous". But given a bit more thought it becomes apparent that Obama's statement is, for now pandering to Republicans and designed to do two things: lessen right wing criticism of his handling of Benghazi ("see? even when you attack me I respect you like crazy") and two, lessen the criticism of his administration over the IRS revelations ("see even when you attack me I respect you like crazy").

And, as we have seen many times before Obama will say or do anything to avoid or lessen criticism by any group except those who voted for him.

The reason his statement of outrage is nothing more than pandering is he first he qualified it by saying "if true". "If true" is no small thing. Which means Obama doesn't know if it's true or not, or claims not to know if it was politically motivated or not and so far the evidence is that it wasn't. If it wasn't then what is the problem? Why all the "outrage"?

Given the information available at the moment, the IRS was looking for potential abuses in political groups applying for tax exempt status, groups which claim to advocate for a position but not a candidate. Usually these are thinly disguised campaign ads and commercials for the election of a candidate posing as advocacy for an issue and thus allowed under separate rules of election law and also allows for tax exempt status under certain circumstances.

The evidence is so far that the IRS started out focusing mostly on conservative political groups (they eventually expanded it to include other groups as well) looking for possible abuses of the law, (they did the same with some liberal groups during Bush's presidency without a word of protest from Republicans) and that it was a implemented without a political agenda. What is not being said is that given the history of sleazy, underhanded, dishonest political tactics by conservative Republicans over the years the IRS has good reason to focus on conservative Republican groups. They deserved the scrutiny.

Republicans and especially conservatives have a recent history of flaunting election law and indulging in sleazy campaign tactics including voter suppression from the head of the Republican party in New Hampshire going to prison for election fraud and tampering during the 2004 presidential election, to the recent dishonest smears by conservative media sites like Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller which published stories before the last election accusing New Jersey senator Bob Menendez of having sex with underage prostitutes, a story that turned out to not only be completely false, but was the result of conservative operatives making cash bribes to the women who made the charges. So it makes all the sense in the world that the IRS would pay special attention to conservative groups who have proved in the past they are much more likely to abuse the law and to try to find ways to circumvent them than liberal groups.

The Republican uproar is over the IRS scrutiny of applications for a 501(c) 4 organization which qualify for tax exempt status if they are primarily for promoting the social welfare. Karl Rove's group is a conservative organization that received such a tax exempt status from the IRS as a 501(c)4 . Democrats should call that a scandal itself and question the IRS as to why Rove received the exemption. The idea that Rove's organization has anything to do with the public welfare as opposed to electing Republican candidates is a joke and something Democrats should demand the IRS investigate as long as everyone is in an investigating mood. And maybe make the rules a little tighter to exclude groups like Rove's.

As long as singling out of conservative political groups for extra scrutiny wasn't the product of Democratic leaning IRS agents or the result of a political directive targeting these groups for political advantage ( as Republicans try to do all the time) then it's a big nothing and something Democrats should point out Republicans probably brought on themselves. And the fact that none of these groups were ultimately denied their tax exempt status seems to re-enforce the idea that the motives weren't political but based on history and sound reasoning. If you get caught cheating on your tax return do you have a right to cry foul if you are subjected to more intense scrutiny of future returns? The Republicans and conservatives in general have been caught cheating more often in more cases than any other political group.

Republicans are now crying "witch hunt" as they themselves conduct a witch hunt over Benghazi and are trying to compare this to Watergate. A few days ago they compared Benghazi to Watergate. They seem to be trying to compare everything to Watergate except Watergate which was a purely Republican criminal enterprise run out of the White House by a Republican president and his cabinet who had committed felonies, most of whom went to prison

The IRS can't come right out and say it, but it seems the scrutiny of conservative groups is the result of a long and tawdry history of Republican conservative campaign and election abuse which is how Watergate started (and let's not forget Tom Delay, former House Republican majority whip from Texas currently in federal prison for election and campaign fraud and misuse of campaign funds.)

It's also amusing to watch Republicans get "outraged" over what amounts to charges that they were being profiled.

During the current congressional hearings, the question that Republicans seem to want answered most is, who was responsible for conservative groups being given extra scrutiny in their applications for tax exempt status for political groups? The answer is simple but not one Republicans want to hear. Its conservatives themselves and their history of dishonest underhanded and even criminal activity in the past when it comes to politics, campaigns, raising money, keeping donors secret and policies they don't like. That is who is responsible.

The idea that these Tea Party and conservative groups applying for IRS tax exempt status based on their assertion that they are doing social welfare work and NOT political campaigning for any candidate is a joke. A bad joke. And makes the extra scrutiny given by the IRS more than understandable and not the "outrage" that Obama tries to assert. What's needed are laws that make it clear what the standards are for being granted the tax exempt status these groups want, which, under present law would allow them to keep the identities of donors secret.

There has to be a change in the law that more specifically defines the criteria for a 501(c)4 group doing social welfare advocacy that will eliminate groups like Karl Rove's getting that status and any other group using it to circumvent traditional campaign laws. Then IRS agents won't be in the position of having to make those determinations. In other words, blame this too on congress, who are passing the buck over vague and inadequate laws that let groups like Kar Rove's hide the bucks.

Republican charges in Benghazi hearings ignores Bush gross negligence in 911 attacks.

2013-05-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

In many ways it serves the Democrats right. The Republicans are going after a Democratic administration tooth and nail over Benghazi where four Americans were killed and while the loss of any American life is tragic, the same people now trying to make political points at the expense of those four deaths were silent when in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept.11, 2001, the 911 Commission hearings exposed nothing less than the worst case of incompetence, gross negligence and even criminal negligence by a president and his administration related to national security in American history thanks to the Bush Administration from day one, ignoring and dismissing all warnings and threats of an impending attack by Al-Qaeda. And Democrats at the time said nothing.

The evidence exposed by the 911 Commission was that the attacks could have and should have been prevented. The evidence at the 911 Commission hearing was that Bush, Rice and Cheney dismissed terrorism as a real national security threat in the nine months leading up to the attacks, despite warnings by every government official in a position to know that Al-Qaeda was the single biggest threat to U.S. national security in the world. Bush demoted Richard Clarke, dissolved the Principals Meeting on sharing terror related intelligence, and did nothing in August of 2001 when intercepts of Al-Qaeda chatter reached the highest in the 20 years Richard Clarke had been White House anti-terrorism chief and the evidence was that an attack was imminent.

Bush was even given intelligence in his August 6,2001 Presidential Daily Briefing that an attack by Al-Qaeda within the United States was going to involve the hijacking of US airliners, and that Al-Qaeda cells had been seen putting office buildings in New York under surveillance. Bush and Rice and Cheney still did nothing. Richard Clarke testified that with the intelligence they had, both he and George Tenant in August of 2001, certain a large scale terrorist attack was imminent, were "running around the White House like men with their hair on fire" trying to get a meeting with Bush to tell him of the imminent threat and to get him to act. He refused both to see them and to act. As did Rice.

The disdain of the Bush Administration for the threat of a terrorist attack was so complete that the assistant director of the FBI testified he was told in a face to face meeting with then attorney general John Ashcroft, to "never bring me anything again related to terrorism".

Given all this damning evidence and testimony of gross negligence by the Bush Administration in the Sept 11 ,2001 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans, Democrats hid under a rock and acted out the Three Monkeys. Of course Republicans did also, proving that their bellowing about national security is as phony a political talking point as was pulling the plug on grandma.

Had Democrats insisted on holding George W. Bush and his administration accountable for what was the worst case of gross negligence regarding the national security of the United States in history the course of history would have been different. Bush might have even been impeached or forced to resign.

Instead Democrats hid in a corner, afraid Republicans would call them "unpatriotic" in the face of an attack on America, never mind that the attack was successful only because of the gross negligence of a Republican president and his advisors.

Democrats, as they have in the past, showed not an inch of backbone after the 911 Commission Hearings uncovered the most stupefying, damaging,gross negligence and incompetence of any administration in history. Democrats said and did nothing. And they said nothing when Bush announced he would refuse to cooperate with the commission unless there was a promise that the 911 Commission wouldnt attempt to lay blame or determine accoutability for who was responsible for the attacks but only report on what could be done better to prevent an attack next time. The press was no better proving once again they could be counted on to fold when reporting the truth matters most.

In the face of all the damning evidence, Democrats kept their mouths shut, including John Kerry when he ran for president in ,2004, not only never mentioning the evidence uncovered by the commission on 911 and holding Bush accountable for the 911 attacks, but never said a word about Iraq either.

And now Democrats are having to deal with Republican attacks over Benghazi and the deaths of four Americans by the same group of Republicans like Lindsay Graham to name one, who papered over the negligence of the Bush administration in attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, killed 3000, damaged the Pentagon and changed much about the way America goes about its business.

On Thursday Republican Senator James Inhoff accused Obama of the "the most egregious cover up in American history". This is everything thats wrong with Republicans and their party and why they have no credibility beyone their own small circle.. Inhoff who has distinguished himself previously as someone who thinks global warming is a myth, is to put it bluntly, a moron and a liar who should never invoke "American history" because he doesnt know American history from string theory. The worst and most egregious cover up in American history as everyone knows involved Republican president Richard Nixon and Watergate, and the most egregious security failure in American history was the result of the incompetence of Republican president George W. Bush and his administration in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

While the emails recently uncovered involving the Obama administration's attempt at damage control throw one more log on the fire of Obama as the most intellectually dishonest as well as inept Democratic president in history, the attempt by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and Inhoff laughably calling Benghazi "worse than Watergate" is a joke. Comparing Nixon's crimes and the obstruction of justice to cover up those crimes and subversion of the constitution and having a felon in the White House for a President along with almost everyone else in the Nixon Administration who were found guilty of felonies from two attorneys general to the director of the FBI to whatever happened in Benghazi, shows how purely political Republicans are and how low they will go not to mention how willing they are to insult the intelligence of their own constiutents. Maybe for good reason.

What is more than comparable to Benghazi but what Republicans like Grahan and Inhoff continue to cover up and ignore, is what happened on September 11,2001 not Sept.11 2012, when a Republican president, after ignoring nine months of warnings of a terrorist attack, after being told by intelligence agencies that the means of attack was going to be the hijacking of US commercial airliners, after being told that there was evidence the attack was going to be in New York City and after being told the attack was imminent, ignored it, did nothing, dismissed it all, and went on vacation in Crawford.

The result was 3000 Americans killed. And now Republicans and their mouthpeices in and out of the press want to make Benghazi and what happened there a flashpoint of an administration' s negligence over the deaths of four, ignoring Bush and his catastrophic failure that resulted in the deaths of 3000.

And while once again exposing Obama as being the ordinary, underhanded, disengenuous, garden variety politician he's always been in his administration's attempts at damage control over the truth about Benghazi prior to the 2012 election has some value, its nothing compared to the Republican silence and whitewash of the catastrophic negligence and failures of the Bush Administration leading up to Sept, 11,2001 and 3,000 dead Americans.

Which proves that Republican attacks over Benghazi are a fraud, and as is often the case with Republicans and conservatives, all about politics, throwing mud and seeing what if anything will stick knowing that for the most part, Democrats won't fight back and that none of them will have the wherewithal to point out the truth about September 11,2001 while Republicans attack over Sept. 11, 2012. And the hot air coming from Republicans like Inhoff will continue to contribute to global warming.

A chastened Maureen Dowd gets the message with Obama's failures on gun control.

2013-05-03T06:31:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, Maureen Dowd was drubbed here for a column she wrote on Hillary Clinton and a prospective Clinton run for the presidency 2016, asking if Clinton would run without what she called Clinton's "foolery".

Dowd was pilloried here for her own hypocrisy in ignoring that it was Obama who played her and a lot of other people for the fool with his almost daily foolery during the 2008 primaries and Dowd's myopic exercise in self-denial that it was the candidate she supported during the 2008 Democratic primaries,Barrack Obama, who hit new lows in "foolery", dishonesty, underhanded campaign tactics, sheer lying, reneging on promises and who never exhibited an iota of any kind of qualification to be president but like most in the press thought it best to support Obama by judging him on the color of his skin instead of the content of his character.

Now that the gun control bill failed, a bill that had the support of 91% of the American public, Dowd wrote a column exhibiting her too little too late disillusionment with Obama.

Dowd wrote:

"It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him."

It's not so unbelievable to anyone who kept their eyes open during the 2008 Democratic primary when a look at Obama's 11 year record as an elected official showed that he never initiated, created, sponsored or co-sponsored a single peice of legislation. In other words he spent 11 years doing nothing but trying to get himself re-elected.

Dowd then wrote:

"The White House had a defeatist mantra: this is tough. We need to do it. But we're probably going to lose. When you go into a fight saying you are probably going to lose, you're probably going to lose".

The truth is its never as tough as Obama says it is. Its only tough when you have no convictions, no principles, nothing you've ever really believed in and tried to see it through. When that's been your life, naturally you're going to fold at the first obstacle and throw in the towel. Obama has done it with Gitmo when he faced Republican oppostion, he did it with the public healthcare option when he couldn't stand up to health insurance industry lobbyists, he did it with finance reform when he couldn't stand up to Wall Street, he's done it with the budget when he couldn't stand up to Republicans and he did it with gun control when he couldn't stand up against the NRA and political opposition in any meaningful way.

And keep in mind Obama was elected with the biggest congressional majority of any president in 60 years. And he still didn't accomplish a thing of value.

Dowd wrote that Obama in saying that the Newtown families deserved a vote set his sights too low, that they deserved more than a vote, they deserved a law. That is of course true but its what to expect from someone who has never accomplished a single concrete thing in his life beyond fulfilling his own personal ambitions. Going for a vote instead of a law is the product of inept and incompetent thinking, which in spite of those who think using $10 words that have no real meaning is "soaring rhetoric", has more to do with covering up what's missing than in getting anything accomplished.

Yes the gun control failure is another Obama failure. Just like dumping the public option because of his inability to stand up to the health insurance lobby was a failure. Just like his reneging on his promise to close Gitmo was and is a failure. Just like his inability to stand up to Wall Street and pass meaningful finance reform was a failure. Just like everything in Obama's presidency has been a failure. But its also Dowd's failure and the failure of journalists like her from Arianna Huffington, Jonathan Alter, Keith Olbermann, Richard Kim at the Nation, Gail Collins and so many others who turned a blind eye to what should have been obvious about Obama back in 2008. Now they are complaining.And now it's too late.

Tragic murder of MIT officer comes back to haunt journalists in PennState fiasco.

2013-04-28T08:30:00.000-07:00

Last week thousands of police officers, civilians, friends and family gathered for a memorial service for murdered MIT campus police officer Sean Collier who was shot and killed by the Boston marathon bombers but whose tragic murder eventually led to their capture.

Collier's murder and the enormous outpouring of solidarity by police organizations from all over the country and from as far away as Canada, along with thousands of Boston police mourning this murdered MIT officer who was responding to a domestic disturbance call, dregs up how journalists all over the country led by ESPN journalists like Gene Wojciechowski, Jemele Hill, Johnette Howard, Jay Bilas and joined by Sean Gregory at Time magazine, disparaged Penn State campus police as not "real police" as the primary basis for their attacks and accusations against Joe Paterno in the Sandusky scandal.

The news media accused Paterno of everything from not reporting what McQueary had told him at all, to "not doing enough" because he "only" reported it to the head of Penn State Campus Police and Tim Curley, his immediate superior, and A.D.

That Penn State Campus Police weren't the "real " or legitimate police was at the heart of all of the original attacks against Paterno and was the self serving holier-than-thou and equally ignorant weapon used by journalists in all of the initial avalanche of criticism of Paterno, led by ESPN journalists, especially Jay Bilas and Stuart Scott on television and Gene Wojciechowski in print. Wojciechowski was especially strident in his attacks about going to Penn State campus police, which according to Wojciechowski, wasn't really going to the police at all.

This mantra was repeated ad infinitum by almost every journalist reporting on the Sandusky story: Paterno calling the head of Penn State campus police and his immediate superior, A.D. Tim Curley, was not, in the out of control, self-serving mob mentality of the news media at the time, reporting it at all.Campus police didn't count. Even Pennsylvania Superintendent of Police Frank Noonan, wanting to jump on the media bandwagon and get into the act said at the time Paterno "should have come to me instead". ( Would he have taken a call from the mother of Victim 2 who also went to Penn State campus police, or do you have to be a big shot like Paterno to get Frank Noonan to take your call? Or was it just that Noonan wanted free tickets?)

That Penn State campus police weren't the "real" or legitimate police was also the sole basis of the attacks by the editors of the Philadelphia Daily News who covered the front page with Paterno's picture and the words "Shame". That Paterno only reported what he was told to the head of campus police, and arranged for McQueary to meet with the head of campus police to tell his story in person was, in the self-serving, revenue generating mentality of the news media, "shameful". Never mind that William Lynn, a Philadelphia catholic priest sentenced to 6 years in prison for burning a list of 34 pedophile priests who had been molesting children for years and never reporting it on orders from Philadelphia Cardinal Bevilaqua never got the "shame" treatment from the Philadelphia Daily News. But Paterno reporting what he was told to campus police was, according to the Philadelphia Daily News, shameful. Putting the nationally known Paterno on the front page while the priest, William Lynn, a nobody whose name or face wouldn't sell a single newspaper didnt have anything to do with it, did it?

Given the tragedy of MIT officer Collier's murder in the line of duty and the outpouring of support from thousands of police officers from jurisdictions all over the country, maybe its time to realize the real shame belongs to Sean Gregory at Time, Jay Bilas, Gene Wojciechowski, almost every reporter at ESPN with the exception of Don Van Natta,and their producers, along with the editors at the Philadelphia Daily News, the reporters at Deadspin, Roland Martin at CNN, and every other person who disparaged Penn State campus police as not being "real police" and who used that as the basis for attacking Paterno.

Would any of these journalists now have the courage to write that campus police aren't real police? Would Gene Wojciechowski , Jemele Hill, Jay Bilas, Sean Gregory or Roland Martin have then guts to write it?

Maybe they'd like to tell the Penn State campus police detective who investigated Sandusky in 1998 who now works for Homeland Security that he wasn't a real detective. Maybe the evidence he presented to D.A. Ray Gricar wasn't real evidence which is why Gricar at the time declined to prosecute. Maybe the evidence campus police presented to former Pennsylvania Attorney General and now governor, Tom Corbett in 2001 wasn't real either which is why Corbett also declined to prosecute.

Most of the journalists who attacked Paterno for "only" going to Penn State campus police (none of whom ever wrote a single article attacking the church for the systematic child abuse in their midsts, or any other acts of child abuse by anyone) acted like this was a police agency made up of rent-a-cops, retired or off duty officers moonlighting for extra money, or security officers provided by some security firm instead of exactly what they are -- real police officers who trained at the police academy like any other police officers and have the same color of authority in their jurisdiction as any police officer anywhere in the country.

No one today in the news media, not Sean Gregory at Time or Roland Martin at CNN, or Jay Bilas or Gene Wojciechowski, or anyone else in the news media would dare say campus police weren't real police. They know what would happen to them if they did. No one would say that the campus police officers at the University of Central Florida, responding to a 911 call that someone had pointed a gun at another student in a dorm and who arrived with guns drawn were not real police officers. And no one now is saying the Penn State Campus Police detective who investigated Sandusky and who is now at Homeland Security was not a real police detective. Except maybe Gene Wojciechowski , Johnette Howard, Jemele Hill , Jay Bilas, Stuart Scott, Sean Gregory, Roland Martin and every other member of the news media who said Penn State campus police weren't the real police.(There are some who find fault with the fact that Gary Schultz, in a dual role was the head of campus police. They universally ignore the fact that this was the result of decisons made by the Penn State board of governors, university president and sanctioned by the Board of Trustees and had been in place for decades. Captain Tom Harmon, Chief of Penn State campus police reported to Schultz, and as far as anyone knows, with no complaints. Whatever validity, if any, there might be to the argument that Schultz wasn't qualified to be head of campus police, that was a decison made by those responsible for governance at Penn State and had nothing to do with Paterno. And nothing to do with media trashing of campus police).

This self-serving and pervasive lack of journalistic standards and principles,mostly the result of incompetence, ignorance, cowardice and ineptitude from the top down and led by journalists and executives who are more interested in generating revenue than the truth, is the biggest reason the most recent studies show at least 70% of the American public no longer trust the news media or find them credible.

Whether it was the media's swallowing of Louis Freeh's smearing of Richard Jewell as the Olympic bomber in 1996 or the lock step herd mentality that reported on the certainty of Sadaam's WMD without demanding any proof and which drove the country to war, this lack of any journalistic standards or professionalism has been going on for least 20 years. And the country has been the worse for it.

On Boston Marathon, news media recalls '96 Olympic bombing but not Louis Freeh's smear of Richard Jewell.

2013-04-17T13:26:00.001-07:00

Recently, the news media has started making comparisons between the Boston marathon bombing and the bombing in Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics and how long the Olympic bombing investigation took until Eric Rudolph was arrested years later for bombing two abortion clinics and confessed to being the Olympic bomber.

Tom Fuentes who was an assistant FBI commander at the time in Atlanta when the bombing took place said on CNN, it took weeks and months to simply identify the roofers nails that were used in the bomb much less have a suspect.

Completely ignored by Wolf Blitzer and again by Anderson Cooper who also invoked memories of the Olympic bombing, was how then FBI director Louis Freeh leaked Richard Jewell's name to the press and identified him as the Olympic bomber even though he didn't have a shred of proof or evidence of any kind to substantiate it or even to point to Jewell as the bomber. And he couldn't have because Jewell was completely innocent.

But with the world's media in Atlanta for the summer Olympics in 1996 and the bombing becoming the biggest, most notorious criminal case in the United States and the world for that matter, and with people clamoring for answers and the news media applying pressure, Freeh decided it was easier to frame a completely innocent man and get the heat off himself and the FBI. And the media willingly complied, without asking for proof or evidence,and instead hounded Jewell everywhere he went, camping out in front of his home by the hundreds,and making Jewell the object of scorn, derison, ridicule and hate, all over the world. They wanted to be there when the FBI arrested him. And it was all for nothing.

There is a reason why the news media, when discussing the investigation into the Boston marathon bombing and comparing it to the Olympic bombing and speculating about what might be expected in comparing the two investigations ignores what Louis Freeh did as FBI director to Richard Jewell.

The reason is two fold. First, Freeh made them all look like idiots in the Olympic bombing case and the news media hates to have to own up to their own stupdity and lack of standards. In Jewell's case they not only had to own up, they had to pay up because Jewell sued them and settled out of court with CNN, NBC, Tom Brokaw and other news organizations for tens of millions of dollars.

The other reason the media doesn't want to mention Freeh is because they and Freeh, did the same thing again, this time with the Freeh Report regarding the Sandusky scandal, Penn State and Joe Paterno, a story that was a cash cow for the media for months. To bring up what Freeh did to Jewell at the Olympic bombing would be to open up the Pandora's Box of what Freeh in his report did to Joe Paterno with the same degree of proof which is to say none and the same results -- the news media swallowing what Freeh said as they did with Jewell even though Freeh did not have an iota of proof, something that should have been obvious to anyone reading his report but finally put into the record by former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, former FBI agent Jim Clements and Dr. Fred Berlin who reviewed Freeh's report and concluded it was as false as Freeh's smear of Richard Jewell.

What made Freeh's framing of Richard Jewell all the more abhorrent was that Jewell was the genuine

hero of the Olympic bombing. Hired as a part time security officer for the Olympics, it was Jewell who first spotted what the thought was a suspicious knapsack under a bench, went to investigate and looked inside and saw the wiring of a bomb. He alerted police and he and other officers helped clear the area but not before the bomb went off killing one woman. But clearly Jewell saved many lives by noticing the knapsack, investigating, and clearing the area as quickly as possible.

That the man who was the real hero of the Olympic bombing was the man Louis Freeh smeared and framed and let hang for 3 months without a shred of proof or conscience before declaring that Jewell was no longer a suspect, is evidence of just how low Louis Freeh is capable of going and just how venal he could be when it was to his advantage, something that was clear in the Freeh Report on Penn State but was also clear back in 2000 when Businessweek ran a cover story editorial called "the Case Against Louis Freeh", demanding his resignation and documenting Freeh's history at the FBI of, in their words, "tainting evidence","misleading federal investigators and judges" and " trampling on the civil liberties of American citzens" ( and this is the man the Penn State Board of Trustees chose to do their investigation).

The media now glosses over what happened to Jewell in the Olympic bombing investigation in their comparisons to the marathon bombing, precisely because of what they have invested in the Freeh Report and to avoid opening a Pandora's Box of embarrassing questions. So in comparing the two investigations the media pretends that what happened to Richard Jewell didnt happen Because in today's news media,when in their minds offending anyone is bad for business, telling the truth about everything just wouldn't be good for business.

NOTE: On Wedesday evening Anderson Cooper did an interview with former FBI agent Tom Fuentes who was an FBI commander in Atlanta at the time of the Olympic bombing and Cooper specifically mentioned Richard Jewell and how he spotted the knapsack that contained the bomb and how he and two other officers cleared the area. Fuentes also acknowledged that and Jewell's help, but neither said a word about how Jewell only days later was named as the prime suspect under Freeh's direction, was hounded by the a media horde 24 hours a day to such a degree his mother pleaded with President Clinton to intervene, and how Freeh and the FBI left Jewell to hang that way for three months because they had no suspects. This is Louis Freeh and whose word the news media has taken.

Maureen Dowd plays the fool in column on Hillary Clinton "foolery"

2013-04-14T11:58:00.005-07:00

In a recent column called "Can We Get Hillary Without the Foolery", Maureen Dowd puts on display every aspect of dishonest journalism, distortion, and personal lack of integrity that is driving mainstream journalism out of business. She either has a very short memory or doesn't have the professional integrity to admit she and everyone like her who supported Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries and those few who still do, were the ones made fools of by the foolery of Barrack Obama who took the press for fools, along with the kind of cocktail party liberals Lenny Bruce used to tear to pieces in his routines on race, and Obama was amply rewarded.

Dowd, in her column wrote:

"Did she (Clinton) learn, from her viper’s nest and money pit of a campaign in 2008, how to manage an enterprise rather than be swamped by rampant dysfunction? Did she learn, when she wrapped herself in an off-putting and opaque mantle of entitlement in the primary, that she’s perfectly capable of charming reporters and voters if she wants to, without the obnoxious undertone of “I’m owed this"?

Dowd has obviously forgotten the movement she joined and championed in 2008 the news media's "it was time for a black president" campaign, the mantle of entitlement that accompanied almost every article written during the primaries, the purpose of which was to create an atmosphere of entitlement and inevitability regarding Obama's nomination, something that continued to the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver in the form of political threats and extortion that Dowd either knows nothing about or doesn't want to talk about.

She also seems to be suffering from short term memory loss when she talks about Clinton's "money pit of a campaign". Given Dowd's state of mind perhaps we should forgive her for forgetting that it was Obama, on at least three public occasions including the debate moderated by the late Tim Russet, who publicly pledged that he would only use public financing in his presidential campaign if he was the nominee in keeping with his theme of bringing "change" to Washington politics, then promptly reneging on the promise as soon as he got the nomination and raised record amounts of money while John McCain stuck to his promise to use public financing and was outspent 5-1.

Never mind that Obama has proved to be the most underhanded, deceitful two faced politician since Richard Nixon to go along with probably being the least qualified in the history of the Democratic party. Never mind that the groups that supported him are now showing up at the White House with petitions signed by millions of people telling Obama not to sell them out again, this time on the budget.

Never mind that Obama promised to close Gitmo, something Colin Powell called a stain on the United States, in the first month of his presidency and to this day hasn't found the guts to stand up to the right wing and close one of the worst cases of human rights abuses in American history after slavery and the Japanese internment camps during WWII. When you have a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former Secretary of State supporting the decision and you still don't have the political courage to do it, you get the first four plus years of the Obama presidency.

But Dowd, seemingly oblivious to the candidate she supported in 2008 gives us more. She writes:

" The other side (of Clinton) is darker, stemming from old insecurities; this is the side that causes her to make decisions from a place of fear and to second-guess herself. It dulls her sense of ethics and leads to ends-justify-the-means wayward ways. "

"Ends- justify- the-means wayward ways"? Does she mean like the time Obama was caught lying to the unemployed in Ohio during the 2008 primaries, telling them the cause of their high unemployment was NAFTA ( a lie proved by Politfact.org) and that if they voted for him he would get rid of NAFTA while at the same time sending Autan Goolsbee to the Canadian embassy in Chicago to tell them to ignore everything Obama says publicly in Ohio about NAFTA, he has no intention of getting rid of it? That kind of "ends-justify-the-means wayward ways"?

And by darker side, did she mean like Obama lying for seven consecutive days about the incident, saying at first Goolsbee didnt even work for the campaign, then when that was proved a lie, admitted he worked for the campaign but that they never sent him to the embassy and when that was proved a lie said ok, he works for the campaign and they sent him to the embassy but never told him to say that, which was then proved a lie when someone in the Canadian embassy fed up with Obama's duplicity released the minutes of the meeting which proved he indeed sent Goolsbee there to tell them to ignore what he is saying about NAFTA publicly.

Is that the dulling of a "sense of ethics that leads to ends-justify the means ways"? Or was it Obama's campaigning for the public option, promising it in campaign speeches since 2007, holding town hall meetings supporting it and then selling it out in a cave-in to the health insurance lobby even though he had ample votes in congress to pass it and then claimed he never campaigned for it?

Dowd's professional denial ignores the fact that she supported and maybe continues to support a politician who has gotten caught in more lies and duplicity in a week than the average dishonest politician does in a career and lied so egregiously during the 2008 Democratic primaries it would have ended the political career much less the presidential candidacy of any other politician. But for people like Dowd and others who made Obama a cause celebre because of a statement they wanted to make on race, they thought it best to ignore the content of his character and focus on the melanin content of his skin.

Dowd then writes: "If Obama is the kid who studies only on the night before and gets an A, Hillary is the kid who studies all the time, stays up all night and does extra credit work to get the A. She doesn't know how not to drive herself into the ground. "

This is more of Dowd's self-delusion. Obama is the kid who never studies and as a result knows absolutely nothing about anything he is talking about. What he does know is how to bamboozle some of the teachers like Dowd. All it takes is using 250 words to say what a precocious 15 year old could say in 3, and Obama gets an "A" from a fawning Maureen Dowd and others.

Like the Nobel Peace Prize Obama was awarded for doing absolutely nothing and which so infuriated other winners many publicly said the Nobel committee diminished the value of the prize by awarding it to Obama. Obama is not the kid who doesn't have to study to get an "A" he is the kid who figured out how to bamboozle his elders, flash an infectious smile, and sell snake oil to those willing to buy. Except millions who bought the snake oil are now showing up on the White House lawn with petitions and their empty bottles of snake oil which did nothing to solve their problems and are demanding he make good on his promises since, at this point, a refund isnt possible.

More Dowd: "But many experts feel, as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker, that, compared with the work of more geopolitical secretaries,(of State) her “signature achievements look like small beer.”

Dowd wants to ignore that when you work for a small president with no ideas no backbone, no convictions, no principles not a clue about what he is doing and doesn't have the respect of leaders around the world, even small beer is a big accomplishment. One can still remember the glow on Clinton's face during the Libyan crisis when she showed up in London to meet with the Prime Minister to discuss what to do about Libya, and was told to her surprise that British and French fighters were already attacking Ghaddaffi military targets because both the British and French simply got tired of Obama's diddling.

When you work for a president who sees Iranians protesting a rigged election getting shot and killed in the street by an oppressive regime and whose response is to say he "doesn't want to meddle", small beer is an accomplishment. Like making lemonade out of the of lemons that is the Obama presidency.

Dowd concludes with: "Her challenge is to get into the future and stay there, adding fresh people and perspectives and leaving the Clinton mishegoss and cheesiness in the past."

After eight years of having The Cheeze Whiz Kid in the White House, a Cheeze Whiz Kid which Dowd helped sell and still promotes, real cheese of any kind will be more than welcome..

So before Dowd comments on anyone else's foolery much less Clinton's she needs to wise up and own up to Obama's foolery her own foolery and the other foolery in the press not to mention groups like MoveOn, the PCCC, Democracy for America who continue to be made fools of by Obama but who all decided to look the other way in 2008 every time Obama was caught in his own foolery, a lie or talking out of both sides of his mouth, all of which foreshadowed what was to come.

Its not Clinton's challenge to get into the future as Dowd claims. Its Dowd's challenge to get into the present which other former Obama supporters seem to be doing as evidenced by the recent email from MoveOn.org complaining about Obama's attempted capitulation to Republicans on Medicare and Social Security in his budget which began with the words, " He's done it again".

In a different way, so has Dowd.

A gun law no one could oppose ( but will they?)

2013-04-11T11:14:00.002-07:00

In the last two days two people have been shot and killed by a four year old and six year old respectively who got their hands on an adult's gun and killed someone accidentally.

Three days ago in Tennessee the six year old nephew of a sheriff's deputy got his hands on a gun that was not secured and accidentally shot the deputy's wife in the head killing her. Two days ago, in Toms River N. J. a four year old took the unsecured rifle of his father and accidentally shot and killed his six year old playmate.

In February three year old Temorej Smith found a pink handgun in his house he thought was a toy and shot himself in the head killing him. In December of 2012, a four year old boy in Houston and a 5 year old girl in Philadelphia accidentally shot themselves with guns owned by their parents.

Last year more than five other children were killed in the same way, a child getting his or her hands on a gun owned by, according to Wayne LaPierre, a "law abiding responsible citizen" and then accidentally killed another child either at school or at the home.

And lets not forget, the 27 killed at Newtown Connecticut were killed by a shooter who used his mother's unsecured AR-15 which she left laying around.

These guns were owned by people who Wayne LaPierre calls " law abiding responsible citizens". Except these people are anything but responsible and are only law abiding because there are no laws currently on the books that would make their gross negligence and irresponsibility a felony.

This should stop.

States need to pass a Firearms Responsibility Act that would make the registered owner of a gun criminally liable as an accessory to any crime committed by any third party with the gun registered in their name and also make them criminally responsible for any bodily harm or death caused by their gun in the hands of someone else. And there should be a federal law that bans any person whose gun was used by anyone else in a crime or caused bodily harm from obtaining a gun for life.

This will insure that "responsible" gun owners who have been irresponsible become responsible and those who aren't will go to jail, pay the price for being a convicted felon, and lose their ability to own a gun for life.

This will also make those who buy or provide guns for others criminally liable for what happens with that gun if it can be traced which will help cut down on gun trafficking since it will be less likely that anyone trafficking in illegal guns, or buying guns to illegally sell to others in the U.S ( most of the guns used in crimes in New York City were purchased in Virginia) will be willing to go to jail for whatever crimes are committed with those guns.

In the case of the two people shot and killed in the last three days by children getting their hands on guns left lying unsecured by adults, no charges will be filed against anyone because it is being ruled an accident.

It was no accident. It was criminal negligence on the part of the adults who left the gun lying around where a child could get it. And the sooner legislatures wake up to that fact, the sooner there will be more "law abiding responsible gun owners" who will become even more law abiding and responsible than before. Or face prison.

There are three other common sense gun laws that would cut down on the sale of illegal guns and gun trafficking:

1. Anyone purchasing more than two guns within any 30 day period other than a licensed gun dealer must register and go into a special data base identifying people purchasing multiple guns within that 30 day period.

2. Make it a federal crime with mandatory prison time for transporting a firearm from a state where that firearm is legal to a state where it is illegal.

3. No one with an out of state I.D. can purchase more than one gun within a 60 day period. This will eliminate situations where a gun trafficker can go to a state like Virginia with its lax gun laws and buy a trunk load of guns to sell illegally in a place like New York.

With states having the explicit right to ban any guns they wish and impose any restrictions they wish, its not as important for the federal goverment to pass laws banning certain kinds of weapons as people seem to think. The states can do it and federal laws can be passed to insure that these laws arent violated by people in states where these weapons are legal.

Obama's ineffective pitch for the gun control vote.

2013-04-09T06:35:00.001-07:00

Barrack Obama went to Hartford Connecticut to make a final pitch for a vote on federal legislation on gun control that 91% of the American people support , expanded national background checks for people who want to buy a gun.

The roadblock for this or any gun legislation are 15 conservative Republican senators who are pledging to filibuster any gun control legislation to keep any kind of gun control legislation from even coming for a vote.

Obama's speech wasn't anything anyone hasn't heard before. And there was no reason to go to Connecticut to give it. If he and his advisors thought that what people who know nothing about honest and effective visual presentation call "optics" was going to matter he was wrong. Any appeal on gun control and allowing a vote to take place would have been far more effective coming from the Oval Office or the East Room. After all that is the White House which is supposed to have some sense of authority, morality, national unity and sense of purpose.

As it was, Obama's speech had such an impact and was so effective, that senate Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell announced he was going to become the 15th Republican senator to threaten a filibuster.

Instead of pleading with Republicans not to filibuster legislation 91% of Americans say they want, instead of asking, instead of begging, instead of invoking a weak plea for everyone to "play by the same rules" like this was some kind of game, Obama could have gone on the attack.

He could have pointed out the courage of the teachers at Sandy Hook who lost their lives trying to protect children from the shooters onslaught and called anyone who would filibuster gun control legislation because they didn't have the political courage to stand up and vote while these teachers stood up to bullets to protect children are simply cowards. He could have pointed out that while those teachers showed unparalleled courage trying to protect those children against bullets, these 15 Republican senators do not even possess the courage to stand up and cast a vote.

He could have pointed out that the purpose of the filibuster was to keep these 15 Republican senators from having to cast a vote one way or the other so they wouldn't have to be held accountable either to the NRA or to voters because they don't have the courage to be held accountable.

He could have gone over the heads of those senators and appealed to the people of those states -- the people of Kansas, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, and others and ask these people if there is a single household in any of those states who don't admire and respect the courage of those teachers who were killed trying to protect those students. Then ask if they can have the same respect for the senators who represent them who don't have the courage to stand up to a vote.

Ask them to compare the teachers who had the courage to face bullets with their elected senators who seem not to have the courage to face political accountability and ask if this is the kind of representation they can be as proud of as they are the teachers at Sandy Hook.

Obama could have asked the people of those states to call their senators and tell them to display 1/1000th of the courage those teachers displayed and allow a vote, no matter which way they vote.

Obama could have shamed the senators threatening a filibuster and accused them all of being political cowards afraid to face a vote and compare them to the teachers of Sandy Hook and what they stood up to face.

Obama could have said a lot of things. He could have gone on the attack. He could have used shame and invoked political and personal cowardice against those who are trying to obstruct a vote. And he could have said that whether or not we allow a vote will define what kind of country we are and if we are still a country of the people by the people and for the people. He could have been tough. He could have stood for the morality and heart of the democratic system which is the vote. He could have shown some righteous anger against those whose purpose is to obstruct that vote and questioned their morality.

Obama could have. But he didn't. Maybe someone else will.

NOTE:On Thursday, 16 Republican senators voted against a filibuster allowing the debate and a vote to go forward. The credit goes to Manchin of West Virgina a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, Republican of PA, both with "A" ratings from the NRA who defied them and presented a bi-partisan bill on expanded background checks.

Obama taken down by a federal judge, progressives and "by far the best looking attorney general" he ever saw.

2013-04-06T08:10:00.003-07:00

This has not been a good week for Barrack Obama though not nearly as bad as it's been for his progressive and Democratic supporters during the last five years of his presidency.

This week a federal judge all but called Obama a political hack in reversing Obama's decision, through HHS Secretary Kathy Sieblus, to ignore the science and testimony of experts and put limits on who and how people could have access to the morning after pill.

In his 54 page ruling, Judge Korman accused Obama of "bad faith" in his decision not to make the pill universally available and accused Obama of being "politically motivated".

In 2011, Obama's Health and Human Service secretary Kathleen Sebelius in what was called an "unprecedented decision", overruled the recommendations of the FDA which was to make the pill available to all ages without a prescription.

The list of scientists and physicians recommending this action was a long one and included the American Medical Association, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

In 2011 FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg issued a ruling that the morning after pill known as Plan B One Step which is designed to prevent pregnancy up to 24 hours after intercourse, was safe to dispense to all ages without a prescription, but she was overruled by Sebelius in what the NY Times reported as being the first time a countermanding of this kind as ever occurred.

Judge Korman's scathing ruling overturning Sebelius and Obama accused their decision of "being politically motivated, scientifically unjustified and contrary to agency precedent".

It was clear that this was another incidence of Obama's caving in, or in this case trying to avoid criticism from the right wing because he didnt have the backbone, convictions, principles or sense of right and wrong to stand up to them and instead played politics.

Obama ignored the science and the FDA, and was more concerned about Republican and conservative backlash against the decision than in doing what was right.

Remember this is the same man who as a U.S. senator, supported Washington D.C.'s ban on handguns, then a year later supported the Supreme Court decision striking it down.

Ignoring science to make a political decision so he can avoid political heat, or avoiding any decision that would result in criticism from the opposition has been a hallmark of Obama as a politician for as long as he's been a politician. Ignoring science for the sake of politics has also generally been the hallmark of conservatives, exactly the group Obama was trying to appease.

Obama's bad week continued with progressive groups wringing their hands over the leak of Obama's proposed budget which also caves in to Republicans by offering Social Security and Medicare cuts.

Why these groups are unhappy now is hard to fathom. They were instrumental in his getting the nomination by looking the other way whenever Obama was caught in a lie or a subtrafuge during the 2008 primaries. You can generally identify a member of MoveOn, the PCCC or Democracy for America by the imprint of Obama's footprints on their backs. They've had them for five years. After weeks of sending out emails (rightly) criticizing Republican polices and using them to raise money with lines like " show president Obama you have his back. Contribute to help pass President Obama's agenda" they are now sending out emails convulsing over the fact that it's become apparent that President Obama's agenda includes the same cutting of social security and Medicare that they were ostensibly trying to raise money to stop. Maybe someone didnt get the memo.

Obama himself characterized his budget as "not my ideal budget". He needn't have bothered. No one except those with vacation homes in the Okeefenokee Swamp expected Obama to do anything related to ideals.

This week progressive organizations started circulating petitions telling Obama not to cut social security or Medicare. Or else what? They wont vote for his re-election in 2016?

The week ended with Obama having to apologize for comments he made about Kamala Harris, California's attorney general as being " by far the best looking attorney general in the country". Women's groups immediately attacked him for making sexist remarks and demanded an apology which he gave. With the Supreme Court having heard arguments this week for same sex marriage had Obama said it about Eric Schneiderman of New York he might have made some political points.

The political question now is will Hillary Clinton supporters ever stop telling Obama supporters and the news media " I told you so"? Probably not.

The NRA wants armed guards in every school? Let's tax guns to pay for it.

2013-04-03T10:41:00.002-07:00

Wayne LaPierre is still pushing his absurd idea of armed guards in schools as the NRA answer to Newtown. Aside from the abject stupidity of LaPierre's idea and that it resulted in a New York Daily News front page showing LaPierre and the headline, "The Craziest Man in America," it exposes something else. LaPierre's idea has nothing to do with protecting children or anyone for that matter. It's about wanting to do everything possible to avoid new gun laws. And he wants to do it any cost. The problem is he wants the cost to be borne by everyone but gun owners and the NRA. LaPierre wants everyone else to pay the price for his idea.

But in case LaPierre hasn't noticed, everyone else has been paying the price for the NRA's ability to remain part of the problem and their success in intimidating some spineless members of congress who worry more about their own reelection than in the welfare of the people they represent.

The general reaction to La Pierre's idea has been contempt and derision. The American Federation of Teachers today called it "an absurd hoax". But it also exposes the selfishness, self centeredness and arrogance of the NRA leadership. To them, and a few lunatics who think like they do like the Montana sheriff who said he'd be willing to die rather than enforce the kind of gun bans being talked about, for these people their guns are more important than anything. And anyone.

But if LaPierre is serious about armed guards in schools as the answer then how about imposing a School Protection Tax on every sale of every gun and box of ammunition in the country? It could be a 25% surcharge (or more - whatever it takes to pay for it) on every transaction in America related to firearms, the importation, sales to gun shops and retail sales.

Just like the cigarette tax which goes to cancer research and prevention, the tax money would pay for the armed guards in every school that La Pierre says would solve the problem and prevent the kind of mass murder we saw at Newtown that was committed with an assault weapon. So why not make gun owners and NRA members pay for it, since what's behind LaPierre's suggestion is that gun owners should be able to indulge their hobbies, fantasies or their fears unfettered and without restriction, not even the inconvenience of extended background checks, as a way of trying to curb mass murder committed with assault weapons. So, if that is what matters, then let those who are proposing the idea in their own self interest pay for it.

The fact is, tax payer dollars paying for drug addicts to get their fix from government monitored clinics would do more good and do more to reduce violence, not to mention instantly putting drug dealers everywhere out of business, than Wayne LaPierre's idea of armed guards in every school, paid for by tax payers subsidizing gun owners not having to be inconvenienced by things like extensive background checks or only having ten rounds in a magazine instead of thirty.

But if LaPierre is serious about his idea, then let's put it to the test and see if it works, but let gun owners and the NRA pay for implementing the LaPierre's idea.

In the end there is only one group that would oppose the idea of taxing firearm related sales to pay for LaPierre's idea of armed guards in every school, and that's LaPierre and the NRA themselves.

And that is all anyone needs to know about Wayne LaPierre and what he thinks matters most and what he has defined the NRA as believing is most important - themselves.

NOTE: With Colorado and New York already having passed laws banning assault weapons and high capacity magazine clips, Connecticut has just passed its own tough gun laws banning over 100 assault type rifles and all clips that hold ten rounds or more. It will also require those who already own these clips to register with the state. And Maryland has now joined in and is passing their own assault weapon ban and ban on high capacity magazine clips.

With those ignorant of the true meaning of the second amendment trying but failing to stop this legislation, all of this is exactly what was suggested here months ago -- that states ignore the current Supreme Court's over tuning of 224 years of Supreme Court precedent which ruled the Second Amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun and did not confer any such right and pass whatever gun laws they wished. Gun laws have always been a matter for state and local governments, the second amendment has nothing to do with any constitutional right to own a gun, and states are now taking the initiative and passing any laws they wish. The next step is to pass a federal law which makes it a felony for any resident of state which legally allows such weapons to transport them to a state that does not.

Why the second amendment doesn't matter in the gun laws debate.

2013-03-28T06:42:00.001-07:00

No matter what side of the gun control debate someone happens to be on, whether its gun control advocates like VP Joe Biden, Diane Feinstein, Mayor Bloomberg, the courageous Gabby Giffords and her husband, or those on the other side who want no gun control at all, they all have one thing in common -- they have no idea what the second amendment is really all about, why it's there, what it means, the original intent of the Framers when they wrote it, or even what the words in the amendment actually mean. They think they know, but they don't..

Whether its gun control proponents, even those who want to see a ban on weapons like the AR-15, or those who oppose any and all gun restrictions, both sides bring up the second amendment all the time, either claiming that such and such gun law doesn't violate an individual's "second amendment rights", or the other side claiming that it does.

Whether its conservative Texas senator Ted Cruz, or his nemesis on gun control Diane Feinstein all of them seem to agree or accept that the second amendment is guaranteeing an individual right to own a gun. They are all completely wrong including journalists writing about the gun debate, who, as usual have no idea what they are writing about and are too lazy to find out.

Perhaps Senator Cruz and Senator Feinstein, and everyone else on both sides of the gun control issue would be surprised to learn that in the first 224 years of the existence of the second amendment, the constitution it's part of, and the Supreme Court the constitution created, in every case, every Supreme Court in those 224 years without exception, when having to rule on whether the second amendment conferred an individual right to own a gun, the majority ruled it did not. In every case. For 224 years.

The only Supreme Court to rule otherwise is the present court, or more precisely, the five so called conservative members of the court, the court which gave us Citizens United which said a corporation is a person, who much to the consternation of many true conservative judges, overturned 224 years of Supreme Court precedent which said the second amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun and last year ruled that it did.

To lay claim to the charge that the ruling was probably the most corrupt and dishonest since the Dred Scott decision in 1859 is the fact that Justice Sam Alito, in his 5-4 majority opinion, invoked, not the constitution of the United States or the second amendment itself, but Blackstone's Rights of Englishmen, a document not only not the constitution, but a document not even American in origin which was written 100 years before the United States was created.

Imagine the hue and cry of conservatives in and out of congress if five liberal justices had ruled the same way and based their decison on something other than the constitution. Conservatives in and out of congress would be screaming for the justices impeachment since conservatives are always complaining about "activist" judges who find rights in the constitution that aren't there. Which is exactly what the five current conservative Supreme Court justices did in their decision.

The reason every Supreme Court in 224 years ruled that the second amendment had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun, is because there is absolute proof beyond the slightest doubt, that the purpose of the second amendment, the intent of those who created it, its very reason for existence, had nothing to do with someone's right to own a gun. And the true meaning of the words in the second amendment, for those who understand the words, reflect that.

While there is a mountain of proof that the second amendment's existence and purpose had nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun, and the true meaning of the amendment was not to confer any such right, you only have to know two facts about the second amendment to understand that.

First, the word "arms" does not mean guns.It didnt mean guns to the Framers who wrote the amendment in 1789, it didnt mean guns in 789, it didn't mean guns in 1969 and it doesn't mean guns today. It has never meant guns. In fact the creation of the word "arms" predates the invention of the gun by more than 1,000 years and given that the amendment was carefully written and rewritten seven times ( and all seven versions can be seen in the Library of Congress) it is proof they chose their words carefully to make sure the amendment meant exactly what they intended.

The very word "arms" is derived from the word "army", which, as everyone knows, is an organized group of people whose purpose is to fight a war and engage in battle.Armies carry arms.

No one with even a passing understanding of the English language doesn't understand and agree, when it is pointed out, that there is a world of difference between "arms control" and "gun control". "Arms control" deals with weapons of war most often weapons possessed by governments and their proliferation. These "arms" include everything from fighter jets to chemical and biological weapons, to missiles, to bombs. "Arms control" has nothing to do with individuals and their guns.

Similarly everyone knows there is a world of difference between a "gun dealer" and an "arms dealer". You can't buy a Smith and Wesson, a Glock or a shotgun from an arms dealer. He would laugh at you. Conversely you can't buy what an arms dealer sells -- rocket propelled grenades, Katyusha rockets, rocket launchers, surface to air missiles, IED's, and yes assault rifles and machine guns, at a gun store. . Arms dealers sell weapons of war, gun dealers sell guns. There is a world of difference.

And finally, the "arms race" between the United States and Soviet Union from the 1950's through the fall of Communism in the 80's, as everyone knows had nothing to do with which country had more people with guns in their closets. The "arms race" had to do with who had more nuclear warheds and the ICBM's and long range bombers to deliver them..

Do not think for one second that those who wrote and ratified "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal" or "we the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union" did not understand the difference between the word "guns" and "arms".The Framers understood the word "arms" to mean exactly what it's always meant and means even today -- weapons and implements of war. Which is why it was chosen.

In 1789 when the Framers created the second amendment, "arms" of course included muskets. But to the Framers it also meant cannon, cannon balls, powder, rockets, bayonets, even warships and forts. Because the whole point of the second amendment was to give individual states the constitutional right to raise and maintain their own well trained or "well regulated", armies and to have whatever weapons of war they wished. Because the whole purpose of the second amendment was to enable the maintaing of state militias who would be able to stand toe to toe with a federal army if it became "necessary for the security of a free state", to protect the states from the possibility of a future president turned dictator trying to use a federal army to enforce his will.

This is crucial to understanding the purpose and meaning of the infringement clause and to understand why Justice Scalia, seeming to understand the constitutional mistake they made and the Pandora's Box they opened, immediately tried to backtrack on their decision by saying the right granted in the second amendment was not limitless. He could not have been more wrong. The amendment specifically states it is limitless and in fact the amendment would be useless if it weren't limitless. The whole point of the amendment was to give the states the capacity to stand up to a federal army with the same weapons the federal army had. For the states to be limited in what weapons -- "arms" they could have would make the whole purpose of the second amendment useless. But Scalia knew the chaos that would ensue if you applied that right, not to a state government, but to individuals.

If anyone has any doubt that the true meaning of the second amendment is to allow states to have whatever weapons of war they wished, look at the National Guard today, the state military force that the "well regulated militia" which is the subject of the second amendment has morphed into.

Tank battalions from the Alabama National Guard fought in Iraq. So did state National Guard units from just about every state in the Union. George W. Bush was a member of the Texas Air National Guard, which has it's own F-15 fighters which Bush and other members of the Guard were trained to fly. The "arms" possessed by state National Guard units is a direct result of the second amendment right of the states to have their own armies and all weapons of war they wish. And they do.

In order for the current conservative members of the court to make its constitutionally dishonest decision they had to abandon the cornerstone of conservative jurisprudence, the principle each of them at one time or another embraced as essential, which is the principle of Original Intent which states that where the clear intent of the framers is clear it is that intent that is to be applied.

This is why former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon said in 1990 that the idea that the second amendment had anything to do with an individual right to own a gun "is the subject of the biggest fraud -- I repeat the word fraud -- ever perpetrated by an interest group ( the NRA) on the American people in my lifetime".

And more recently, conservative judge Harvie Wilkinson III of the 4th Circuit US Court of Appeals in criticizing the Supreme Court's Heller decision that the second amendment applied to individuals said, " I prefer Fox News to CNN and the Washington Examiner to the Washington Post, but the decision of the majority read an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment’s enactment. The majority then used that same right to strike down a law passed by elected officials acting, rightly or wrongly, to preserve the safety of the citizenry.”

The only other thing one needs to know to understand the second amendment is what the words " the right to bear arms" really means and what those words meant to the Framers.

The words do not mean the right to use a gun as most people wrongly assume. It does not mean the right to use a gun to hunt, or to target shoot or to have a gun for your own personal self-defense or to protect your livestock. Having a gun for those purposes was so basic to life in 1789 that to think the Framers spent three weeks debating it is preposterous. The term "to bear arms" as used and understood by the Framers in 1789 is a term that had a very specific meaning because the term "to bear arms" had only one true meaning in 1789. "To bear arms" meant to go to war.

The little known fact which explodes most people's assumptions about the second amendment along with the current Supreme Court ruling is that the original debate among the Framers that created the second amendmet was transcribed by a stenographer in the room while the debate was taking place, transcribed sometimes verbatim. It is a virtual certainty that most people who pontificate about the second amendment are not even aware this transcript exists much less having read it. And reading it settles once and for all what the intent of the amendment was and is. Because the idea of an individual right to own a gun is not even discussed.

The second amendment came into being when a representative from North Carolina stood up and offered a proposition that all at the constitutional convention agreed with. The proposition was "the existence of a federal army is a threat to liberty".

The question was then put to the Framers at the convention of what to do about it. The first suggestion was an amendment which would ban the federal government from even having a standing army. This was deemed impractical and unsafe. The next proposition was to allow the government to raise an army but only on an ad hoc basis contingent on a 3/4 vote of congress. That was also rejected as being impractical. The solution finally agreed upon after three weeks of debate was to allow the states to have their own well drilled, well trained standing armies -- state militias with a clear command and control structure as opposed to the Minute Man type militias that existed in 1775. So a well trained, "well regulated" militia armed with whatever weapons of war the state wished, militias that could go toe to toe with a federal army if needed, was the solution decided upon and which became the second amendment, a states right to have an army and weapons of war and to go to war on their own behalf if neccessary. Those states having their own armies or militias, armed with weapons of war is why the Civil War lasted four years.

During the entire three week debate that created the second amendment individual gun ownership was never even brought up. Which is why Chief Justice Warren Burger called the idea that the second amendment applied to an individual right to own a gun "the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people in my lifetime".

Ultimately the reason why the second amendment doesn't matter in the current gun control debate is because gun laws have always been a matter for local governments, not just states, but individual towns, cities, or villages. And what was suggested here some months ago, that states and localities completely ignore last year's Supreme Court ruling and enact whatever gun laws they wish is just what is happening.Gun laws that work in Montana make no sense in New York. And vice versa. It is and always has been a local matter. And it is not likely, given Scalia's statement that the second amendment is not "limitless", that the Supreme Court would overturn any gun law on second amendment grounds.

New York enacted the toughest gun laws in the country and Colorado followed suit with their own new tough laws. On the other end of the spectrum, South Carolina is considering a law that will not require any gun permits at all, especially to carry concealed weapons.

And that's the way its been for 225 years -- gun laws not rights have always been decided by individual states and local governments. In the 1880's Wyatt Earp banned guns completely from Tombstone, Arizona and no one ever complained he violated their constitutional rights.

Its up to each individual locality to decide for themselves what gun laws work for them. The second amendment has nothing to do with it and never did. The federal government, if it so chooses could ban or regulate the sale of any weapon they wished to private individuals since it has jurisdiction over interstate commerce. And none of that would be unconstitutional.

In the end, with all the bombast and evocation of the second amendment on both sides, it won't affect gun laws anywhere. Legislatures and how they vote will be what matters. Justice Scalia's backtracking on the court ruling by saying the second amendment is not unlimited when in fact it specifically says it is unlimited indicates the court will uphold as constitutional almost any gun law or regulation a state or town or village wants to impose.

The rest is up to them.

Anniversary of Iraq war is also anniversary of news media's massive failures..

2013-03-22T07:24:00.001-07:00

When trying to assemble a collection of the news media's finest moments, other than Edward R. Murrow's standing up to Joe McCarthy, Walter Cronkite's broadcast calling Vietnam a stalemate and a war we couldn't win, and Woodward and Bernstein's historic Watergate reporting, the news media over the last 15 years, especially in times when it's needed most, doesn't have much to be proud of.

Over the last 15 years, beginning with the All Monica All the Time coverage by the cable networks of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, self-serving news coverage which gave the Republican majority the belief there was hay to be made in impeaching Clinton, there has been a lot for the news media to be ashamed of. And none more devastating then their collective abdication of responsibility, incompetence and spineless, fearful reporting in the promoting and selling of Bush administration lies when it came to the run up to the war in Iraq.

That George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and others in the Bush administration told outright, bald faced unequivocal lies both to the American public and privately to members of congress to gather support for the war in Iraq is now a part of history and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Senator Bill Nelson, a former astronaut revealed two years ago, that in a private meeting with civilian administration defense department officials, he had been told that Saddam Hussein had drones capable of hitting the east coast of the United States with a chemical attack. That was not only an outright lie, but there was in fact an Air Force intelligence assessment of Sadaam's drones and that intelligence report stated they were made of wood, did not have a range of more than 300 miles and had no capacity to launch any kind of missile. We also know Dick Cheney lied to House Majority Leader Dick Armey to get him to change his opposition to the Iraq invasion, telling him Sadaam had developed miniaturization technology that could result in a nuclear suitcase bomb.

That the news media never questioned a word anyone from the Bush administration said, never demanded proof, never even asked for it, never considered there could be two sides, and ignored all the credible evidence that flew in the face of the Bush-Cheney lie machine is also now a part of history. And is why, even today, the worst collection of journalists, especially on cable news, that the country has ever had continues to deserve our contempt.

Leading the charge of journalistic incompetence and malfeasance was the New York Times who were duped by Dick Cheney worse than a first year journalist for a high school newspaper but have nothing but their own low journalistic standards to blame.

As everyone knows by now, Dick Cheney's office, through Scooter Libby, fed the gullible and ambitious Judith Miller, a reporter for the Times, a series of false "facts" that she swallowed like a trained seal, and with the thumbs up from her equally journalistically irresponsible Washington Bureau chief Jill Abramson (who incredibly was promoted and is now the Executive editor of the Times) wrote articles about Sadaam's WMD that were published on the front pages of the NY Times, all of which turned out to be false and published by the Times without a shred of proof.

Cheney and Bush then used the Times front page spoon fed reporting as if it were the product of the Times independent reporting which confirmed their claims and used that to bolster the case for war. Without a word of protest from the Times. This was not only a massive failure on the part of Miller and on the Times editors but journalistic incompetence and malfeasance.

Anyone who has ever seen All the President's Men, knows that at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, Ben Bradlee's journalistic standards required that Woodward and Bernstein get corroboration from three independent sources before the Washington Post would publish a Watergate story. The New York Times published front page stories asserting the existence of WMD by Sadaam Hussein, written by Miller, spoon fed to her by Dick Cheney justifying the case for the first preemptive war in American history without trying to get a single independent source to corroborate what Miller was being told.

On the contrary, there were sources who plainly contradicted what Cheney and Bush were pushing, no less a credible source than Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector who had spent time in Iraq and was absolutely convinced that Sadaam did not have any biological or chemical weapons and no capability at all to make a nuclear weapon.

Republican conservatives at the time mocked Blix, dismissed him, and ridiculed him while the NY Times, and cable news' Wolf Blitzer at CNN and others stood around with their hands in their pockets and behaved like sycophants, afraid, as they always are, to speak out or present contrary information if they think they might pay a price. It was during an interview with Blitzer on CNN that Condoleeza Rice told Blitzer "we can't afford to see the smoking gun turn into a mushroom cloud". Blitzer let the statement stand without even an iota of skepticism or demanding any proof.

Then of course there were the radio stations in Texas and other Red states who, taking a leaf from the Nazi propaganda effort, organized the mass burning of Dixie Chicks CD's because of their public statements against the war, statements which gave massive heartburn to their propaganda swallowing listeners who believed every lie the Bush Adminstration told, including Cheney's lie to a VFW gathering in which he said " there is absolutely no doubt that Sadaam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction". When Cheney made that statement he did not have one single peice of intelligence from any intelligence agency that would have allowed him to make that statement.

Yet even today, MSNBC's Chris Jansing either out of sheer ignorance, dishonesty, or perhaps unable to come to terms with her own complicity in the lies she helped disseminate, talked about how "faulty intelligence led to the war in Iraq" when today it is well known that no intelligence ever gave the Bush administration a shred of proof that Sadaam had WMD and in fact even warned the White House about statements it was making because there was no evidence of WMD in Iraq

In a recent interview on MSNBC marking the anniversary of the Iraq invasion, congresswoman and Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth said that she wished there had been a more reasoned and a more honest discussion about going to war in Iraq before the invasion (hard to do when Red State war mongers who belonged to the coalition of the willing to hold the coats of those who had to fight were burning Dixie Chicks CD's and convulsing like Holy Rollers over going to war). But the primary reason there was not an honest discussion and a reasoned debate over going to war was completely the fault of the news media, those at MSNBC, Fox, CNN, the New York Times and those who followed their leads.

Those media outlets made it impossible to have an honest discussion about going to war, an honest discussion about the "evidence" and more to the point, the lack of it. They dutifully kept their mouths shut except to cheerlead for the war, followed the Bush administration lead and refused to question or raise a doubt while the Republican and conservative cheerleaders for the war were branding anyone who opposed the war or even questioned it as "unpatriotic".

And those who quivered the most, who were most afraid of that label and who buckled under were the news media, people Wolf Blitzer at CNN who got real tough with Anthony Weiner over a photo of him in his underwear but was an administration puppy dog when it came to the lead up to the war in Iraq. Management at MSNBC, wasn't much better, and then there was of course, Judith Miller and the New York Times.

Maybe the worst of it is, after all the lies they reported as facts have now been proved to be just that, and is a matter of history, and how mainstream journalism was complicit in shaping dishonest policy and dispensing propaganda, when it comes to mainstream journalism and the lack of competence and integrity with which they do their jobs, nothing has changed.

Happy anniversary.

The top 21 conservative contributions to America.

2013-03-16T11:11:00.001-07:00

Now that the CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing it seemed like a good idea to review the contributions made by conservatism to America , the American way of life, and American values as defined by the Founders. So as a public service to those who may speakl at CPAC and want to remind those gathered there of how valuable conservatism has been, here are the top 20 conservative contributions to America, those that have had the most impact on the country and life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

1. They opposed independence from Great Britain and the revolution in 1776.

Conservatives in the colonies at the time were known as Tories. They were completely against the Revolution and independence from Great Britain. In fact most of them thought those crazy radical liberals like Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Adams, Paine and the others in New York,Pennsylvania and Boston were going to ruin everything and many of them defected to the British.

2. They created and insisted on the institution of slavery and the total subjugation of Africans kidnapped and brought to America against their will be made part of the Constitution.

3. They started and fought a Civil War in which over 600,000 were killed, hoping to destroy the country so they could keep the institution of slavery.

4. For more than 100 years after the Civil War including following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, conservatives, especially southern conservatives, did everything in their power to deprive African Americans of their rights, including lynchings, beatings, burning crosses on the lawns of African-Americans, and having the police beat them with clubs.

5. Conservatives opposed women's right to vote.

6. Conservatives were responsible for Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that outlawed alcohol and is credited with turning organized crime into an enterprise bigger than U.S. Steel and made Al Capone a star.

7. Conservatives vigorously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment which guaranteed women's equality in all areas of life. Their argument against the amendment was that if the Equal Rights Amendment passed women would have to use the same public rest rooms as men ( no kidding).

8. Conservatives believed global warming is a myth and since 1968 have opposed all legislation protecting the environment including the emission of greenhouse gases and mocked as "tree huggers" those trying to clean it up.

9. A conservative president and administration were responsible for what became known as Watergate, the worst abuse of power, undermining and disregarding of the constitution and American liberty and constitutional rights in American history. Every member of the Nixon administration went to prison including the Director of the FBI, two attorneys general, two White House chiefs of staff, two White House counsels and most of their subordinates.

10. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan, conservatism's biggest hero, is the one who gave Sadaam Hussein his chemical and biological weapons including anthrax starter kits.

11. In 1981 the Reagan Administration voted for a UN resolution condemning Israel for sending fighter jets into Iraq and destroying Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor.

12. In 1982 Reagan, called by conservatives The Great Communicator, communicated nothing when Saddam used his chemical weapons against his own people and killed 60,000 civilians.

13. In 1998 the conservative Republican majority in congress impeached President Bill Clinton, only the second time in American history a president had been impeached, and used Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and lying about it as the reason. At the same time the House voted to impeach Clinton, conservative Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was found to be cheating on his own wife with his own administrative assistant. He was replaced by conservative Robert Livingston who resigned two day later when it was revealed he also had been cheating on his wife. It was also revealed during the impeachment proceedings that conservative Republican Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Clinton, had not only been cheating on his wife he also had cheated on the woman he was cheating with, telling her he wasn't married.

14. In 2001, a newly elected conservative president, George W. Bush decided the Clinton administration had been wrong in treating terrorism and Al-Qaeda as the biggest threats to U.S. national security, demoted Richard Clarke, head of White House anti-terrorism, dismissed terrorism as a threat, ignored frantic warnings by George Tenant at CIA that intelligence showed the country was about to be hit with a terrorist attack, was told on August 6, 2001 that Al-Qaeda was going to hijack U.S. airliners as part of the attack and did absolutely nothing. In addition, the assistant director of the FBI testified that then attorney general in John Ashcroft, had told him early on in the administration that he didn't want to hear any more about terrorism.

15. The same conservative president and a conservative dominated congress lied the country into a war in Iraq by falsely claiming that Sadaam had a nuclear weapons capability even though they knew he didn't. They also cut taxes at the same time they took the country to war, blowing a $1 trillion hole in the balanced budget and zero deficit they inherited.

16. The Bush Administration and a conservative congress passed economic policies in 2002 that led the country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

17. In 2009 conservtives fought tooth and nail against health care reform. At a Republican presidential debate in 2012, the conservative audience cheered the idea of letting someone without health insurance die.

18. While complaing that healthcare reform was government interference in to the private lives of Americans, conservative dominated states passed laws forcing women to have vaginal ultrasounds and witnessing them before they could have an abortion.

19. In Texas, in 2010, patriotic conservatives on the Texas school board voted to dump Thomas Jefferson from Texas school curriculum on political philosophy because of Jefferson's vocal and well documented contempt for the Christian church which made it impossible for them to teach that the country was founded on Christian values.Conservatives decided Jefferson had to go.

20. In 2012, while trying to pass laws to prevent or restrict abortion, conservatives also tried to pass laws opposing contraception which, in case they didn't seem to know can make abortion unnecessary.

21. In 2013, conservative members of congress who identify themselves as Right to Life have opposed a ban on privately owned assault weapons.

With CPAC now in its second day, conservative speakers should feel free to use any or all of these conservative contributions as talking points to illustrate what can be accomplished in the future.

In David Brinkley's recent biography of Walter Cronkite, Brinkley writes about how Cronkite when covering the 1964 presidential elections privately viewed the conservatism of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and his supporters as being closer to fascism then democracy. It's not hard to understand why.

The Ryan budget: fiscal conservatives or fiscal fakes?

2013-03-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

The hypocrisy of Republicans and tea party conservatives and their representatives in Congress when it comes to deficit reduction has now hit new lows especially with Paul Ryan's absurd budget which is based on the repeal of Obamacare, something worth doing but only if it's replaced with a public option and nothing that will happen with the present make up of congress.

This exercise in futility is brought to you by the same representatives in Congress who in the name of fiscal conservatism and deficit reduction were prepared to allow the United States to default on its debt for the first time in its history, an unconstitutional act that could have been labeled treason had Obama or the Democrats had the backbone or political savvy to do so. Had they called their bluff there wouldn't even be a sequester now.

Republicans and Tea Party conservatives have embraced the sequester which as everyone knows by now was a foolish compromise by Obama who didn't know how to stand up to Republicans on the debt ceiling and so made an offer he expected the Republicans to refuse . They didn't.

Knowing he has outgamed Obama which Republicans always seem to do, John Boehner has said he will entertain no other solutions to reducing the deficit that includes more revenue, even if increasing revenue doesn't mean higher tax rates only closing corporate loopholes. The point isn't deficit reduction, it's gamesmanship.

In the end, as the Ryan budget which is predicated on the repeal of Obamacare shows, these are not really fiscal conservatives, but fiscal fakes and have been since the days of the Bush administration when it was solely Republican policies that caused all the problems in the first place. Ryan himself has admitted his budget isn't a serious one that could ever be adopted, but a political statement. Ryan acknowledges his party lost the election but asks, " are we supposed to give up our principles because we lost the election? Are we supposed to stop believing in what we believe in"? The answer is no, youre supposed to acknowledge that the majority of the country rejected your princples and do not believe in what you believe in so stop trying to cram it down everyone's throat.

What Ryan nor anyone else in the Republican party want to acknowledge is that the Republicans inherited a balanced budget and a zero deficit from Bill Clinton in 2001 but it didnt take long for them to destroy it. The first $1 trillion hole Republicans blew in the balanced budget and what originally caused the deficit, was the decison by a Republican dominated goverment that for the first time in American history took the country to war and cut taxes at the same time. Republicans wanted the war but didnt want to have to pay for it. And they didnt. Ideology first because they always want to cut taxes, and fiscal responsiblity last.

What is at issue for Republicans now is not how to solve a problem, something they have proved incapable of doing, but how to use the sequester to further Republican and conservative ideology, an ideology that has been nothing but a disaster for the United States in every aspect of life since the beginning of the Republic whenever Republicans or conservatives have had the votes to implement their ideology. It has been the defeat of conservatism from the time of the Revolution to the present that has allowed the United States to get where it is. Unfortunately there are few liberals and Democrats who know how to hoist conservatives on their own petard and instead have been relying on conservatives to do or say something stupid which Democrats can then turn into victories.

As for the sequester and so called deficit reduction and cutting spending, the proof of Tea Party and Republican hypocrisy is that the states that most Tea Party conservatives represent like Idaho, Kansas, and others receive much more in federal money then they pay out in federal income taxes. Its federal tax money from more prosperous states like New York,Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and California, that for the most part go to finance the federal programs and subsidies in these so called conservative Red states.

Conversely, states like New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and California, get far less back from the federal government then they pay in federal income taxes.

So here is the solution for the Tea Party Republican conservatives in Congress who want to cut spending without producing additional revenue and who want to claim they are not liars and hypocrites: sign a pledge and sponsor bills that make it federal law that no state can accept one dollar more in federal money that exceeds the amount in federal taxes their states send to the federal government less their share of defense and non- discretionary spending. Not a dime more. For anything.

Then, if these Red states don't like the reduction in services -- money for health, education, infrastructure or law enforcement -- because of the cut in the revenue they receive from the federal government, let them raise taxes in their own states to pay for it. Or do without them.

The money the federal government can save by not giving these conservative states any federal money after taking out their share for national defense and other non-discretionary spending,can go directly to deficit reduction.

Any Republican representative who wont make such a pledge or sponsor or vote for such a bill should be branded a liar and a hypocrite, along with the constituents and members of the Tea Party in the states and districts they represent.

Democrats should try and introduce such a deficit reduction bill, then use it against any Republican who wont support it. That might put an end to the gamesmanship involved in conservative budget policies that are more about "do what we say, not what we do".

Why the sequester is all Obama's fault.

2013-02-23T10:42:00.000-08:00

It seems almost everyone ( but not all) thinks the sequester scheduled to go into effect March 1 is a bad thing. And maybe it is. But those condemning the sequester the loudest have been Barrack Obama and the Democrats.

Obama has been going into overdrive in his town hall meetings ( and when it comes to Obama and town hall meetings that's saying something) pointing out how the Republicans are being obstinate and refusing to compromise or meet him half way to forge an agreement to avoid the sequester. And all of that is true. Except there wouldn't be a sequester in the first place if it wasn't for Obama, and his own negligence, incompetence and his once again, failures of leadership in his not dealing with the debt ceiling when he could have, when the Democrats controlled both houses of congress and they could have done what they wanted with no Republican roadblocks. If he had, all this would have been avoided.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the sequester was all Obama's idea, not the Republicans. And the cuts are Obama's cuts. You can blame Republicans all you want for their Draconian, almost medieval ideas about everything,their political dishonesty, ineptitude, and putting politics over everything and all that would be true, but it is Obama's inability to be a leader, to take it to the Republicans and instead instituted this sequester that is the heart of the problem.

The sequester was Obama's response to the Republicans holding the country hostage over the debt ceiling in 2011. The Republicans threatened to let the country go into default on its debts for the first time in its history by not raising the debt ceiling unless Obama agreed to budget cuts they would accept, and then and only then would they be willing to raise the debt ceiling, something the Republican congress did eight times without batting an eye when Bush was president.

The smart thing to have done, the leadership thing to have done, certainly what I would have done, is call the Republicans bluff, and even label their threat to default a violation of the constitution which states " the debt of the United States shall not be questioned", and call their intentions treasonous.

How long do you think the Republicans would have stood up against that kind of attack? How long do you think they would have gone on trying to defend themselves against being traitors to the United States and the constitution? How many polls do you think the news organizations would have done asking the American people if they thought the Republicans forcing the country to default on its debts was treason against the country and the constitution?

But instead of calling the Republicans bluff and daring them to cause the United States to default and holding it hostage to raise the debt ceiling, (calling them "budget terrorists" would have done nicely also) Obama did what he does more than any president in history -- he caved in and initiated the Draconian budget cuts in the sequester as a way of bribing the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling and prevent default, something they should have done anyway. Republicans 1, Obama 0.

We heard from Jay Carney the other day that the sequester proposed by Obama was never supposed to go into effect. They why did he propose it and agree to it in the first place? To play games with the Republicans? When it comes to gamesmanship Obama and the Democrats come out on the losing end every time, mainly because there are no Democrats in leadership positions or Democratic strategists that really know how to play the game or take it to the Republicans. They think they do but they don't (see the recent fiasco with Harry Reid backing off his original intention to get rid of the filibuster, then compromised with McConnell on something way less, only to see the Republicans spit in Reid's face and use the filibuster against Hagel only days after he backed down on the filibuster and capitulated to McConnell).

So Obama proposed a series of deep budget cuts that he thought the Republicans would never agree to as a way of playing a political game by thinking he was tricking the Republicans with a bribe to get out from under Republican threats to default on the U.S.debt and now Obama's back is to the wall because the Republicans seem ready to accept Obama's bribe and let the sequester go into effect.

In other words, Obama didn't have the backbone to call the Republicans bluff on default and the debt ceiling , but Republicans seem very willing to call Obama's bluff on the sequester and blame him for it and now Obama and Democrats are crying foul.

Had Obama called the Republican bluff on the debt ceiling in 2011, called their intention to let the country default treasonous, he would have been holding all the cards. Either the Republicans would have backed down and there would now be no sequester, or had they followed through on their threat and caused a default and all that came with it, it would have been a major campaign issue in 2012 and the Democrats would have assuredly retaken the House and now controlled all three branches of government, and in that case there wouldn't be any sequester either.

Democratic groups like MoveOn, The DCCC and others keep sending out dishonest emails asking people to sign petitions blaming the Republicans for the sequester that was initiated and crafted by Obama ignoring the fact that Obama was grossly negligent in not dealing with the debt ceiling and the budget in his first term when he had a huge congressional majority, and now they act like he had nothing to do with it.

This is what happens when dishonest politics grips both parties. The email from the DCCC showed a picture of Obama and the words " Have His Back. Sign your name".

If Obama had had the country's back, if he had been a leader and was able to see down the road more than 6 inches in front of his face, if he had dealt with the debt ceiling when he had the chance or if he had called the Republican bluff in 2011 instead of caving in, if he didn't offer a compromise he had no intention of wanting to honor in the first place, none of this would be happening. Its all the fault of a lack of leadership by Obama and the sooner Democrats admit it the better. Blaming Republicans for accepting cuts Obama proposed because Obama is now yelling, "but wait, you weren't supposed to accept this, I was only kidding", is not going to work. In a recent town hall meeting Obama said, "these cuts are not fair, not smart and will hurt the economy". He also said, "we can't afford the reckless sequester". He forgot to add, "and it was all my idea".

The Democratic groups who are now complaining about the sequester and Republican refusal to compromise and what it might do, should wise up that they are complicit in this also by supporting a president who has not been 1 /10th of what they pretended he would be, and still doing nothing about it, which would be to pressure Democrats in leadership positions to do something they have been incapable of doing in the past -- get tough with Republicans. And force Obama to use his backbone or get one, instead of asking rank and file Democrats to sign petitions that are supposed to be a substitute for one.

McCain, Graham, and phony Republican outrage over Benghazi.

2013-02-17T15:39:00.001-08:00

The Hagel nomination has been held up by Republicans and one of the excuses that has emerged for holding it up, especially by the two most outspoken Republicans opposing Hagel, John McCain and Lindsay Graham, are their assertions that they aren't getting the whole truth behind what happened at Benghazi. Over on the House side we saw the vein popping Republican Congressman Dana Rorharabacher make a fool of himself as he often does, during a recent House hearing on Benghazi by comparing the initial administration explanation of the attack at Benghazi to Watergate, the scandal that almost destroyed Rorharbacher's party when a Republican president, every White House aide including two White House chiefs of staff, a number of White House counsels and two Republican attornys general along with a Republican appointed Director of the FBI were all found guilty of multiple felonies including obstruction of justice, and who subverted the U.S. constitution with abuses of power never before seen in the U.S. government and were sentenced to prison. To Rorharbacher, Susan Rice's initial statements on Sunday morning TV talk shows repeating initial information given to her by intelligence agencies that proved to be incorrect, was the same thing.

The outrage expressed and continuing to be expressed by Republicans and their stated desire to get to the bottom of what happened over the deaths of four Americans is as phony and hollow as Rorharbacher's analogy. Because the facts show it's not the deaths of four Americans in a terrorist attack that really matter to any of them. Those deaths are nothing more than political fodder and smoke screen for Republicans to use against a Democratic administration and a Defense Secretary nominee who, as a Republican, bucked the party over the war in Iraq.

Republicans have hammered away at the same questions about Benghazi and have used them in part as an excuse to hold up the confirmation of Hagel as Defense Secretary, their childish way of poking a stick in the eye of the Obama Administration and Hagel himself. Graham and McCain claim they want to know why there wasn't more protection at the embassy in Benghazi and claim they are outraged that the deaths of four Americans were, accordingt to them, the result of Obama Administration State Department negligence. And, they claim, they want answers.

They point to requests to the State Department for more protection for the Benghazi embassy that were ignored, and warnings of potential threats in a part of the world that was clearly dangerous and filled with anti-American sentiment. They accuse the State Department and the Obama Administration of fudging, of hiding, of not being honest about what happened that night, about trying to dodge responsibility and engineering a cover up. As recently as tody's Sunday morning talk shows, McCain was saying he hasnt gotten the answers to crucial questions. And Republicans, headed by McCain and Graham accuse the State Department and the Obama Administration of doing nothing, of not heeding the warnings and therefore being responsible for the deaths of four Americans by not responding adequately to the threats.

We know what Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Dana Rorharabacher and other Republicans have demanded to know and are still demanding to know about Benghazi in their self-righteous anger, according to them, over the deaths of the four Americans.But here is what Lindsay Graham, Dana Rorharabacher, John McCain, Mitch McConnell and other Republicans in the House and Senate didn't want to know.

They didn't want to know 12 years ago, why George W. Bush, the president from their own party, and Condoleeza Rice, his national security advisor ignored nine months of terrorist warnings from every intelligence service in the United States, including warnings from the outgoing president, outgoing National Security advisor, the directors of the FBI and CIA, and their own White House head of anti-terrorism that the United States was going to be attacked by Al-Qaeda who represented the biggest threat to U.S. national security in the world.

Republicans didn't want to know why one month before the 911 attack, on August 6, 2001, Bush was given an intelligence report that not only told him Al-Qaeda was going to conduct a terrorist attack against the United States within the United States, but that intelligence agencies had observed Al-Qaeda operatives who were already in the United States and were in New York City conducting surveillance on New York office buildings. Even more damning, the intelligence report told Bush that Al-Qaeda's plan of attack involved the hijacking of U.S. airliners.

McCain, Graham, McConnell, Rorharbacher or any other Republican didn't want to know why Bush ignored these warnings and did nothing, why he didn't act on these intelligence reports and the dire warnings that were being received as a result of intercepts of Al-Qaeda chatter, chatter that Richard Clarke said had spiked to the highest level in 20 years. They also didn't want to know why Bush ignored dire warnings in August of 2001 from the CIA that these interecepts indicated an attack was imminent and in the words of one CIA translation, was going to be "spectacular".

Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Dana Rorharbacher and others didn't want to know back in 2002 why, when Richard Clarke testified that the threat of an Al-Qaeda attack was so great and so imminent that he and CIA director George Tenant were "running around the White House like men with their hair on fire" trying to get Condoleeza Rice and Bush to do something and that not only did Bush and Rice do nothing, Bush refused to even see or even talk to them while he was on vacation in Crawford at Rice did nothing.

Neither Lindsay Graham, John McCain, Dana Rorharbacher or any other Republican ever wanted to know why. And they never asked.

None of them wanted to know why a Republican president ignored warnings for 9 months that resulted in the worst attack on American soil and the greatest loss of life on American soil at the hands of a foreign enemy in American history. None of them wanted to know how the worst case of gross, even criminal negligence in regards to the national security of the United States in the country's history committed by a president of the United States could have happened. None threatened to hold up a single nomination or piece of legislation until they were given the answers. None demanded an explanation as to why Bush and Rice ignored all those warnings for nine months when they clearly could have prevented the 911 attacks has they been taken seriously. None of them demanded accountability for 3,000 Americans killed at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. But now they are demanding accountability for four.

Last week for the first time in American history, a cabinet confirmation was filibustered by Republicans, keeping the country from having a Secretary of Defense for the next ten days and forcing Hagel, who is in no danger of not being confirmed, to miss an important meeting with his European counterparts in Belgium and they used Benghazi as the excuse. It was also payback to Hagel for having the gall to attack Bush for lying the country into war in Iraq, lying about the yellow cake Sadaam was supposedly importing from Africa, and using the 911 attacks that Bush could prevented, as the dishonest excuse to go to war in Iraq.

Unlike McCain who was caught lying through his teeth about the progress of the war and the security situation in Iraq during what was revealed to be a completely phony photo op in Baghdad designed to show that the insurgency had been quelled at a time when the insurgents were still out of control, Hagel tore into Bush over his lying the country into the war, was proved right and made fools and marionettes out of McCain, Lindsay Graham and every other Republican. This is their payback for Hagel telling the truth when Republicans were trying to hide it. That these actions by McCain and Graham hurts the United States doesn't really matter to them. For Repblicans its usually party before country. And politics before policy. And payback before anything else. Their silence over Bush's failures in the 911 attacks show it.

When it comes to phony Republican outrage over anything,whether it's phony Republican morality, phony Republican patriotism, phony Republican concern over the economy, it;'s never what they say that matters, only what they do. And when it came to the gross negligence of a Republican administration in the worst attack on American soil by a foreign enemy in our history, one that cost the lives of 3000 Americans, and then a phony war that cost another 5,000 lives with tens of thousands of injuries, John McCain,Lindsay Graham and all their Republican cohorts sat in a corner and never said a word. But now they want answers from a Democratic administration over the deaths of four Americans at an foreign embassy and what they are trying to call a cover up. Something Republicans know a great deal about.

On Sunday on Meet the Press, McCain and David Gregory engaged in what almost became a shouting match when Gregory asked questions that pointed out the absurdity of McCain's inquest, namely the idea that there was a cover up with regards to Benghazi. Gregory repeatedly asked,
"cover up of what"? to which McCain repeatedly answered, " don't you care about the deaths of four Americans, David"?

If demanding accountablity from a president and his administration in the deaths of four Americans at the hands of terrorists is the standard McCain is using, then McCain, Graham, and every other Republican joining in on the Benghazi inquest,when it comes to the deaths of Americans at the hands of terrorists didnt care very much about the 3,000 who were killed Sept.11,2001 when those deaths were the result of gross negligence by a president of their own party.

CNN coverage of Carnival ship return,biggest waste of news resources in history.

2013-02-15T07:59:00.000-08:00

CNN covered live, exclusively and interminably for 9 consecutive hours,the return of the Carnival cruise ship Triumph which had become disabled at sea, until it docked in Mobile Alabama at approximately 11 p.m. eastern.

Nine hours on CNN of nothing but watching a big cruise ship being towed by tug boats at between 3 and 5 mph after it had been disabled for 4 days by a fire that had wiped out the ships electricity and engines.

CNN and its journalists treated the event like it was the Titanic instead of what it really was - a titanic inconvenience and nothing more, for those on board and nothing short of a man bites dog story for the rest of the country. How unimportant was it? You couldn't find the story about the ship finally docking on the front page of the NY Times. You had to go to the travel section to find the story, which is where it belonged.

No one was killed. No one was injured. No one was sick. No one was in any danger of any of those things happening. It was not a tsunami. It was not an earthquake. It was not a natural disaster of any kind. It was not the cruise ship that went aground and tipped over on its side in Greece putting people at great risk and necessitating dramatic sea rescues.

It 4200 people aboard a large cruise ship who went through enormous inconvenience for 5 days without electricity aboard a cruise ship, and thanks to CNN because many though not all, the toilets weren't we working, we know they had to poop in biohazard bags. It's not known if reporting that fell under CNN's journalistic guidelines of the public having a right to know, the need to know, or ought to know.

But that and other things, none of which had anyone in any danger is what CNN thought worthy of 9 consecutive hours of live coverage by all their correspondents and for some reason known probably known only to her college roommate, necessitated a trip by Erin Burnette and Martin Savage flying to Mobile to be on the dock with a camera crew when the ship came in.

CNN seemed to think that this ship coming in would be their ship coming in as far ratings are concerned, but they are liable to be disappointed. It was one of the biggest bores in the history of television news which is saying something when you consider the low level of journalism you get on a daily basis on all the cable news channels.

It finally degenerated into a kind of desperate comedy when coverage spilled over into CNN's pretentiously named Situation Room, and Wolf Blitzer did his best to try and turn it into something serious when anyone could see it wasn't.

Blitzer kept repeating that this was a "dramatic and very serious news story" only to be constantly rebuked by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, maybe the one real journalist CNN has who doesn't compromise his integrity one iota, when Blitzer kept asking leading questions hoping for breathless answers from Gupta concerning the seriousness and danger of disease aboard the ship. Unfortunately Blitzer didn't get what he wanted from Gupta who simply told him there was no danger of disease at all because of the conditions. Blitzer tried again reminding Gupta of the perceptions out there that this is a dangerous situation with the potential to spread disease and Gupta said he understood that there might be those perceptions but that the perceptions were wrong and that there was no danger of disease. Blitzer, undaunted, tried again pointing out that the mother of one of the passengers was bringing antibiotics to give her daughter when she got off the ship. Gupta said, really bad idea, since you don't do that if someone isn't really sick.

CNN kept trying to tug at our heartstrings and empathy and the deplorable conditions those on the ship had to endure by talking about how families and loved ones hadn't been able to hear from those on the ship for two whole days because of no cell phone service and the internet being knocked out,ignoring the fact that they were on a cruise and out to sea where presumably there aren't a lot of cell phone towers so no one would have gotten a cell phone call from them anyway.

Erin Burnette who breathlessly made it to the scene of of the docking in Mobile Alabama, on the scene, helped pass the time of waiting for the ship to dock by asking a former Carnival crew member if the crew, any crew on a cruise ship was really ready to handle a fire on board the ship. Her voice was hopeful, full of anticipation that he would say "no" no one could be prepared for anything like this, and she would finally have something newsworthy to justify all this attention. But her hopes were dashed when he said, " the crew is absolutely ready to handle a fire and this kind of situation. They are sailors first, they are well trained, and they know exactly what to do in a situation like this".

Clearly disappointed she thanked him and moved on to how terrible it must have been not to have internet for days and not be able to send videos or text messages to loved ones.

There was another attempt to try and justify this idiotic expenditure of resources when Martin Savage, interviewing a passenger getting off the ship after it docked, tried to compare their experience with Katrina. The passenger clearly thought Savage was nuts and would have none of it. "Two different things, two entirely different things. We were on vacation here to have a good time, we were on a cruise ship. In Katrina's case it was people's homes that were destroyed, their whole lives that were affected". Not to mention 1500 people who died, not exactly the same as 4000 people who had to poop in a biohazard bag.

After this latest passenger interview dashed Savage's hopes of comparing a cruise ship inconvenience to Hurricane Katrina, Erin Burnette kept hope alive pointing out that there had to be people who were "absolutely frightened". But she couldn't find any. And no one she interviewed said they were frightened.

Another passenger getting off the ship, this one interviewed by Martin Savage, was asked, "what was the lowest point for you"? You could literally see the blood drain out of Savage and Burnett's face when he said, " there really wasn't any". Savage and Burnett looked at each other briefly and shared a "now what?" moment.

Their last desperate shot at trying to justify 9+ hours of continuous coverage came when Burnette used the well known underhanded dishonest journalistic trick of trying to create a controversy and get an answer to something that has no bearing on reality by saying to a passenger, " there are some passengers are really angry about what happened. What do you say to that"?

Journalists always like to say "some say", when asking a question when no one at all has said it but them, but they don't want to say it's them saying it so they say "some say". But in this case this passenger left Burnette holding the proverbial biohazard bag when he said, "the crew was wonderful, they couldn't have done a better job. It was a little inconvenient, but the crew was wonderful, many of them going without sleep and doing all they could. We werent angry at all".

It was an end to a long and grueling day for CNN and it was hard to say who went through more grief and who had the more trying time, the passengers on board the Triumph, or CNN. Based on the expressions on the faces and the demeanor of the passengers and the journalists for CNN, it seems to be CNN.

New findings demolish Freeh Report,Freeh himself,the NCAA, news media and Penn St. Board of Trustees.

2013-02-11T06:36:00.000-08:00

A review of the Freeh Report by a distinguished panel of investigators which includes a former U.S. Attorney General has demolished the Freeh Report along with Freeh's integrity,even calling into question his motives, and proved beyond any doubt what should have been obvious from the beginning -- that the Freeh Report was a biased hatchet job with an agenda, filled with smears, unsubstantiated conclusions designed intentionally to smear,and did not at any time present even a shred of actual proof to back up any of its conclusions. It was in not in any way the independent and honest investigation it pretended to be.

This is going to be a hard pill to swallow and cause a lot of embarrassment, humiliation, heartburn and worse for a lot of people including 99% of the news media, the NCAA and of course the Board of Trustees at Penn State who accepted, perhaps swallowed is the right word, Freeh's report so it should be expected that there are going to be some reactions, probably first from the news media, that will attempt to cast aspersions on this report and its findings which, unfortunately for any naysayers, is bullet proof in it's conclusions.

Some may attempt to dismiss it using the fact that the Paterno family commissioned the report, and therefore it is somehow biased but that will never fly. First it would ignore the fact that the Freeh Report itself was bought and paid for by the Board of Trustees, who clearly had a hidden agenda, especially after their knee jerk firing of Paterno before any facts were in, not to mention that they had closed down a press conference Paterno had called to tell all he knew, and Freeh was only too happy to accept the $6 million fee and be the hit man he was hired to be.

The other unassailable fact is the difference in the integrity, the backgrounds and experience of the people who reviewed and issued the report for the Paterno family who, unlike Freeh who was one of the most unscrupulous and sinister characters in the history of law enforcement, have impeccable credendtials and reputations. Dick Thornburgh is a former Attorney General of the United States during Reagan's presidency, Jim Clemente a career FBI agent, profiler and former prosecutor whose entire career and expertise is in the area of child sexual abuse, and Dr. Fred Berlin, a renown physician and expert on sexual disorders at Johns Hopkins University hospital.

The report issued by Thornberg,FBI agent and former prosecutor Jim Clemente and Dr. Fred Berlin (click the link for the report) tears the Freeh Report to shreds from the ground up not only destroying it on factual grounds but destroying Freeh's motives and integrity and proves it to be the incompetent, inadequate hatchet job and dishonest mess that it is, pointing out the same things that were pointed out here more than a year ago when the story first broke and the media first started to railroad Paterno based on inaccuracies, unvarnished lies, distortions and self-serving fabrications that were as false today as they were then. Nevertheless the media and others, like lemmings simply swallowed what Freeh fed them when he issued his report in July since it supported (probably intentionally) their own factually inadequate and dishonest narrative, and they swallowed it for self serving purposes not the least of which was money and the opportunity to try and elevate themselves as the moralists they aren't but will pretend to be when given the opportunity.

The Freeh Report itself, when it first came out, was clearly and intentionally dishonest for anyone who read it and didnt have an agenda, and was taken apart in this space back in July of 2011. Every dishonest aspect of the Freeh Report exposed here was re-enforced by the review by Thornburgh et al.

The report was also, as characterized by the Paterno family lawyer, a shot across to the bow to the NCAA, the Board of Trustees and Freeh himself since there were suggestions during an interview with Bob Ley on ESPN with Paterno's attorney as well as with Thornberg and Clemente, that unless something is undone, there could be massive law suits which could force the NCAA, the Board of Trustees and Freeh himself into a court room.

Not unsurprisingly, Freeh issued a statement that did not say, "okay you nailed me, I was completely dishonest and the report is the biased hatchet job it was supposed to be, paid for by John Surma and others on the Board of Trustees for reasons they will have to explain. I did the best I could to pin this on Paterno and the three others and take the heat off everyone else including myself since I was the vice chairman of a huge bank, MBNA, and during my tenure from 2000-2007 as vice chairman we were Sandusky's biggest corporate sponsor at Second Mile, and even though there is evidence I must have known about the 1998 Sandusky investigation and 2001 incident with Sandusky I did nothing. But look, I did pretty well pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of people by using the dishonest and biased narrative established by the news media and I was pretty successful in fooling as many dumb people as I did who were stupid enough to buy it".

No Freeh didn't say any of that but if he were honest he would have. Instead to no one's surprise he stood by the report he was paid $6 million to produce that was supposedly an unbiased objective investigation to get to the truth of what happened but didn't think he needed to interview the two people at the epicenter, Paterno or Mike McQueary who repeatedly asked to be interviewed. He stands by his report that drew conclusions from an email in 1998 from Curley asking Schultz for an update on the investigation, writing "coach is anxious to know" that concluded without a shred of proof that "coach" was Paterno even though all the evidence showed that "coach" was actually Sandusky but Freeh fudged it and got away with it at the time by saying "it is believed coach is Paterno" instead of "the evidence shows 'coach' is Paterno". Because he had no evidence to show that. The real investigators hired by the Paterno family pointed that out as well which was also pointed out here months ago.

The 1998 investigation is extremely important because without Paterno knowing anything about the investigation and therefore the allegations against Sandusky as Freeh tried to allege, the entire Freeh Report falls to peices since there is no motive to cover anything up and no knowledge by Paterno of the allegations against Sandusky. Not only is there no evidence that Paterno knew, all the circumstantial evidence says he didnt. But more compelling than that, there are two people who know exactly who "coach" is. Unambiguously and with a 100% certainty. Its Curley who wrote the email and Schulz who recieved it. And the report by Thornburgh,Clemente and Berlin states clearly that even though Freeh never interviewed Curley or Schultz, Thornburgh et al did meet with Curley and Schultz' lawyers and interviewed them and they say so in the report. And though they didnt say it in so many words ( perhaps for legal reasons since both men still face a trial) it is a virtual certainty that lawyers for Curley and Schultz know who "coach" is from their clients and the fact that the report cites that their lawyers were interviewed with respect to that email, and the report emphatically states that Paterno knew nothing of the investigation, it is a certainty one can conclude they received assurances in some way from Curley and Schultz' lawyers that "coach" in that email was NOT Joe Paterno.

Don Van Natta, the only real journalist ESPN employs called the new report "damning" against Freeh. which chronicles all the dishonesty that exists in the report. Van Natta wrote, "the report raises troubling questions about the findings, motives, independence and investigative techniques of Freeh's investigators". And damning,by extension the NCAA, the Penn State Board of Trustees , all the journalists who bought it, like CNN's spineless Roland Martin who never wrote a word in his life about child abuse even with all the painful revelations coming out against the Catholic church, but who jumped on the bandwagon vilifying Paterno, calling him a coward in a column based on the Freeh Report which was something he obviously never even read.

The real coward of course is Roland Martin. As were so many others in the media especially those writing for ESPN. In fact, even in reporting on the new Thornburgh report, ESPN cant get the facts straight and continues to "report" the false narrative they pushed from the beginning which had much to do with inflamming passions against Paterno.

In their article published yesterday they state, " In that 2001 incident, then assistant coach Mike McQueary witnessed the assault of a boy in a shower by Sandusky and told Paterno about it the next day (italics added). We know now McQueary never witnessed any such thing. In fact it turns out he witnessed nothing at all much less an assault and testified as such at Sandusky's trial which is why Sandusky was acquitted of the count of sexual assault stemming from the incident in the Penn State shower.

So we know he never told Paterno about any assault of a boy by Sandusky in that shower. In fact he never told anyone he witnessed an assault including his own father and family friend Dr. Dranov, and never mentioned an assault of any kind except in his shaky grand jury testimony where he was asked leading questions. That he never witnessed any assault and that none took place in the Penn State shower was confirmed by "Victim 2", in an on the record pre-trial interview with Sandusky's defense lawyer where Victim 2 stated that no assault of even contact ever took place, which explains why Freeh didnt want to interview McQueary.

That anyone needed a report to point out how dishonest and factually manipulative the Freeh Report really was, is in itself damning.As was the media dishonesty that started from the very beginning which turned Paterno into a modern day Richard Jewell, another one of Freeh's smear victims back in 1996 when Freeh was FBI director and had him named as the Olympic bomber.

But the news media who had a lot invested in attacking Paterno to ring up their cash registers (according to Pew Research the media made the story the number 1 story in the country for three weeks) continued to perpetuate the misrepresentation of facts and attacks for which they had no facts and it didnt matter. Unless it was going to cost them in some way. After I pointed out in a peice here that Sean Gregory of Time magazine had presented as fact things that were so clearly untrue about what Paterno knew back in November of 2001 that he had opened himself, Time Magazine and Time Warner up to an open and shut case of libel, Time magazine's lawyers must have agreed because sometime after my piece was written, someone removed the false and libelous comments Gregory tried to pass off as journalism and replaced them with sentences so reasonable and measured compared to what was orginally written, it actually makes you laugh when you compare the two.

Unfortunately they didn't remember Woody Allen's line that when you tell the truth all the time you never have to remember anything because the new lines that replaced Gregory's libelous ones would have been impossible to write on November 8,2011 when the article was first written because it reasonably suggests we wait and see what facts will come out in the future to tell us what Paterno knew and told the grand jury when, by November 8,2001 when the article was first written those facts had already come out. (Note to Gregory and Time magazine's lawyers -- you can still go back and fix it).

The report written by Thornburgh,Clemente and Dr. Berlin not only demolishes Freeh as a dishonest hack, but it also demolishes the news media, the Board of Trustees, the NCAA and every person who blindly believed the clearly preposterous unsubstantiated nonsense Freeh presented in the hopes he would get away with it. And they did it by presenting facts and evidence collected by people whose integrity, experience and public lives are beyond reproach.

It demolishes Freeh's central and preposterous premise, that Paterno knew of the 1998 investigation into Sandusky, did nothing, said nothing and was part of some conspiracy with three others to keep Sandusky;s activities quiet and to keep Penn State from bad publicity (even though the investigation and child protection exonerated Sanduksy at the time).

The report not only proves Paterno knew nothing of the investigation ( and couldn't have since as pointed out here months ago by a former inspector general who had read the report, unauthorized persons are prohibited by law from being given any information in a case involving a sexual assault on a child and had Schultz given Paterno any information about the 1998 investigation he certainly would have been charged and prosecuted for that now -- and he isnt, a little fact that escaped Freeh those intrepid journalists in the news media and those who don't read Woody Allen).

While there is no evidence that Paterno knew of the investigation, there is plenty of evidence that Freeh did as co-chairman of a bank that was Sandusky's biggest corporate sponsor. Which would give Freeh the proverbial means, motive and opportunity to fix the blame somewhere else and hopefully avoid any blame himself. And who knows what skeletons are in the closet of some members of the Board of Trustees? There have already been articles written showing that John Surma, a trustee had a vendetta against Paterno.

There are still going to be people who will cling to the Freeh Report at any cost and try to cast aspersions on this review of that report which debunks everything Freeh concluded, as if Thornberg a former U.S. attorney general, Clemente a career FBI agent and Dr. Fred Berlin a physician at Johns Hopkins would compromise their good names and a lifetime of integrity and achievement for a few bucks after the story had passed from public view. The only people who will still support the Freeh Report will be those who will do it for their own self serving reasons. One of those is attorney Thomas Kline, a lawyer looking for a payout and who represents Victim 5 who said this in response to the new report:

(The new report and its findings) "do not erase the shocking and striking documents which Freeh did uncover and which form an unassailable finding made by Mr. Freeh that Joe Paterno tragically had knowledge in 1998 .."

Mr. Kline is either incompetent, a liar, or is simply out for a payday since as pointed out both here and in the Thornburgh review, the Freeh Report produced no such proof that Joe Paterno knew a thing about the 1998 investigation, there is more proof to the contrary, and Kline's use of the word "unassailable" is a bad joke for someone whose profession is supposed to be about presenting facts. But there is a lot of money on the line for Mr. Kline as he is representing a victim whose case and claim would be substantially damaged if Paterno didnt know anything about the 1998 investigation, and that is apparent in the way Kline factually misrepresents the truth, when in fact the findings made by Freeh are not only quite assailable they were assailed completely and effectively by former Attorney General Thornberg, FBI agent Clemente and Dr. Berlin and seemingly confirmed by lawyers for Curley and Schultz.

This report debunking the Freeh Report could be the opening of a Pandora's Box for Freeh, the Board of Trustees, and the NCAA. It will force all of them to answer questions that need to be asked and answered. And it will happen either in the court of public opinion or in a court of law. It will also teach a lesson to those who can't or won't think for themselves,who are not nearly as smart as they think they are, not nearly as moral as they think they are and blindly believe everything they read by those who will willfully ignore the truth for their own self serving reasons.

That it took this new report to point out all the lies, distortions, and blatantly misleading and biased aspects of the Freeh Report underscores how useless the mainstream media has become and how devoid they are of any journalistic standards or ethics. From the time the first dishonest and factually inaccurate reports by people like Sean Gregory at Time magazine and those at ESPN first started to flow, and then the response of the media the NCAA and others to the Freeh Report, the mindless and equally ignorant torch carrying mob has had their say. Now with this report which speaks for itself, and the unquestioned integrity and professionalism of the people who produced it, reason, facts, truth and justice will have it's say.

As for the NCAA, their sanctions were nothing more than cheap grandstanding by Mark Emmert who behaved more like a sycophantic small town World War II burgomeister trying to curry favor with Nazis than anyone who had any respect for the truth, facts or the constitution. Emmert wanted to jump on the bandwagon and show that the NCAA "cared" and cared so much he was willing to smear and damage an innocent man and punish tens of thousands of Penn State students who were eight years old at the time Sandusky committed the crimes for which he was convicted. And Emmert did it by circumventing and violating the NCAA's own rules, procedures and guidelines.

Freeh issued a statement that he stands by his report. He has no choice. What matters now is who will stand by Freeh.

The NRA's newest enemy: America.

2013-02-09T14:19:00.000-08:00

All the latest polls show that a large majority of Americans are diametrically opposed to the ideas and point of view of the NRA when it comes to gun control, especially the NRA's opposition to more sweeping and extensive background checks and the banning of high capacity magazines and assault weapons.

Based on all the latest polls covering a variety of issues related to gun control the NRA is now on the outside looking in. But what's made matters even worse for them has been the publicizing of their new "enemies list", a list so preposterous it might be a factor that causes politicians who might be sympathetic to the NRA to bite the bullet and start voting against them.Because if there is one thing any politician wants to avoid at all costs it's embarrassment. And the NRA's new enemies list is just that - an embarrassment. To the NRA, it's leadership, and any one who supports them who are capable of being embarrassed.

The enemies list not only shows the NRA out of touch with reality, it shows that the NRA is also out of touch with America and possibly out of control completely. They have not only become the enemy of America and has made America the enemy of the NRA, they are quickly becoming a joke. Which will not only make them politically irrelevant, but they are inspiring reactions that range from contempt and derision to simply being laughed at as the recent front page of the New York Daily News exemplies. And for good reason.

Here is a sample of some of the groups and organizations that are on the NRA's newest enemies list:

AARP

American Medical Association

American Academy of Pediatrics

American Federation of Teachers

American Bar Association

American Nurses Association

American Association of Surgeons

Children's Defense Fund

Gray Panthers

League of Women Voters

National Association of Law Enforcement Officers

Ben and Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream

Blue Cross Blue Shield

Hallmark Cards

Kansas City Chiefs Football

Kansas City Royals Baseball

Levi Strauss and Co.

Sara Lee Corporation

St. Louis Rams Football

Stoneyfield Farms Yogurt

Time Warner

The Christian Science Monitor

CBS

PBS

McCalls Magazine

Motorcycle Cruiser Magazine

YWCA

No doubt were he still alive Norman Rockwell would be on the list too. How the Girls Scouts didnt make it is a mystery. Intentionally left out are all the groups and people one might expect to find on an NRA enemies list, which includes every news organization in the country except for Fox News and groups like the ACLU and journalists and companies you would expect to be on the list. (the entire list can be seen here). But Sara Lee and Ben and Jerry's? One can imagine Wayne LaPierre lining up boxes of Sara Lee frozen cheesecakes on a firing range and opening fire. Or blasting a case of Ben and Jerry's ice cream to bits.

The fact is, when you have as big a list of enemies that begin with the word "American" as the NRA does, you have made America your enemy. And have become un-American yourself. In spite of the bogus ideas they have about the second amendment. And not only do recent polls bear that out, so do the recent elections results.

The problem for the NRA is that they are fast becoming impotent as a political force as well as being laughed at in some places and no amount of political Viagra is going to help. In the last election, of the $7 million the NRA spent supporting candidates who pushed their point of view against candidates who opposed them, they received close to nothing as a return on their campaign dollars. In contrast Planned Parenthood saw a 99% return on the money they spent on candidates they supported against those who opposed them and who won their elections.

So how much is the NRA really at war with America? These are the results of recent polls.

Should gun control laws be more strict?

57% say yes. 9% say less strict, 30% say keep them as they are.

Banning the sale of high capacity ammunition clips?

62% say yes.

Banning the sale of semi- automatic rifles like the AK-47?

62% say yes.

Requiring all gun owners to register all their guns with local government?

78% say yes.

Background checks on anyone attempting to buy a gun in any venue?

95% say yes.

In New York which recently passed the most restrictive gun laws in the country, including the outright ban on the sale of assault weapons and a ban on magazines holding more than 7 rounds, 65% of New Yorkers approve of the new laws. Laws that the NRA said made them "outraged". The respone has been " so what"? So the NRA might want to add the state of New York to their enemies list.

The NRA has decided it is going to vehemently oppose all and any reasonable restrictions and laws related to owning guns, laws that despite the lunatic statements to the contrary would clearly make the country safer, especially those laws that would force legal gun owners to be more responsible by holding them criminally responsible with severe prison sentences for anyone other than the registered owner using their gun to commit a crime, which is about as common sense a law as it gets.

But the NRA has decided to oppose that too and has not only put themselves and the gun owners they speak for on the lunatic fringe of American society and outside what America wants,but when you have someone like Tony Bennett, not just a respected celebrity for six decades who has never gotten involved in a political fight, but who is also someone who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, when you have someone like that saying that the NRA and their positions have more in common with Nazis than Americans as he did on CNN, the NRA is going to find itself outgunned.

NCAA investigation of Miami destroys credibility and legality of Penn State sanctions.

2013-01-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA has put out a statement regarding the investigation into the Miami Hurricanes that the NCAA has " found a very severe case of improper conduct" committed by NCAA investigators during their investigation of the Miami Hurricane football program.

The "severe case of improper conduct", according to NCAA president Mark Emmert, was that the NCAA "improperly obtained information through a bankruptcy proceeding that did not involve the NCAA".

This admission and clear hypocrisy by Mark Emmert, all but assures that the law suit filed by the state of Pennsylvania against the NCAA seeking to dismiss the sanctions the NCAA imposed on Penn State in the wake of the criminal activity of Jerry Sandusky will almost certainly succeed.

It is ironic that Emmert considers information obtained through a proceeding that did not involve the NCAA "a severe case of improper conduct" by its investigators and yet every sanction against Penn State was leveled as a result of the corrupt Freeh Report, a proceeding, to quote Emmert, " that did not involve the NCAA".

That all the sanctions against Penn State were based solely on the Freeh Report, a report that has been discredited and demolished by people with actual investigative and legal knowledge and rife with evidence of dishonesty,intimidation, misrepresentation, subterfuge and smear tactics by Freeh substantiated by statements from witnesses interviewed by Freeh that was more pervasive than anything seen in a major investigation outside of the smearing of the innocent Richard Jewell as the Olympic Bomber in 1996, a smear campaign also orchestrated by then FBI director Louis Freeh, completely invalidates the NCAA sanctions against Penn State even on its own terms.

Except for a self serving, incompetent and in many cases, a cowardly and dishonest news media, and those without the brain power to question anything in the media, (of which there are clearly many) there was nothing rational or legal about the NCAA's sanctions against Penn State in the first place, since at the very least the NCAA was guilty of, in the words of ESPN reporter Dana O'Neill, "going outside the rule book to punish Penn State".

The clear illegality of the Penn State sanctions now contrasted with the developments at Miami and the admissions by Emmert and his double standard,also makes the quick acceptance of the sanctions by the current Penn State president and Board of Trustees, not just suspect in terms of justice and common sense, not just a clear dereliction of their responsibility for doing what was in the best interests of the university,its faculty, students and alumni, but it is also suspect in raising the question of whether there were members of the Board of Trustees as well as the current president, who had something sinister to hide and that was the reason behind the almost whiplash acceptance of the sanctions. It was left to Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett to sort out the absurdity of the sanctions and sue the NCAA.

Anyone following the events at Penn State closely knows that their Board of Trustees were too interested in "moving on" as quickly as possible as their chairperson, Karen Peetz, kept repeating every time their decisions were challenged or there was any dissent or questioning of their decisions or motives surfaced. These questions were universally dismissed and ignored. Possibly for good reason from their point of view assuming they had something to hide. Because it is the preposterous degree of the sanctions as well as any sanctions themselves that makes the acceptance by the Board reek of cronyism, collusion, cover-up and dishonest motives.

First, the sanctions against the football program made no sense. The people who were being punished, the current members of the football team, were eight years old and in the 3rd grade at the time Sandusky was engaging in the activity for which he was convicted and sent to prison. Other students at Penn State were also affected by the sanctions both in the form of the fines levied and loss of revenue from bowl games in terms of how that affects academic opportunities and scholarships, and they too were also about eight years old at the time of Sandusky's activities.

Secondly, all the sanctions went beyond the bounds of the NCAA's own rules and their authority as anyone familiar with their rules know, and this was echoed by one of Freeh's own investigators in an interview with the Chronicle For Higher Education.

The only authority the NCAA has to sanction anyone for anything is if the NCAA found violations and rules that were broken and which gave a competitive advantage to those who broke the rules. There were no NCAA rules broken in the Sandusky matter and there was nothing even remotely connected to Sandusky's abuse of boys from Second Mile that gave anyone a competitive advantage in a collegiate athletic contest or for that matter even related to Penn State's athletic program other than Sandusky had once been a coach there.

Even the lone accusation of sexual misconduct and abuse against Sandusky that allegedly took place in a Penn State shower was dismissed and deemed not credible by a jury and, while it was the accusation that set off the media frenzy, it was one of three counts for which Sandusky was acquitted.

Regarding Curley the athletic director and Schultz, VP of Business and Finance and overseer of Penn State police, there has been no legal finding regarding pending charges of perjury and they have the legal presumption of innocence before trial and would be irrelevant in any case regarding grounds for sanctioning Penn State. Even if Curley or Schultz were serial killers, there would be no basis for the NCAA to punish the Penn State football team or impose fines or any sanctions at all since it would have nothing to do with rules within the NCAA's jurisdiction and nothing about the charges against either that could relate to Penn State gaining an unfair competitive advantage.

Emmert's vacating of Paterno's victories between 1998 and 2010 is also both a legal and moral joke on which there are no grounds and no basis. The idea that Joe Paterno had some competitive advantage in violation of any NCAA rules during that time is an argument the NCAA wont even try to defend and that sanction will no doubt be vacated by a judge as well for being baseless and outside the purview of the NCAA. As far as the other nonsense Paterno was accused of by both the media and Freeh, there is still to this day not a shred of proof to substantiate any of it and a mountain of proof to rebut it. It was Paterno's name, his accomplishments and his name alone that drew all the focus and attention and purely for self serving reasons.

For now,the statements coming from Mark Emmert and the NCAA regarding the investigation into the Miami Hurricanes all but insures the law suit filed against the NCAA by Governor Tom Corbett and the state of Pennsylvania to vacate the NCAA sanctions against Penn State will succeed since all the information the NCAA used to levy the sanctions were based on a proceeding in Emmert's own words, "that did not involve the NCAA" - namely the Freeh Report.

Further it exposes the dishonesty, hypocrisy, hysteria and rush to judgement that prevailed during the height of the frenzy surrounding Penn State and Sandusky which only became a frenzy because of the name, accomplishments and stature of Joe Paterno, which everyone from Sean Gregory at Time, almost everyone at ESPN, CNN and most media outlets and the NCAA themselves, used like vultures to ring cash registers, try and elevate their own statures, and who. cared most about what was in it for them. (There have been no front page full page pictures in the Philadelphia Daily News of the priests currently on trial in Philadelphia for years of child sexual abuse with the word "Shame". Or the monsignor serving 6 years in prison for covering it up).

It must be remembered that the current NCAA investigation of Miami is being conducted solely by NCAA investigators to determine violations of NCAA rules which in turn will determine sanctions. In the case of Penn State, there was no NCAA investigation of any kind. None. It relied solely on the Freeh Report. There was none because Emmert and the NCAA knew there was nothing involving NCAA rules and Penn State or anything related that was within their purview. Yet, more interested in jumping on a bandwagon, they violated their own rules, their own jurisdiction and imposed Draconian sanctions that the Penn State Board of Trustees and president accepted without blinking an eye.

It remains to be seen once all the current legal proceedings have run their course and the sanctions are vacated, whether the Paterno family, Penn State alumni or anyone else adversely affected will ring some cash registers of their own and sue both the NCAA, the Penn State Board of Trustees, and the current president of Penn State for gross negligence in accepting the NCAA's illegal sanctions and even Freeh himself for defamation, libel and investigative misconduct. If that happens then the record will have finally been set straight.

How many NRA executives does it take to screw in a light bulb?

2013-01-20T09:55:00.000-08:00

Wayne LaPierre, when he gave the official NRA response to the Newtown murders said, " I call on congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation and do it now".

That was the sound of La Pierre standing on a chair holding a light bulb while five NRA executives rotated the chair.

There have been many reactions and responses to the Newtown shootings in the last month and one of the unintended results is that it has turned the NRA into a joke, a laughable organization run by right wing clowns and lunatics who seem to want to take any idiotic action possible just to avoid being inconvenienced by more controls or laws or bans on certain kinds of weapons that would make the citizenry safer.

The NRA has a membership of a little over 4 million. How many of them support LaPierre and the NRA leadership and how many are embarrassed by him there is no way to really know. But his "idea" of congress appropriating money to put armed police officers in every school in the country shows how low, dishonest and nonsensical he and the NRA leadership are. And when you have the conservative, Republican leaning New York Daily News calling you crazy and calling the NRA vile, you know that except for the most spineless members of congress that allow themselves to be intimidated, you've lost the argument , you've lost all credibility and you've lost the war.

First,even if congress wanted to pass a law requiring armed police in all schools in the country, it would be unconstitutional (given what former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger called the NRA's "fraud" over the second amendment, recommending something unconstitutional isn't a surprise) since the federal government has nothing to say and no jurisdiction over local school districts and how they operate. Which proves LaPierre's "call on congress" aside from being as the Daily News called it, "crazy", wasn't even sincere.

But it does show what their values are, values not shared by a majority of Americans. Let's say putting those cops in schools was possible. Who is supposed to pay for it? In LaPierre's foggy world every tax payer in the country is supposed to pay higher taxes so some gun owners can have 30 round clips, not be subjected to additional background checks and not have military weapons banned? What makes more sense, ban 30 round clips and assault weapons and expand background checks or spend $5-10 billion, paid for by raising taxes to put cops in every school?

What do you think would happen if Obama said, "great idea. Lets put armed guards in every school. And to pay for it we are going to add an armed guard tax and surcharge which would double the price of every firearm sold and all ammunition with the addtional tax money going to implement the NRA's idea."

You would hear the gagging by LaPierre and the NRA from New York to LA.

How stupid the NRA can be was evidenced by an idiotic commercial that criticized Obama calling him "an elitist and a hypocrite" because his children have Secret Service protection while he rejected LaPierre's hypocrisy and stupidity in his armed guard in schools idea.( How LaPierre thinks armed guards in schools that would have helped at the Aurora movie theater where 70 people were shot, he doesnt say). Even Republicans are trashing the NRA for the commercial, not only for dragging Obama's kids into a political debate but also because the Obama daughters Secret Service protection is required by law and has nothing to do with elitism or hypocrisy or even choice. On the other hand, some people might call it elitism when an organization like the NRA wants 300 million to pay the price for the ability of 4 million to own firearms.

How many NRA executives does it take to screw in a light bulb? LaPierre to stand on the chair and hold the bulb while the rest of the NRA leadership turn the chair. Only given the positions of LaPierre and the NRA, it wouldn't be a light bulb getting screwed, it would be the country.

New York's new assault weapons ban exposes false 2nd amendment claims.

2013-01-15T15:57:00.000-08:00

New York State has been the first to act and pass more gun control legislation since the shootings at Newtown.

While there is expanded background checks and other measures, the biggest is the outright ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines, not just for rifles but handguns and pistols as well.

The outright ban on these weapons means, obviously, they will no longer be sold in New York. But additionally, for those who already own these weapons, the law is now going to require current owners to register the weapons with the state. Since the weapons are now banned, those currently owning them, while not having them confiscated will not be able to sell them privately to anyone in New York. And more extensive background checks including those related to mental health are now going to include private sales.

These laws essentially fly in the face of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the second amendment that said, for the first time in American history,and contradicting 224 years of previous Supreme Court rulings, that the second amendment applied to individuals.

That this ruling was completely bogus as well as contrary to the amendment's intent, the intent of the Framers who created it, the words of the amendment itself, and 224 years of Supreme Court precedent is evident in the New York State legislature and governor Cuomo essentially ignoring the Roberts court ruling and passing the legislation they wanted.

Though gun laws and restrictions have typically been a local matter for state, city and town governments, the Federal government should immediately act to respect state law and pass legislation that makes it a federal crime to transport an assault weapon over state lines. While other states may act differently than New York and not ban these weapons, it should be incumbent on the federal government to make transporting these weapons over state lines a federal crime with harsh penalities -- 20 years would do nicely. This would insure the integrity of the law of any state that wants to ban these weapons as New York has.

The new law also bans magazine clips of more than 7 rounds, down from 10 rounds and substantially less than the 30 round clips that have done so much damage in mass shootings.

An opponent of the law, Republican Kathleen Marchione, said the law "weakened the second amendment constitutonal freedom of every New Yorker". Unfortunately for her argument, you cant "weaken" a constitutional provision. It is iron clad and if someone wants to challenge these new laws and take them to court as being unconstitutional, including the NRA, they are welcome to try. But it's unlikely anyone will.

The NRA has weighed in and said they are "outraged" by what they call "the draconian laws" just enacted by New York State. Okay, so they are outraged. So what? The question is what are they going to do about it? There was not a word from the NRA about the recent Supreme Court decision and not a word about challenging the new New York laws based on their constitutionality. We'll see if the NRA is more than "outraged". We'll see if they try and get these laws overturned. If not, they will prove again, emphatically that even the NRA knows better and won't push the idea that the second amendment applies to individuals. As former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon said repeatedly, the idea that the second amendment applies to the individual is "the biggest fraud, I repeat the word fraud, ever perpetrated by an interest group (the NRA) on the American people in my lifetime".

Marchione added one other statement which proves how wrong she and many Republicans are on the issue of assault weapons and gun safety. She tried to make the point as to why we didn't need tougher laws and why we didn't need a ban on assault weapons and very tough laws on gun owners who leave their guns accessbile to others.

Marchione said, “Law-abiding citizens who own guns are not our problem. Law-abiding citizens understand and know how to take care of their guns, not to be a danger to others.”

Tell that to the families of the victims at Newtown whose loved ones were killed by an assault weapon owned by a law abiding citizen who clearly did not understand how to take care of her gun and to make sure it was not a danger to others and left her weapon accessbile to her son who then took it, went to Sandy Hook Elementary school and used it for mass murder.

Gun debate proves there is no 2nd amendment right to own a gun but common sense laws can solve the gun problem.

2013-01-11T10:37:00.001-08:00

Since the school shootings in Newton, the debate about guns and laws and what to do about both have taken center stage. The NRA had agreed to be part of the talks headed by Vice President Biden and offer their point of view and just the other day, New York's

Governor Cuomo rolled out the strictest most comprehensive gun legislation in the country and the consensus is that all of it will pass the legislature.

What makes all this activity, soul searching, and debate about gun laws ironic, is, in it's own way it proves the obvious despite what people say publicly or what they think is right to say politically -- that the second amendment does not in any way guarantee anyone the right to own a gun and in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with individual gun ownership at all. It doesn't even imply it.

The proof whether they want to admit it or not, that everyone accepts this fact, is that there are debates about gun laws at all. Because if the second amendment really had anything to do with an individual right to own a gun, if it was truly a right guaranteed by the constitution, there wouldn't be any debates about gun laws at all because based on what the amendment says, any law restricting any gun ownership in any way would be unconstitutional.

As pointed out here previously, there is no reading of the second amendment that can in any way be applied to individual gun ownership if one goes by the precise words of the amendment, it's meaning, and the clear intent of the Framers in terms of what the amendment was really all about. In fact in the context of the second amendment, and in the context of the english language, the word "arms" doesn't even mean guns. The word "arms" didnt mean guns at the time of the amendment's creation, didnt mean guns before the amendment's creation and doesnt mean guns to this day. The word "arms" has never meant guns. "Arms" has a very specific meaning and it means weapons of war - all military weapons of war, and they are distinct from civilian firearms. Military weapons of war is what the word "arms" meant in 1789, it's what it meant in 789, and its what it meant during the cold war when the "arms race" related, not to guns or which country had more people with guns in their closets, but nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them.

That is something that goes over the head of someone like Alex Jones, whose appearance on Piers Morgan did more to re-enforce the need for psychological testing for gun ownership than anything Morgan could have said. Jones was the one who created a White House petition to have Piers Morgan deported for his stance on guns, something signed by a little more than 100,00 constitutional idiots like Jones who are so busy wailing about the second amendment they never read or don't care about the first.

The second amendment as debated and created by the framers of the constitution had nothing to do with civilian ownership of firearms. It never even came up in the debates. And as former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Warren Burger, appointed by conservative Richard Nixon said, the idea that the second amendment relates to individual civilian gun ownership is "the biggest fraud, I repeat the word fraud, ever perpetrated by an interest group (the NRA) on the American people in my lifetime".

Every Supreme Court in the last 225 years agreed with this since every court since the court itself and the constitution was created had ruled that the second amendment does not relate to individual gun ownership. The one exception has been the politically motivated conservatives on the farcical Roberts court and an opinion written by Alito that would have had conservatives screaming for impeachment had a liberal court based a decision the same way.

If the second amendment did relate to individual gun ownership, there would be no debate on gun laws at all because there is a little thing in the amendment called the infringement clause which specifically says the right granted in the second amendment is unlimited and cannot be reduced, modified,impeded, altered, or changed in any way.

Being part of the debate, the NRA itself is acknowledging that any state, locality, city, village or the Federal government can write any gun laws they wish even if they don't come right out and say so. Actions as they say, speaks louder than words. And it is why the NRA takes an active role in elections and spends millions to try and elect officials sympathetic to their agenda. If they believed the second amendment applied to individuals they wouldn't have to spend a dime, would cite the infringement clause and say, wait a minute buster, any restrictions on gun ownership is unconstitutional. But even the NRA isn't going to push their luck with that argument and they prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. But based on the ruling of the Roberts court, they could push the argument that all restrictive gun laws are unconstitutional. But they know that argument would go nowhere and would probably result in the Roberts court reversing or modifying itself at the first chance.

There are gun laws on the books right now in every town, village,city and state in the country that would be unconstitutional if the second amendment applied to individuals. And so most arguments about gun laws are only giving lip service to the second amendment. The NRA's contention that Biden's task force is only interested in attacks on the second amendment is just so much hot air since you can't "attack" a constitutional provision. Or pass a law negating it.

That aside, both gun owners and those on the other side keep missing the point on gun laws. Gun owners want no gun laws which is preposterous, and those on the other side often propose laws that have nothing to do with solving the real problem. And if you don't correctly define the problem you can never come up with the real solution.

Anyone looking at the available data involving gun violence can see the obvious. The problem isn't guns, its illegal guns. What is an illegal gun? It's any gun in the hands of a person who isn't the registered owner of that gun or someone who is in possession of a gun obtained fraudulently.The other obvious problem and the solution which is already being discussed is the banning of private ownership of 30 round clips, something that is already a certainty to pass in New York State.

The first thing that needs to be done is to pass laws with severe penalities to substantially reduce illegal guns -- guns getting into the wrong hands and irresponsible gun owners who let it happen,intentionally or unintentionally, and people buying guns to illegally sell them to others.

1. First, it should be a felony for anyone to be in possession of a gun for which they are not the legally registered owner.

2. There should be laws requiring gun owners to report any lost or stolen gun to law enforcement within 24 hours. And any gun owner who has two lost of stolen guns in a 3 year period should have their license or permit to own firearms revoked for at least 5 years and be forced to surrender all their firearms. They are clearly not responsible enough to own firearms.

3. Anyone not reporting a lost or stolen gun for the purposes of evading the penalties for not doing so should face a mandatory 3 years in jail and a lifetime forfeit of being able to own a firearm.

4. Any gun lost or stolen that is unreported and involved in the commission of a crime should charge the registered owner as an accessory before the fact on any crime committed with his or her gun including murder.

5. Because most guns used in the commission of crimes in New York for example, are purchased in Virginia which has lax gun laws and then resold in alleys in New York, there should be laws that anyone purchasing a firearm living outside the state where the gun is purchased must have that gun shipped to the address on their drivers license at their own expense and may not take those firearms with them at the time of purchase. And limit the number of guns that can be bought out of state within a 30 day period to one.

This will cut down the use of phony ID's to purchase guns and also cut down on people buying firearms by the carload in one state and taking them to another state for re-sale to criminals.If someone tries to use a phony drivers license, it's easy to cross check the address and penalties for using phony ID's to purchase a firearm should be 10 years in prison.

6. Ban private ownership of 30 round clips. Allow those clips to be available at firing ranges where gun owners who want to use them for target practice can obtain them for use at the firing range and then turn them in when they leave. There is no reason for a gun owner who has firearms for hunting or self-defense to have 30 round clips. They have no value to a real hunter, and as for self-defense, if you cant stop an intruder with an 8 round clip you are a loser.

Make the private possession of 30 round clips a felony punishable by a mandatory 5 years in jail and make the illegal sale of these clips to an individual other than the legal owners of a firing range, also punishable by a hefty prison sentence.

These are laws that would, by acting as a deterrent, cut down on the proliferation of illegal guns and guns falling into the hands of the wrong people, as well as imprisoning those trying to evade existing laws. It would also force gun owners who were not responsible to make sure their guns are secured since the penalties if they should be used by anyone else would be severe, including prison time. There were 3 cases in the last year where a child got his hands on a parents gun, took it to school and shot and killed a schoolmate by accident. Under the proposed law, that gun owner would be tried for second degree murder which is defined as "showing a depraved indifference to human life". Anyone leaving a loaded gun around where a child can get it, fits that description.

Laws that have sentences equal to or will surpass laws related to drug trafficing when it comes to buying or selling illegal guns or trying to obtain one illegally would also make the kind of trafficking not worth the risk. No one is going to get rich selling illegal guns. Laws that could include life in prison would make the reward negligable compared to the risk.

Banning 30 round clips would go a long way in saving lives by cutting down the ability to commit mass murder, and while yes, someone intent on committing such acts could do so with a hand gun, no one can say that banning the 30 round clips would not save lives. Jared Loughner, the shooter of Gabriel Giffords and who killed six people,including a child was stopped when he was jumped trying to reload after exhausting an 8 round clip.

Laws have to be aimed at solving real problems, not exacting a pound of flesh. The problem by all statistical measure is not guns themselves in spite of the fact that the second amendment does not give anyone a constitutional right to own a gun, but illegal guns and laws need to be passed to define what is an illegal gun and to reduce the possibility of guns falling into the wrong hands, unintentionally or intentionally. And those laws need to be harsh.

The gun used in the Newtown killings was legally owned and registered to the shooters mother. Had there been a law that had a harsh mandatory prison sentence if that gun fell into the hands of someone other than the registered owner for any reason, if that owner knew they could be held criminally responsible for any crime committed with their gun, if that owner knew they faced mandatory prison time if someone else was caught in possession of that gun, its possible as a gun enthusiast that she would have kept that gun under lock and key and it wouldnt have been accessible to anyone but her.

Just maybe.