Laura Curtis

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is a catastrophe. It’s literally going to make large swaths of the coastline and wetlands a disaster area. It’s also part of the reasonable cost of drilling for oil, and Obama’s order to shut down all new American drilling is shortsighted and foolish. (The Russians, Chinese, and other countries will continue new drilling in the Gulf, regardless.) So impulsively shutting down new drilling certainly doesn’t do anything to protect our coasts. It just means that every day we wait, America will have less of a share of the oil off our own coast.

A little perspective is in order: the reason this is such a shocking disaster is precisely because this sort of thing is so rare. I’m not insensitive to how it’s going to affect the Gulf Coast. I live here. I’ve got shrimpers and fishermen in my family. And I promise you, in spite of this awful accident, we don’t want drilling shut down. Most people want it expanded. We need the jobs, the country needs the oil, and the federal government, with its massive spending binge, would surely like to have the revenue. A little known fact: other states split drilling revenue 50-50 with the federal government. Louisiana, on the other hand, has never received that. We’re fighting just to get to 37.5%. And even that doesn’t start until 2017.

Conservatives chant “Drill, baby, drill!” because we know that right now, oil is the most cost-effective form of energy available. We think it’s great that research is being done into green energy. We’d love it if hydrogen fuel cells, the wind and the sun could power how we live. But they can’t right now. So we need to continue drilling for oil, because these sort of accidents are part of the cost of doing business just as Chernobyl was part of the cost of nuclear energy. [Read more...]

It’s “Damn the facts and full speed ahead” for the Associated Press. In spite of the fact that not a single instance of racial slurs – or spitting – on black Congressmen has turned up on any of the numerous videos taken of the spring stroll PR stunt in question, they have their narrative and they are sticking to it.  I am really nostalgic for the time when they published actual facts and wrestled the story into the shape they wanted by omitting key facts and using ad hominems and straw men.  These days, they just make crap up.  What a disgrace.

Added: Breitbart provides a smackdown, via Jeff G:

“This is an attack on the American people, this is who the left is in this country, this is why they want to fundamentally change it because they think we’re inherently terrible and we need to be socially engineered.”

That is how they behave. I guess some “original sin” concepts are more equal than others.

This has to be read to be believed. But the truth is, Helen Thomas’ distress that “Everybody with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist, and everybody with a cellphone thinks they’re a photographer” is unfounded.  Not least because, unlike Helen Thomas and the rest of the Democratic talking point spewing media, I make no laughable claims of impartiality, and when I make a mistake, I admit it promptly and in the same post where the original error was located.  Journalism?  I wouldn’t stoop to that.*

As for Helen’s concerns that “They can ruin lives, reputations, and once you send something into the air, it’s going to land, and there’s nothing that can curb them from saying anything they want,” tell it to the Tea Partiers falsely accused of racism.  Tell it to John McCain after the NYT published ridiculous, false rumors of his infidelity during the campaign.  Tell it to “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.  Tell it to Sarah Palin as you uncritically publish whatever her daughter’s ex-boyfriend vomits up.  Tell it to the scientists who are ostracized because they think “consensus” is not science.  Tell it to all of us who know what Pallywood is. Tell it to Toyota, which actually makes really safe cars.   Tell it to insurance and pharmaceutical and oil companies, all of whose “obscene” profit margins are a fraction of Google’s apparently acceptable 27%.  Tell it to the parents of children who died because of other people’s unvaccinated children – while Jenny McCarthy has enjoyed hours of uncritical airtime to dispense her medical advice.

I could go on listing examples for hours.  For decades, journalists have presented themselves as unbiased, fair, impartial arbiters of the facts.  And until fairly recently – since technology has wrestled away their exclusive possession of news delivery – people believed it.  To whom much is given, much is expected, and that people are angry at the betrayal of the trust they invested in the media is entirely expected.  The problem is not that journalists are liberal.  It’s that they are liars and their whole profession is a sham.

Check out Henry Neufeld’s response – some very good points.

*Okay, there are a handful of journalists who are honest brokers of information; people I really admire.  But in general, the profession is dying because it deserves to die.

Again, light posting, because I’m working my fingers to the bone over here.  However, I’m taking a cookie and juice break – shades of grammar school, except the cookie is caramel chocolate chip from the store deli, and the juice is diet cranberry pomegranate – and checking the intarwebz to see what I’ve been missing.

A few favorite stops – The Anchoress joins Ed Morrissey in wondering if and when the press will smarten up, but the answer is sadly predictable:

The self-recrimination of the press on its failures to ask questions or do investigative work only applies in one direction. And if we ever see another GOP president, the press will go full-jackal on him or her, using both Iraq AND the Obama presidency as justification for their their fervent displays of doubt and skepticism.

However, even then, they will never accuse themselves regarding Global Warming; they will never say “we failed to ask questions,” because on that issue, it is personal for them, much in the same way that passing something called Health Care Reform has become “personal” for Obama and for Speaker Pelosi.

The press is always happy to run with “J’accuse!” when the accused are not their fellow progressives.  But on the topic of their own reporting, “I confess” is limited to weak tea admissions on minor issues by ombudsmen who keep their fingers in the dam of reader outrage.  Contrast that with bloggers, who when they make mistakes, tend to promptly correct them – and who make no effort to hid our bias.  The media deserves to die, and if bloggers and the public in general is indulging in a little schadenfreude, well, who can blame us?

However – I’m going to enjoy the rest of my break – here’s something funny I found on Facebook, and I heartily recommend it:

Call the Nestle Hotline @ 1-800-295-0051. When asked if you want English or Spanish, wait quietly for about 10 secs & you will smile. Keep going & press 4, then press 7. If you comment on this, don’t give the secret away!! If the line is busy try again, it is worth it!

I was happy to see that a woman who falsely cried rape – sending her attacker victim to prison for nearly four years – has just been sentenced to 1 – 3 years for perjury.  She’ll be eligible for parole in a year.  Rape is a terrible crime.  It stays with the victim long after the actual attack is over.  Lying about it demeans actual rape victims, and further adds to their burden when they try to seek justice – to say nothing of the poor man whose life is destroyed by the accusation.

What’s been done to him is akin to rape.  He’s victimized, helpless, abused by his attacker – who, together with the state prosecuting him – hold his very life in their hands.  Even if it doesn’t go so far as to send him to prison, his reputation is forever harmed as potential employers and others Google his name and learn of the arrest.  And if he goes to prison, he may well be the victim of an actual rape.  False rape accusations are as much a life-destroying crime as committing an actual rape.  It’s unjust that she was only sentenced for a maximum of three years – even less time than the man she accused actually served.

Why did she do this terrible thing?  She got drunk, made her friends angry, and invented the rape to make them feel sorry for her.  I made some people angry when I suggested that women should be held more accountable for what they do when they’re drunk.   Sending this woman to prison is a good start.

I am so completely blown away by last night’s game, I’m having a hard time getting it together this morning to work or even to post. And nope, no hangover – just a good time and a late night. We had a few friends – diehard Saints fans – over to watch the game and had a great time, even sans alcohol. When the Saints won, my neighborhood went crazy – people just poured out of their houses, they were screaming “WHO DAT?!”, setting off fireworks and car alarms… just unbelievable.

Added:

Considering the frequent attacks in Israel – more or less daily from their Palestinian “neighbors” – as you’d expect, medical services in Israel have evolved. They’re much more accustomed to having to deal with victims trapped in rubble from bomb or rocket attacks, and rescuing, triaging, and treating victims in the worst possible conditions; more so, probably, than any other medical personnel in the world. So after the earthquake in Haiti, they immediately sent supplies and teams to do what they do best.

They have so impressed even Bill Clinton that he was moved to say (at Davos), “Shimon, I don’t know what we would have done without the Israeli hospital at Haiti. The Israeli hospital was the only operational facility which was able to perform surgery and advanced tests.”

Carl in Jerusalem has more on how the IDF learned to administer medical care in such challenging circumstances.

And in response to this? A weird convergence of Truther loons and Muslim antisemitic conspiracy loons accuse them of doing all this good to gain access to steal organs. (Yes, seriously. No link to those jackasses; if you really want to have a dip into that sewage you can google it.)  No good deed goes unpunished.

Ellie Light, Astroturfer Extraordinaire, managed to get her letter published in over forty credulous newspapers. Turns out, she’s Barbara Brooks, a nurse from California, and finally came clean to the Cleveland Plain Dealer about her motives for her repeated lies:

A proud Democrat, she said that “I want to deliberately talk to the enemy” and “people deep, deep in the red states.”

Except, even this much appears to be a lie, because apparently “Ellie Light” wasn’t Barbara Brooks, but her husband, Winston Steward.  Barbara Brooks told Gawker,

“I’m not Ellie Light,” she told us. “My husband is. I never told anybody that I was Ellie Light. Winston wrote every single letter. He’s been doing it since he saw that the Gulf War was being fought under false pretenses. I told him from the beginning that he shouldn’t write letters under phony names, but he wanted to get them out there.”

So why did she tell the Plain Dealer, in the clearest possible terms, that she was, in fact, responsible for the Ellie Light correspondence? “That wasn’t me,” she says. “I don’t know how they got that. Maybe my husband was impersonating me.”

Is there some reason it was impossible for Ellie Light Barbara Brooks Winston Steward to just write his own opinion under his own name?  Why pretend to be a woman?  Why lie like this?  Was “proud Democrat” Winston so ashamed of his views that he couldn’t bring himself to say them openly?

Added: The Cleveland Plain Dealer provides this update, wherein Winston lies about, well, pretty much everything else.  Of course, it’s all because he’s terrified of the “right wing crazies” which I find extremely amusing from a Californian, where “right wing crazies” who have the temerity to oppose same sex marriage have their names, addresses, and job information posted on the internet so they can be hounded and stalked from public life.  As always, more projection from the left.

No carseat?  No problem.

Strung up on a crucifix?  Sure!  Just like Madonna!

Bees, wasps, hornets, dead or dying animals, mixing pots of acid, operating antiquated heavy machinery, and as for the lit phosphorous, Bring It On!!

There’s no parents like stage parents… no parents I know, anyway. Video below the fold. [Read more...]

WaPo whines about incivility.

In no particular order: eight years of Chimperor, Bushitler and worse; the disgraceful racial attacks on Colin Powell and Condi Rice; countless f-bombs; millions of dollars of property damage at recruiter’s offices and the Vietnam monument and in Olympia, WA hindering troop support; literally tons of trash left on the ground after Obama’s inauguration (while the tea partiers left it spotless); Obama flipping the bird at Hillary like a seventh grader whose teacher assigned extra homework; about a third of the Democratic party is willing (via insane 9/11 conspiracy theories) to call the Bush administration mass murderers of Americans, not to mention what they say about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan…

I could go on, but why?  Do these people actually believe the crap they print or are they willfully propagandizing the public?

The really funny thing is conservatives haven’t even taken off the gloves.  Yet.