30 April 2006 @ 6:29PM >> A number of readers wrote in response to Paul Jimerson’s ugly stereotyping in his e-mail criticizing my post Tolerance and Hospitality, San Francisco-Style.

Mr. Jimerson predicted bloodshed if gay groups visited “small-town America”:

If such a thing should ever take place in small town America what kind of reaction do you think they might receive from the town if/when they came back the next year to do the same thing? How about the third year? There would be blood shed and it wouldn’t take long either. You know it and I know it and it’s typical of Christian tolerance or others and good will towards man.

Most of the e-mail pointed out that Paul’s assumptions were not only bigoted, they were flat-out wrong. Here’s a sample.

Forrest writes:

I guess the tolerant Paul Jimerson didn’t hear about Shout, the new Gay and Lesbian film festival here in Birmingham - starting tonight actually. I’m getting so tired of hearing Birmingham being used as an example of Nazi America. Birmingham has a large, thriving gay community. This town has come a long way in the past 40 years.

I’m a straight, white, Southern male - and *gasp* I hang out with my gay neighbor all the time. No beatings, no name calling, not so much as a harsh word.

Jeremy Brown adds:

Your recent post “Inside the Mind of a Tolerant One” was particularly interesting because I just read an article in World Magazine about the homosexual group, Soulforce, visiting and holding demonstrations at Evangelical Christian college campuses. This actually fits well with the hypothetical scenario Mr. Jimerson presented, although the welcome they received is significantly different from the one he suggested would occur.

It must be quite satisfying to imagine yourself superior to the rest of the country, so this information could be profoundly disturbing to Mr. Jimerson. Out of respect to him, I will not pass it along.

If ignorance is bliss, I’d hate to ruin his good time.

28 April 2006 @ 12:58PM >> Last month, I noted the greeting that a Christian group received when they arrived for a week-long retreat in San Francisco. (A sample, courtesy of Assemblyman Mark Leno: “[T]hey’re loud, they’re obnoxious, they’re disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco.”).

A gentleman named Paul Jimerson took issue with my highlighting the rude welcome put out by the supposed world capitol of tolerance. Here’s his e-mail, with my responses interspersed:

Hello Mr.Maloney,

As a liberal, progressive and especially as a resident of San Francisco I was most interested in reading your interpretation of the events you detail in your “Tolerance and Hospitality, San Francisco-Style” editorial.  After reading your article I thought about it for a few minutes and would like to share with you my thoughts on the matter.

First, Evangelical Christians who choose to come to San Francisco do so because they’re looking for a fight ....or for a confrontation at least.  By bringing their message to San Francisco they were attempting to soil our progressive nest with what we see as hate speech.

So, what you’re saying is, your “progressive nest” has no room for people who disagree with you. And that people who disagree with you are engaging in “hate speech.”

They had no intention of proselytizing or converting people.  Their actions were provocative and antagonistic....the only metaphor that seems appropriate is “flipping the bird”.  I hardly think that any of those in attendance  were surprised by the reception they met.  A lot of the people here came from small towns and I’m sure a lot of them came here to escape the animosity and hatred of the Evangelical Christians in their home town.  They were victimized, humiliated, beaten, and despised by Evangelical or other Christians until they came here.

All Christians are brutal thugs who beat people up. I’m glad to see that “progressives” have moved beyond the simple-minded stereotyping that exists everywhere else in America.

The counter-protesters were superior in number and they could have done anything they wanted with the Evangelical group who would have been helpless against them.  If you consider how Evangelicals have treated homosexuals throughout history in the countless situations where the homosexuals were the helpless ones, I’d say that your Evangelical Christians were treated VERY WELL.  I bet they didn’t even get spit on.

Wow! San Francisco is tolerant! You don’t beat people up who disagree with you! And you might not even spit on them, but you’re not sure about that.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario .... a small group of gay and lesbian activists come to a small very religious town and start making speeches and  broadcasting sentiment that condemns evangelical Christians for nothing more than being evangelical and christian....while this goes on they pass out leaflets that state un-categorically that God hates evangelical Christians because they engage in un-natural cannibalistic practices every Sunday.....Cannibalism hasn’t been socially acceptable for thousands of years and only the most savage and primitive of peoples today practice it (or so the fliers would say) and those who still eat human flesh ought to be wiped off the face of the earth for the good of all mankind.  After making their speeches and passing out their leaflets the group then proceed to hold a noisy protest/rally on the steps of the nearest big church in town. While they are there they form an effective block of the entrance and nobody can get in or out of the Church until they leave.

That’s a rather extreme hypothetical scenario I’m sure you would agree but these are extreme times and the scenario’s events were intended to be as offensive to you as the Evangelicals visit to San Francisco was to us.  If such a thing should ever take place in small town America what kind of reaction do you think they might receive from the town if/when they came back the next year to do the same thing?  How about the third year?  There would be blood shed and it wouldn’t take long either.  You know it and I know it and it’s typical of Christian tolerance or others and good will towards man.

I’m having a little trouble understanding your bizarre fantasy. On the one hand, you condemn a fictional town for being intolerant of gays in your hypothetical scenario, but at the same time, you applaud San Francisco for being intolerant of Christians in reality.

Either you want a country where a group of citizens can meet openly wherever they want without being harassed, or you don’t. Which is it?

And, I must congratulate you once again for showing such a great understanding of what it means to be a “progressive.” Being a progressive used to mean that you’ve progressed beyond hateful stereotypes. But you’ve just replaced one set of stereotypes with another. Can’t you see that you’re exactly the same as someone who hates a gay person simply for being gay?

I mean your position is rather funny actually.  Christians come to San Francisco and do little more than flip the bird at the entire gay community .. they do it every year on a schedule and then complain when people here get upset about it and give voice to their anger.   If the Perpetual Sisters of Indulgence got dressed up in their full regalia and marched through downtown Biloxi, Mississippi or Birmingham Alabama, all the while shaking their butts in the faces of the city’s residents and carrying on like the outlandish queens they are, taunting and ridiculing the people for being heterosexual, I seriously doubt that all of them would leave those cities alive.... such a thing couldn’t even take place without the National Guard coming in and lining the streets.  That is how tolerant you folks on the right are and you know it.

Yes, everyone on the right is exactly the same. They’re a bunch of intolerant neanderthal murderers. Thanks for pointing this out repeatedly. I was beginning to get the mistaken impression that people should be judged as individuals. But that’s pretty time-consuming. Your technique of condemning large masses of society is much more efficient.

If we on the left were as kind as you some Evangelical Christians would have perished when they first started coming here.  I think it might even be a good idea for the Evangelical Christians who came here to write a thank you note to San Francisco for treating them so well.  They should be especially thankful they didn’t receive a more christian welcome.  I’m a firm believer in treating people in the same manner they have shown to me.  It’s lucky for you that the gay and lesbian community here don’t hold to that philosophy, or the Christians would have all left here for the nearest hospital.  Please don’t misunderstand me ......I don’t engage in or condone violence Mr. Maloney.  I don’t savagely beat people who are different from the norm in my society.  But I have been beaten because I was the different one.  When you folks come here you’re the different ones, and yet we do not beat you for it.

Well, I’m very sorry to hear that you were beaten simply for being who you are. There’s no excuse for that, and I hope whoever did it got what was coming to them, several times over.

I am also very sorry that the lesson you’ve drawn from this is to assume that anyone who calls themselves a Christian is a hate-monger who will beat you up. If you dislike the stereotyping that led to your beating, then why do you continue to engage in it yourself?

It’s funny...... we on the left literally turn the other cheek when struck, we did not treat you as we have been treated by you.  Christian principles come naturally to those on the left it seems even though the last thing I would ever call myself is a Christian.  You should read what Gandhi said about Christians and Christianity sometime.   I couldn’t agree with him more. 

Sincerely,

Paul Jimerson

Thanks for the e-mail, Paul. I hope your future is happier than your past has been.

28 April 2006 @ 10:07AM >> Apparently, Angelina Jolie is an Ayn Rand fan. Who knew?

27 April 2006 @ 12:40AM >> Teachers trying to influence the political views of students is not a phenomenon limited to higher education. You’d be surprised what sorts of political displays teachers can get away with in public high schools. Check out this display at Marilla Carillo High School in Santa Rosa, California. While the writing is clearly satire, the photographs, sadly, are real. Your tax dollars at work!

26 April 2006 @ 9:58AM >> When it came to the economy, there used to be two distinct political parties in America. Democrats generally favored larger government, more controls over the economy, and higher taxes. Republicans preferred smaller government, a more free economy, and lower taxes. But in the dozen years since the Republicans gained control over Congress, they have inexplicably begun to morph into the party that they displaced.

Government spending under the Republican Congress is out of control, and the high price of gas is causing Republicans to dust off socialist terminology like “price gouging” and “obscene profits.” The one remaining difference between the parties seems to be on tax policy—Republicans still tend to favor lower taxes—but given the Republicans’ abandonment of their other principles, I wonder how long that will be the case.

James K. Glassman chides President Bush for jumping on the “bash big oil” bandwagon:

He started his speech by, once again, criticizing Americans for their “addiction to oil.” He used the same obnoxious phrase in his State of the Union Address.

[...]

The President — and I am not even mentioning the claptrap one hears from Speaker Denny Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter — is now using the lexicon of extreme environmentalists and statists. Again, he knows better.

After talking about addiction, the President said he was going to crack down on price gouging — that old bugaboo. He said he had asked the Justice and Energy departments to find out whether the rising price of gas was partly the result of manipulation. This is absurd. The gasoline market is broad, fragmented and highly competitive. Price gouging has been studied many times, to no effect. Gas prices are rising because crude oil prices are rising.

[...]

President Bush lived and worked in the oil patch. He knows very well that oil is a commodity whose price moves up and down with global changes in supply and demand — movements that we can’t affect all that much. What we can do is remove political obstacles to a well-functioning market. Such steps would increase supply and lower prices. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The rising oil price is affected by geopolitical threats, but it is mainly the result of increased demand, which itself is the result of rising standards of living — which are a lot better than the alternative.

Glassman also explains many of the reasons that the price of gas is so high today: increased demand from developing countries like India and China, belligerent talk from Iran and general uncertainty on the world stage, and a political climate in America that makes it impossible to increase production capacity.

Did you know, for example, that a new oil refinery hasn’t been built in the United States in the past 30 years? Or that environmentalists have blocked new oil drilling virtually everywhere in the country? And since oil isn’t an option, what about nuclear power? Nope, environmentalists have blocked that, too. Even wind farms are out of vogue; the great environmentalist Kennedy clan is trying to kill a wind farm project in the Nantucket Sound that might have marred the view from their Hyannisport compound. In other words, many of the people using the high price of gas to push for government intervention in the economy are the very people who created the energy supply shortfall in the first place.

But that doesn’t let the Republicans off the hook. In fact, it makes it more important to take them to task for their irresponsible economic rhetoric. I expect Democrats to employ socialist arguments; it’s what they do. But when Republicans join them, it makes me wonder what the point of voting Republican is. I doubt I’m alone in feeling this way, and if so, the Republicans have a reason to worry about the election in November. They are supposed to be the party that understands basic economic laws like supply and demand. Maybe a good old-fashioned electoral ass-whoopin’ is what the Republicans need to remind them of that.

25 April 2006 @ 1:49PM >> And I thought all the great domain names were taken: Michelle Malkin has a new video site, called Hot Air. Welcome to the vlogosphere, Michelle. The online video revolution continues!

24 April 2006 @ 9:26AM >> Sometimes, I look at the language of academia, and I have to wonder if I got off on the wrong planet.

22 April 2006 @ 2:57PM >> Jonah Goldberg of National Review proposes an interesting idea: “Why not let the Iraqis have a referendum on whether US forces should stay?”

Goldberg then lists a number of reasons why such a move would be beneficial:

The formation of the government is the last major political benchmark for the Iraqis, and it’s not going well. Sectarian feelings have hardened and there are few events left that can foster a sense of national unity. But a national referendum on whether Americans should stay would be exactly that.

If Iraqis vote yes on continuing America’s presence — which I think they would — the Iraqi people will feel more “bought-in” to America’s project.

It will once again signal that America is on the side of democracy while many of its opponents are not.

It will (further) pull anti-American elements into the electoral process.

It will take the burden off the new government of seeming like a lap dog to the gringos. The president and prime minister can say “I’m bowing to the will of the people” or “this issue has been settled by the people already” whenever presented with that charge.

It would deflate the impact of the “occupiers” epithet against Americans.

It would send an important signal to opponents of the war in Europe and America about the nature of the project. Could Ted Kennedy really say this is a war for Bush’s ego or for oil with so much spittle if the Iraqi people poured into the polls to ask for America to stay?

It would help American troop morale.

It would take the heat off allies — current or future — when it comes to helping in the war effort.

It would marry Iraqi nationalism to democratic norms and force Iraqis to think very seriously about what their country would like if America left.

Even the American media would have to celebrate such an event.

It would further bind the next president — Democratic or Republican — to finishing the job in Iraq.

I think it’s a great idea, regardless of the outcome.

If Iraq asks the U.S. to leave, then Iraq takes immediate responsibility for its own security situation. While that could lead to short-term instability, the instability itself could push the Iraqis to a breaking point where they have to choose between complete chaos and resolving differences through the political processes that the U.S. helped erect. The choice between peace and civil war can only be made by the Iraqis themselves. But currently, the continued U.S. presence gives the Iraqi factions an excuse to avoid making that decision while the responsibility for security still rests largely on the U.S.

And if the Iraqis vote to keep the U.S. forces longer, the vote confers legitimacy on our presence there in a way that no external actor (like the U.N. or the E.U.) could do. It gives cover to us and to our allies, and it takes the argument off the table that “they don’t want us there in the first place.” American support for the war effort would increase as well, because the politicians and media elite demagoguing the issue would be putting forth a position—namely, that we shouldn’t be there—that the Iraqis voters themselves visibly rejected.

In either case, such a vote could be helpful, although in different ways.

21 April 2006 @ 9:43AM >> Thomas Sowell points out how amnesty for illegal aliens will make them “more than equal” when compared to many life-long Americans:

Amnesty would mean, for many illegal immigrants, that they would not merely have the same rights as American citizens, but special privileges as well.

Affirmative action laws and policies already apply to some immigrants. Members of a multimillionaire Cuban family have already received government contracts set aside for minority businesses. During one period, an absolute majority of the money paid to construction companies in Washington, D.C., went to Portuguese businessmen under the same preferences.

Immigrant members of Latino, Asian, or other minority groups are legally entitled to the same preferential benefits accorded native-born members of minority groups.

The moment they set foot on American soil, they are entitled to receive benefits created originally with the rationale that these benefits were to compensate for the injustices minorities had suffered in this country.

The illegal status of many “undocumented workers” can at least make them reluctant to claim these privileges. But, take away the illegality and they become not only equal to American citizens, but more than equal.

20 April 2006 @ 10:40AM >> Blogger Meryl Yourish takes an extensive look at the innards of the bombs used by Palestinian suicide bombers. She quotes one article that discusses x-rays of suicide bombing victims:

[Dr. Michael] Messing said one of the victims he saw while in Jerusalem had around 300 individual metallic fragments within his body. The metal fragments, measuring from millimeters to centimeters, were imbedded in the young man literally from head to toe, he said.

“Several of the fragments penetrated into his vital organs. He sustained a punctured colon, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated liver and kidney. I could actually feel the nails under his skin where they had burrowed and lodged,” Messing recalls.

Yourish cites the recent Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel, which killed nine and injured many dozens.

Shrapnel is what killed Phillip Balhasan, who stayed alive long enough to realize his children had survived, and to hug them tightly before he collapsed.

But even this is not enough for the terrorists. They also soak the shrapnel in rat poison, because it causes hemorrhaging — victims may bleed to death before they can get to the hospital.

The new Palestinian government, run by the terrorist group Hamas, actually endorsed the recent suicide bombing, thereby making it clear that terrorism is an official state policy of the Palestinians, something I predicted would happen shortly after the election of the Hamas government. (Terrorism has been an unofficial tactic of Palestinian leaders for years, but for purposes of plausible deniability, the old government of Yassir Arafat never stated it publicly. That’s what kept the aid money coming in.)

Yourish concludes:

Remember all of this, when you hear the world tell Israel to “use restraint” in responding to this attack. [...]

Remember all of this, when Israel is the nation that is demonized by the blind, hateful people who wear checked kaffiyehs at anti-war protests, and call Israel an “apartheid state” for building a separation barrier — to keep out the monsters who would use bombs like I have just described.

Remember this, when you look at the pictures of the results of the bombing, and notice the thousands of dents in the metal surrounding the bombing area — the mark of the ball-bearings and other metal shrapnel.

These are the people with whom the world sympathizes: Those who create and set off the bombs. Not the victims. The bombers.

And that’s the worst evil of all.

I would just correct Ms. Yourish that not all the world sympathizes with Palestinian terrorists. The United Nations does, much of the European Union does, the American left does. But not everyone. There’s still some hope left.

18 April 2006 @ 3:47AM >> Independent online journalist Michael J. Totten took a recent trip to Kurdish Iraq with blogger Sean LaFreniere. Totten’s report is a fascinating read, and it is supplemented by many pictures—some of them quite eye-opening—of life in northern Iraq.

Combining the spirit of blogging with the economic model of public broadcasting—minus the taxpayer-funded subsidies—Totten is providing unique reports from around the middle east and financing it through reader contributions. I think his model represents the future of online reporting, and I hope it succeeds.

If you find his work valuable, please consider hitting the PayPal donation button at the end of his report.

18 April 2006 @ 1:15AM >> Maybe I’m strange, but I love getting hate mail. There’s something satisfying about getting under the skin of someone who abhors my views. Don’t get me wrong; I like praise, too, but the bitter mail tends to be more creative. And for some reason, these last few days have brought me quite a bilious bounty. One of the more tame e-mails is from a guy named Rick:

From: Rick <ismore@spiritone.com>
Subject: the complete video set
Date: April 16, 2006 3:51:53 AM EDT
To: Evan Coyne Maloney

just picked up a copy of your video from the local library.
found it to be very amateurish.
you have a long way to go to become the “conservative Micheal Moore”.
where’s the humor?
what’s the point?
conservatives control the white house,
congress,
the senate,
the supreme court,
and virtually all major media outlets,
yet, your all white male crew seems to be whining about being disadvantaged.
anyone with money can make a movie,
and I think it’s safe to say that conservatives control most of that too.
it takes brains (and humor) to make a good movie.
so maybe you should sell the camera,
join the army,
move to Iraq,
and fight the good fight.
you’d look good in camo.

I rarely post e-mails that don’t address a specific argument I’ve made, but in this case, what I find interesting is Rick’s assumption that I use an “all white male crew.” (You forgot to critique the sexual orientation of the crew, Rick!)

The people who’ve helped me on my various videos are neither all white nor all male, but Rick wouldn’t know that because the crew has never been shown on camera.

Rick just assumes that, because I am white and male, everyone who works with me must be as well. There must be something about Rick’s world that would cause him to assume that white males don’t associate with anyone else. Perhaps Rick is a white male, and if so, I’d argue that his thinking is a form of psychological projection, where he takes his own internal mindset and assumes that everyone else in the world has the same prejudices. But I don’t know Rick, so who am I to assume that he is white or even male?

What’s also interesting is that Rick seems to think that the racial and gender makeup of the people who work with me on shoots has some relation to our political outlook. To Rick, only white males are allowed to be conservatives. People from other groups may only hold Rick-approved views. He must be ignorant of a number of powerful thinkers who are neither white nor male nor straight.

Rick must hate that, all those uppity non-white-males daring to think differently from how he believes they should. The funny thing is, this guy probably thinks I’m a racist.

17 April 2006 @ 9:50AM >> If this device had been invented earlier, Al Gore or John Kerry could be living in the White House today.

15 April 2006 @ 1:52PM >> I don’t know any other way to interpret these statements, other than to say that Iran will attack Israel with nuclear weapons at the earliest possibility (emphasis added):

The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was “heading toward annihilation,” just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

[...]

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

Ahmadinejad provoked a world outcry in October when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

[...]

On Tuesday, Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium using a battery of 164 centrifuges, a significant step toward the large-scale production of enriched uranium required for either fueling nuclear reactors or making nuclear weapons.

For the last few years, peace-at-all-costs advocates have argued that there is no justification for pre-emptive war. They claim that talk and diplomacy can solve all world crises, and that we should put our trust in the United Nations to do just that.

If ever there were a time for the U.N. worshippers to prove that their cherished institution is of any use at all, this is it. Put up or shut up. Solve this problem. The world needs it.

14 April 2006 @ 11:34AM >> A librarian at Ohio State University is being charged with harassment for recommending four conservative books for inclusion in a freshman reading program.

14 April 2006 @ 2:50AM >> Legal racial discrimination didn’t end with the abolition of slavery, or with Jim Crow, or the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So-called “Affirmative Action” programs upheld by the Supreme Court have made it legal for institutions to discriminate based on race since the 1970s. But for many people, the American melting pot has melted away well-defined racial boundaries, making the simple pigeonholing of Affirmative Action difficult to administer.

And now, with DNA testing, many people can rightfully lay claim to all sorts of ethnic and racial backgrounds. Because Affirmative Action sets aside different rewards for different races, people now have an incentive to “discover” racial backgrounds that might be beneficial to them. The New York Times reports:

Alan Moldawer’s adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual’s genetic ancestry.

The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

“Naturally when you’re applying to college you’re looking at how your genetic status might help you,” said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins’ birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. “I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will.”

[...]

Given the tests’ speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities — and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.

[...]

“This is not just somebody’s desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish,” said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. “It’s about access to money and power.”

Affirmative Action has always been a bit hypocritical in a society that claims to strive for color-blindness. Technology is now helping us see just how absurd it is.

13 April 2006 @ 1:04PM >> Comedy Central censored the most recent episode of South Park to remove an image of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, reports Stephen Spruiell of National Review:

I’m not sure if it’s been reported yet, but for what it’s worth, I just got off the phone with a Comedy Central spokesman. I asked him about last night’s episode of South Park in which, at a moment right before the prophet Mohammed was supposed to make a cameo, the words, “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network” appeared on the screen.

According to Spruiell, the Comedy Central spokesman replied that the censorship was not a South Park gag, but was a network decision.

13 April 2006 @ 5:42AM >> A bizarre display of political correctness run amok in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

13 April 2006 @ 12:43AM >> National Journal published an extensive and revealing look at how Jihadist propaganda ends up being (unwittingly?) carried by the western media:

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media’s best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional.

On January 14, for example, shortly after unmanned U.S. aircraft fired missiles at several suspected leaders of Al Qaeda who were thought to be staying in the village of Damadola, Pakistan, Agence France-Presse distributed a picture said to be from the scene. AFP is based in Paris, and the picture was sent by one of its locally hired photographers, a stringer. The photo showed a piece of military equipment placed on a damaged stone wall, flanked by a solemn old man and a young boy. Another firm, Getty Images, also distributed the photo to picture editors at newspapers and magazines around the world. The New York Times published it in the paper’s January 14 Web edition, and Time magazine ran the picture in its January 23 print edition, along with the caption “Detritus from the latest U.S. raid in Pakistan.”

But the caption was wrong, the pose was staged, and the picture was, in essence, untrue. The initial AFP caption said that the military object was a piece of a missile from the U.S. strike. Later, AFP issued a correction, labeling the object an unexploded artillery shell.

But it was not a U.S. shell. It was most likely a fired but unexploded artillery shell, identical to those manufactured by Pakistan Ordnance Factories and it was brought there from somewhere else and posed atop the wall. These steel shells are used by the Pakistani military; one would not be a part of a U.S. missile. In fact, the AFP’s stringer, Thir Kahn, had taken a September photo of a very similar shell seized from Islamic militants by the Pakistani military.

[...]

In Iraq, “we keep two to three [in-house] photographers there year-round,” said Elizabeth Flynn, foreign-picture editor for The New York Times’ print edition, which did not publish the AFP picture of the misidentified artillery shell. “I try to rely on and use what they shoot, because we trust them, we know them.” The AFP stringer’s photo “is the kind of picture you desperately want to have because [the missile strike] was a big story,” she said, but when people “gather around like a family photo, that should raise a hundred red flags.”

And yet, for some reason, it didn’t raise those red flags for many outlets. Was the picture that the Times “desperately want[ed] to have” yet another one of those stories that was “too good to fact-check” for much of the media? It sure seems that way.

The common theme among the false pictures cited in the National Journal article is that they all reflect poorly on the United States and the war effort. The media is quite skeptical of the claims made by the U.S. military, and rightly so. One of jobs of the media—aside from reporting what happened—is to ensure that they’re giving the public factual information, and that requires proof, which in turn requires a healthy dose of skepticism. It would be nice if the media applied the same level of skepticism to information received from al Qaeda sympathizers and Iraqi insurgents.

But it seems the media applies different standards of proof depending on the source of the information. This weakness of our media is being exploited by our enemies, who use the media’s Vietnam-era disdain for the American military as part of their war strategy. The article quotes an intercepted communication from Osama bin Laden to Taliban leader Mullah Omar:

“It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods; in fact, its share may reach 90 percent of the total preparation for battles.”

If the media can be used as a tool to wear down the resolve of the American public, then voters will demand that politicians pull back in the fight against al Qaeda and the Jihadists. This is something they understand. It’s time we did, too.

11 April 2006 @ 2:24AM >> If agreeing to a date with someone meant that you had to marry and spend the rest of your life with that person, how many dates would you go on?

France puts employers in much the same position. Once someone is hired, French employment laws make it virtually impossible for that person to be fired. Naturally, this makes companies quite leery about taking on new employees. It’s a huge risk to hire someone who might prove to be lazy or incompetent down the road. But in France, lifetime employment laws mean that employers are stuck.

This sort of economic thinking is one of the reasons that the French unemployment rate for people under 30 rivals the American unemployment rate during the Great Depression. It is also one of the reasons that the French government quite sensibly tried to reform the law.

The proposed change—intended to make hiring younger workers more palatable—was quite modest: new hires under the age of 26 could be fired within the first two years of employment. This way, companies could make sure there’d be a good fit before being locked in to a lifetime commitment. Companies would be more likely to hire people if there was less of a risk of hiring someone who might not work out.

But in France, the prospect of having to earn your job through sustained good performance was just too much for people to bear. So the country erupted in mass strikes and riots, as it tends to do for various reasons every few months. The leadership of France saw all this turmoil and surrendered yet again, as it tends to do every few years:

French President Jacques Chirac has announced that the new youth employment law that sparked weeks of sometimes violent protests will be scrapped.

He said it would be replaced by other measures to tackle youth unemployment.

Millions of students and union members have taken to the streets over the last month in protest against the law, which made it easier to fire young workers.

[...]

The new package of measures includes offering state support for employers hiring young people who face the most difficulties in gaining access to the labour market.

Apparently, the French have figured out that the way to cure the problems of socialism is with more socialism. That hasn’t worked anywhere else on the planet, but I wish the French the best with their noble experiment.

11 April 2006 @ 1:27AM >> Public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland are granting credit for participating in political protests against immigration reform:

The Montgomery County schools’ decision to grant students community service credit for attending Monday’s immigration rights protest is raising concern among some parents as well as activists who say officials should focus on education, not political advocacy.

[...]

Student participation in the event is being organized by CASA of Maryland Inc., a Silver Spring-based group that works with the Latino community. It is CASA’s role — as organizer — that has some questioning whether the school system is allowing an outside group to push its political agenda on students. “I do understand that CASA offers some worthy services to immigrants and that’s noble, but it’s a stretch to allow students to protest for a particular side of an issue,” said parent Melissa Andersen. “I’m taken aback by it. I think it’s poor judgment.”

[...]

Maryland students are required to put in 60 hours of community service to graduate from high school. They can undertake a number of activities — including working for political campaigns — as long as the work is done for a secular, nonprofit community organization that is tax-exempt and that school officials have approved.

It would be interesting to see what other organizations have been approved by school officials. I think it is unwise to offer school credit in the name of community service for political advocacy. But if the school board insists on granting credit for one type of political activity, then they should be even-handed and give credit without regard to the political orientation of that activity. Otherwise, it is quite obvious that the school system is attempting to encourage students to adopt a particular set of political views.

School board member Stephen N. Abrams [...] said students have the right to express their opinions, and if they choose to do so at a political rally — as long as they abide by the credit rules — they should not be barred from participating.

“The last time I checked, the First Amendment is not a right to question what the speech is,” he said. “I’m sure if students were participating in a tax cap rally, these same people would not be objecting to that.”

Perhaps. But would the school district offer credit for a rally in support of lower taxes? Do such rallies even exist? Maybe that’s part of the problem. For whatever reason, leftists seem more prone to public protesting than others. People who want lower taxes are more likely to engage in other forms of political activity instead of marching around holding signs and chanting slogans.

I’m attempting to find out whether the Montgomery County school system has ever given credit to students for attending other political rallies.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to report my findings soon.

9 April 2006 @ 7:06PM >> The Hartford Courant reports:

Borders, which also owns Waldenbooks, announced last week that it would not carry the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine, which contains the Danish cartoons that offended many in the Muslim world. Though there have been no reports of direct threats against stores carrying the magazine, a Borders spokeswoman says the decision was “based on the potential for a compromise of the safety and security of our employees.”

Every time we bend to the wishes of those who will use violence to silence dissent, we guarantee that more and more people will use the threat of violence to kill thinking that they don’t like.

In order for Sharia law to be in effect in the United States, we don’t need to be overrun by Jihadists who wish to impose it on us. All we need to do is continually acknowledge that we will willingly give up our freedom—bit by bit—to people who threaten us with death for failing to adhere to their wishes.

By proving that the threat of violence works, Borders Books has just increased the chances that such threats will be used and carried out in the future. Thank you for selling us out, Borders.

7 April 2006 @ 9:18AM >> In response to yesterday’s story on Rudy Rios, a high school senior writes:

[W]hy is it that school administrators fail to see that there is no difference between using a school copying machine to spread this propaganda and using taxpayer-funded teaching time, for which these people are getting paid, to “teach” students liberal values. What Mr. Rios did was certainly wrong, but teachers that spend entire classes ranting about George Bush rarely face any consequences. People need to understand that situations like this are not just isolated incidents. Liberal educational bias is expanding beyond college campuses and into the world of impressionable high school students.

All I have to add is, Jay Bennish.

6 April 2006 @ 3:23PM >> Rudy Rios is an English teacher at Cesar Chavez High School in Houston, Texas. He also opposes immigration reform, and is now being disciplined for using school equipment to create and distribute political fliers to students.

But perhaps most troubling is that, as a teacher of English, this is the best writing Rios could muster:

We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint shit with out us

6 April 2006 @ 2:32AM >> Michael Barone comments on media bias in The Washington Times:

Let’s say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media — daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.

Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let’s have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation’s two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.

[...]

Surveys galore have shown that somewhere around 90 percent of the writers, editors and other personnel in the news media are Democrats and only about 10 percent are Republicans. We depend on the news media for information about government and politics, foreign affairs and war, public policy and demographic trends — for a picture of the world around us. But the news comes from people 90 percent of whom are on one side of the political divide. Doesn’t sound like an ideal situation.

Of course, a lot of people in the news business say it doesn’t make any difference. I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

“Doesn’t the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?” I asked.

“Oh, no, no,” he said. “Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don’t affect the news.”

“So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans.”

He quickly replied, “No, then it would be biased.”

This is a variation on the same logic I often hear applied to Fox News. I’ve spoken with a number of people—left-of-center folks, as far as I can tell—who cite Fox News as an example of a biased media outlet. It’s as if media bias was invented by Fox News and never existed prior to the network coming on the scene in the mid-1990s.

To me, Fox does seem to lean more to the right than other news networks, but not significantly so. And much of that slant comes from the fact that Fox covers conservative perspectives that are often ignored by other networks. Does that make Fox lean to the right, or does it make the other networks lean to the left? Probably a little of both.

But bias is inevitable in any system managed by humans as opposed to machines. It’s just much easier for people to recognize bias when it differs from their own individual preferences.

Bias is a flaw (or feature?) of human nature, and our news media should be constructed to account for it instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. The notion that reporting can always or even frequently be purely objective is a sham.

Reporters claim to be in the business of truth. If they want news consumers to believe them, they can start by acknowledging their own perspectives and the possibility that those perspectives color their perceptions—and therefore their reporting—of the world they cover.

4 April 2006 @ 12:04AM >> Yale alumnus Clint Taylor isn’t too happy with his alma mater’s decision to admit the former spokesman for the Taliban. So he has joined with other Yale graduates to start the “Nail Yale” campaign:

The Taliban’s misogyny ran so deep that they would chop the fingernails from women who dared to wear nail polish. Please join me in sending to the members of the Yale Corporation red cosmetic fingernails, as a reminder of the brutality of the Taliban regime whose minister their university has welcomed to American soil.

For those of you new to this story, it is interesting to note that while Yale was rolling out the red carpet (in the form of a generous tuition discount) to a former Taliban official, the school was also arguing to the Supreme Court that it should be allowed to continue its campus-wide ban on U.S. military recruiters.

Yale is accountable to its trustees who make up the Yale Corporation. Yale’s decisions reflect on them. Recently the Corporation decided, for sound moral reasons, that the University should divest all holdings in companies operating in Sudan. In doing so, it said that the companies involved in propping up the Sudanese government were committing a “grave social injury”. But the injuries of the Taliban are also grave, and they are ongoing.

Taylor argues that Yale’s trustees might be able to bring common sense back to the once-great Ivy, and that the “mail a nail to Yale” campaign combined with an alumni donation boycott can get their attention. For the convenience of interested alumni, Taylor has also assembled the contact information for various Yale Corporation board members, including the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.

This is an issue that concerns all Americans, and indeed all free people. Its implications reach far beyond Yale, but if you have donated money to Yale in the past, please make clear you will give no more until the situation is resolved.

The Yale Corporation meets, as far as I can tell, around April 13-14. Let’s make certain they’ve been briefed about this issue, and the damage it has done to Yale’s reputation.

3 April 2006 @ 8:12PM >> The website Power Line, which achieved international fame for its role in the downfall of Dan Rather, has launched an online video news service.

In addition to providing video reports from established news sources, Power Line News Video is also soliciting contributions from independent videographers wishing to find distribution for their own work. Power Line, as one of the most-visited sites in the blog world, would undoubtedly provide an impressive platform for video reporters seeking a sizable audience.

3 April 2006 @ 11:34AM >> Not exactly the strongest case against immigration reform:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country.

“You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs,” Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. “You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?”

1 April 2006 @ 4:42PM >> In a parallel universe, this likeably unlikely combo is the top-rated reality TV show:

Although [the Dalai Lama] appeared not to approve of the war in Iraq, he was admiring of [President George W.] Bush.

“He is very straightforward,” said the monk.

“On our first visit, I was faced with a large plate of biscuits. President Bush immediately offered me his favourites, and after that, we got on fine. On my next visit, he didn’t mind when I was blunt about the war.

“By my third visit, I was ushering him into the Oval Office. I was astonished by his grasp of Buddhism.”