Daily Archives: December 24, 2014
Watcher’s Council Nominations – Christmas Edition – 12/24/14
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.
Council News:
Merry Christmas to all our readers and fans from The Watcher’s Council!
This week, American Digest, The Pirate’s Cove, IOwnTheWorldReport.com and Seraphic Secret earned honorable mention status with some great articles.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning.
Simple, no?
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
So, let’s see what we have for you this week…
Council Submissions
- Simply Jews – Omar Mahmood and the goddess of Political Correctness
- The Noisy Room – 2 NYPD Officers Shot in the Head, Killed in Ambush on Cop Car in Brooklyn
- The Independent Sentinel – Police Turn Their Backs to De Blasio After Muslim Murders Two NYC Officers
- The Right Planet – The Left’s War On The Police
- Nice Deb – Rioting For Change in the Age of Obama
- Joshuapundit – What Christmas Really Means, And Why The Left Hates It
- GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Top 10 Conflict Priorities For 2015
- The Razor – Unwelcome Visitors: Ghosts from the Past
- Bookworm Room – Has American higher education reached a tipping point?
- VA Right! – War on Christmas and the Establishment Clause
- The Glittering Eye – As Plain As the Nose On Somebody Else’s Face
- Rhymes With Right – Is It Our Patriotic Duty To See “The Interview”?
Honorable Mentions
- American Digest – The Creche by the Side of the Road
- The Pirate’s Cove – Tax Cheat Charlie Rangel Unintentionally Calls Leftist Protesters Insane
- IOwnTheWorldReport.com – Town Uses Letter of the Law To Have Childish Nativity Scene Removed
- Seraphic Secret – The Old-New Chanukah War 2014
Non-Council Submissions
- Ron Radosh/PJ Media – ‘The Third Narrative,’ and Michael Walzer and Todd Gitlin, Join the Fight Against Israel submitted by Simply Jews
- Sultan Knish – Saving Comrade Castro submitted by The Noisy Room
- The Weekly Standard – Obama Apologizes To Castro submitted by The Independent Sentinel
- The New American – The Betrayal Of Cuba submitted by The Right Planet
- Doug Giles/Townhall – Jessica Chambers: Teen Murdered Immediately After Local Blacks Called For Rape & Burning Of White Women submitted by Nice Deb
- Victor Davis Hanson – War Clouds on the Horizon? submitted by Joshuapundit
- War Is Boring – China’s Building Stealth Fighters Faster and Faster submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
- Reason.Com – Don’t Try to Blame ‘Rhetoric’ for the Deaths of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos submitted by The Razor
- Kevin D. Williamson/NRO – The United States Of Anxietysubmitted by Bookworm Room
- GotNews.com – NYPD Cop Killer Worked For Alleged Muslim Terror Front Groupsubmitted by VA Right!
- Walter Russell Mead/The American Interest – Next Up in America: the Liberal Retreat submitted by The Glittering Eye
- The Switch/Washington Blog – German researchers discover a flaw that could let anyone listen to your cell calls.submitted by The Watcher
- Bret Stephens/WSJ – The Marvel of American Resilience submitted by The Watcher
- Heather MacDonald/City Journal – The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal submitted by The Watcher
Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that! And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!
“Christmas with Hef” and Other Fairy Tales
By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Various news organizations have run articles quoting Hugh Hefner, aka “Hef,” as saying he is shocked—shocked—by allegations that Bill Cosby molested a 15-year-old girl at his Playboy mansion. Hefner says, “Bill Cosby has been a good friend for many years and the mere thought of these allegations is truly saddening. I would never tolerate this kind of behavior, regardless of who was involved.”
Former Playboy Playmate Miki Garcia testified before the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in 1980 and said that Hefner encouraged Playmates to come to his mansion and “partake of the activities,” including orgies and bisexual escapades. She said Playmates were forced to engage in sex acts with Hefner`s associates through “peer pressure.” As director of Playmate Promotions from 1976 to 1982, she said she was told by models “about rapes, mental and physical abuse, attempted murder, drug addiction, attempted suicide and prostitution.”
Our media have conveniently “forgotten” this testimony as the accusations against Cosby have snowballed. One reason for that, as we have reported, is that Hefner gives major figures in the liberal media “Hugh Hefner” awards for the work or articles they do.
Regarding Playboy’s role in the controversy over sexual assaults, Dr. Judith Reisman notes that Playboy ran an online “So Right, It’s Wrong” campaign in 2009 to “hate rape” ten conservative women, providing a gallery with their names, photos and videos. The story was supposed to be funny.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, who was one of those mentioned on the list, commented at the time that publications such as Politico made light of the Playboy attack, while misrepresenting the vicious nature of what Playboy was advocating, and “whitewashing all the vulgarity” out of it.
So rapes of conservative women are something worth laughing about.
Meanwhile, according to the most recent allegations, Cosby, Hefner and their buddies were engaging in sexual escapades with Playboy models and “bunnies” at the mansion, the Playboy Clubs, or various hotels. Several of those accusing Cosby of sexual misconduct have a Playboy connection. P.J. Masten, one of the two ex-bunnies who have publicly accused Cosby of sexual assault, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that “[There are] 12 former bunnies that I know of that are ashamed to come forward, frightened to come forward, married with families [and] don’t want to come forward. But they were also drugged and raped by Bill Cosby.”
Russell Miller’s book, Bunny: The Real Story of Playboy, noted the presence at the Playboy Mansion of “Lila,” described as a 17-year-old high school student “whose startling sexual precocity made her a popular participant at orgies.”
If our media have been paying attention to what was really going on in the Playboy mansion, rather than just attending parties with “Hef,” they might have uncovered some of Cosby’s alleged sordid activities. Instead, as we have noted, reporters and media celebrities such as Bill Maher have been going to the parties in the mansion and smoking pot, among other things.
Dr. Reisman conducted the 1989 study for the Department of Justice on “Images of Children, Crime, and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler Magazines.” It found that Playboy had run numerous images, and even cartoons, depicting children as sexual objects or enjoying themselves as sexual partners of adults. For example, Playboy’s December 1977 issue showed actress Jodie Foster, then only 14, in the nude, describing her as “talented” and “sophisticated beyond her years.”
During an appearance on Dutch television in 1994, Dr. Reisman essentially accused Playboy of producing child pornography based on her study of three decades of its publications. Playboy sued, but ultimately lost the lawsuit.
Some of the examples include:
- An August 1967 cartoon shows a Girl Scout being let into an apartment by an adult male as she says, “We’ll have to stop meeting like this. I’m running out of cookies.”
- A November 1972 cartoon shows a small girl with a bow in her hair telling a man offering her a candy cane, “No, thank you, nice man, I don’t want to go for a ride in your car. Why don’t we just go up to my place and b-?”
- A March 1973 cartoon shows a little girl, with a ribbon in her hair and her breasts exposed, sitting next to her teddy bear on the bed while an adult father figure lowers his pants. The caption has the little girl saying, “But first of all, we have to ask Teddy’s permission, and that costs $40.”
But the media convey a different impression of “Hef” and his magazine. “By his own lights, having purged himself of the shame and hypocrisy that is part of most Americans’ sexual baggage, he leads a life that is exceptionally honest and moral,” reported The New York Times in 2011.
On December 23, 2006, reporter Rita Cosby, then with MSNBC, described a Christmas party at the Playboy mansion that included Disney characters and sounded family-friendly. She introduced three more of Hefner’s “gorgeous girlfriends,” who “were nice enough to give me my own personal tour of their posh pad right before Christmas.”
Here was some of the dialogue:
Cosby: How does it feel to celebrate Christmas at the Playboy mansion?
Female: It’s wonderful. Everything is so beautiful, like the food on Christmas. Everything’s just so cool.
Cosby: Who did the tree?
Female: I did the tree. I wanted to decorate the tree. Hef used to have just staff do it, and it was kind of generic looking. And I always wanted to have a Disney tree, so I have all my little Disney characters and everything.
We reported back in 2001 that the CBS Early Show with Bryant Gumbel assigned a female correspondent, Hattie Kaufman, to go to Hefner’s Playboy mansion and do a feature about him. Kaufman called the mansion “a Pleasure dome for singles and celebrities,” and referred to him as “Hef.” He was in his bathrobe with his Playmates, bunnies and centerfolds, smiling and describing how he had liberated America from its Puritanism.
The Washington Post reported with glee that the Marijuana Policy Project had resumed Playboy mansion fundraising parties in 2011 after its founder/director Rob Kampia “acknowledged having slept with an underling and took a medical leave of three months to get therapy for his attitudes towards women.” Kampia said, “I just think I’m hypersexualized.”
The MPP’s board is rather “diverse” and includes Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of National Review,
Speaking of being “hypersexualized,” the 1980 memoir of pornography star Linda Lovelace remembers a side of “Hef” that many have not been exposed to. Her book, Ordeal, describes the Playboy founder and major contributor to the Democratic Party as “a collector of eight-millimeter movies.” That is a reference to the underworld of hardcore pornography, not the “coffee-table pornography” symbolized by Playboy.
Lovelace, who says Hefner sodomized her in the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles, writes, “He supposedly has the second largest collection in the world, second only to someone in Singapore. His eight-millimeter movies go back to the first ones ever made, and they include some with actors and actresses who were to go on and become very famous. He seemed especially interested in his animal films; pigs, chickens, donkeys, horses—he had them all.”
The old joke is that men read Playboy for the articles or interviews, rather than to look at the pictures.
But writing articles for or granting an interview to Playboy gives the publication respectability as a “serious” outlet for news and information.
After Sean Hannity of Fox News gave Playboy an interview last year, Dr. Reisman told us, “Hannity has just become another ‘inadvertent sponsor’ of the oldest pioneering child pornography publication in history.” She said he became a “foolish pawn” of the “sordid, illicit Playboy enterprise.”
But Hannity isn’t alone. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert all gave interviews to Playboy.
No wonder Bill Cosby is under attack while “Hef” successfully maintains his distance from the scandal. Hefner has made himself and his publication “respectable” across the political spectrum.
Playboy ingratiates itself, especially with the “progressive” community, by promoting what it calls in a Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing “social justice.” The magazine has celebrated the use of illegal drugs such as LSD and cocaine, and Playboy money has gone into the movements for abortion rights, homosexual rights and legalized drugs, as well as to the Democratic Party.
This is why Hefner is portrayed as a cultural icon and not the dirty old man he truly is.
“Red Bill” de Blasio: We Warned You
By: Cliff Kincaid
America’s Survival

These are videos we produced before Red Bill was elected Mayor of New York City. Click on links to watch videos.
- Trevor Loudon: “A perfect storm is brewing” for New York City. “People will die.”
- Cliff Kincaid: The Media cover-up of Bill de Blasio’s terrorist and Muslim sympathies
- Pamela Geller on Bill de Blasio and the terror threats against New York City.
- De Blasio and the Clinton Terror Pardons by Joseph Connor
Cliff Kincaid and Pamela Geller
Joe Connor’s father was killed by FALN Puerto Rican terrorists: “The Clintons were using our father’s life and death for cheap political gain. They thought releasing Puerto Rican terrorists would help secure the Hispanic vote for Hillary Clinton’s run for New York senator. Bill de Blasio ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign. What did de Blasio know about the clemencies and when did he know it?”
The St. Louis County Police Department Releases CCTV Clip Detailing Events Of Last Night’s Shooting

From Zero Hedge:
In a modification of the infamous Greedo scene from Star Wars, tonight’s latest fatal shooting at a gas station in Berkeley, MO boils down to one thing: who threatened to shoot whom first. As a reminder, the local police department said that “the man had pointed a handgun at an officer who approached him and another man outside a gas station where the officer was conducting a routine business check in the suburb of Berkeley. Fearing for his life, the Berkeley Officer fired several shots, striking the subject, fatally wounding him.”
Moments ago, in order to quell further speculation, the St. Louis County Police just released a CCTV clip (shown below), highlighting the moments just before the fatal shooting which, indeed, appears to show the victim pointing a gun at the officer first, in which case this is nothing than a case of an officer engaging in self-defense.
It remains to be seen if the facts will be enough to cool local tempers.
The full statement and clip released by the police:
Surveillance video from officer-involved shooting in Berkeley, Missouri. This video shows the suspect pointing a gun at the officer.
More information on the incident:
At approximately 11:15 PM on December 23, 2014, a police officer with the City of Berkeley was conducting a routine business check at the Mobile Gas Station located at 6800 N. Hanley when he observed two male subjects on the side of the building. The Berkeley Police Officer exited his vehicle and approached the subjects when one of the men pulled a handgun and pointed it at the officer. Fearing for his life, the Berkeley Officer fired several shots, striking the subject, fatally wounding him. The second subject fled the scene. The Berkeley Police Department requested the St. Louis County Police Department’s Crimes Against Persons Unit to handle the investigation. St. Louis County Police Detectives have recovered the deceased subject’s handgun at the scene. At this time, I cannot confirm the identity of the deceased subject. The investigation is on-going and further details will follow as they become available.
Officer Near #FERGUSON Kills Black Teen Who Pointed Gun At Him
Why we should all stand with the Thin Blue Line
Shooting Death of Black Man by White Officer Spurs Protests in St. Louis Suburb
Officer kills armed 18-year-old near Ferguson
Explosives, bricks hurled at officers in new protests…