11/28/15

The Council Has Spoken!! Our Watcher’s Council Results – 11/28/15

The Watcher’s Council

Ted Cruz Thanksgiving

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, speaks during the Presidential Family Forum as Ben Carson listens, Friday, Nov. 20, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, left, speaks during the Presidential Family Forum as Ben Carson listens, Friday, Nov. 20, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match-up.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left. – Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name. – Percy Bysshe Shelley

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. – Malcolm X

Republicans and Democrats are obsessed with making sure that illegal aliens are granted citizenship. The American people are not. They’re concerned about jobs, the economy, debt. They’re concerned about a plundering country. They’re concerned about a decaying, dying country. – Rush Limbaugh

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This week’s winning essay, Bookworm Room’s The Wall Street Journal’s hatchet job on Ted Cruz, is pretty much about what the title implies it is. As Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz continues to rise in the polls, like Donald Trump he becomes a target for character assassination and trial by media… not just for his conservative principles, but in particular for his positions on illegal migration. That’s an issue dear to the heart of both Leftist Democrats and as we see here, the GOP establishment. Bookworm takes this effort by Kim Strassel apart in her usually erudite fashion. Here’s a slice:

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz. I realize he’s not perfect, but no candidate is. What matters to me is that his political values most closely align with mine, that he’s not scared of a fight (and, especially, he’s not scared of the media), and that he is truly smarter than just about everyone else out there. I learned yesterday, though, that Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal most definitely does not like Cruz. She wrote a savage hit piece on him essentially blaming him for ISIS’s ability to spread throughout the United States. (That spread, of course, has nothing to do with Obama’s open borders policy and the contempt he shows for every person and idea that suggests that Islam might have a problem.)

But before honing in on her perception about Cruz’s alleged security failures, Strassel first lambastes him as a rank opportunist who cares only about self-aggrandizement and refuses to take care of the GOP’s needs:

The senator’s supporters adore him because they see him in those moments when he has positioned himself as the hero. To them he is the stalwart forcing a government shutdown over ObamaCare. He’s the brave soul calling to filibuster in defense of gun rights. He’s the one keeping the Senate in lame-duck session to protest Mr. Obama’s unlawful immigration orders.

Mr. Cruz’s detractors see a man who engineers moments to aggrandize himself at the expense of fellow conservatives. And they see the consequences. They wonder what, exactly, Mr. Cruz has accomplished.

ObamaCare is still on the books. It took the GOP a year to recover its approval ratings after the shutdown, which helped deny Senate seats to Ed Gillespie in Virginia and Scott Brown in New Hampshire. Mr. Obama’s immigration orders are still on the books. The courts gained a dozen liberal judges, all with lifetime tenure, because the lame-duck maneuver gave Democrats time to cram confirmation votes through. Mr. Cruz’s opportunism tends to benefit one cause: Mr. Cruz.

So it’s Cruz’s fault we have Obamacare and it’s his fault because . . . he took a principled stand against it? (I admired that stand when he took it and I still do.) The fact is that Cruz is one of the few Republicans in Congress who actually stood by the party planks and actual promises he and other alleged conservatives made to voters since 2008. He is the only one in Congress on the right who shows the slightest bit of spine. So when Strassel writes, “but Obamacare is still on the books,” the real question shouldn’t be “How do we blame Ted Cruz?” Instead, the real question should be “How did this happen when Republicans control Congress and the purse strings?”

Strassel’s claim that, following Cruz’s principled stand, it took Republicans “a year to recover,” is patently ridiculous. Republicans have enjoyed greater electoral success in the past six years than the party ever has — and she is going to blame defeats in Virginia and Massachusetts on Cruz. That is infuriating.

The above insults are just throat-clearing for Strassel’s real issue: Ted Cruz has made us less safe than we should be because he refuses to authorize the government to turn America into even more of a police state with endless spying on citizens:

Mr. Cruz regaled the crowd about how he had opposed a proposal to intervene in Syria and how he doesn’t support “nation building.” To this he could add a few others: He has consistently voted against defense reauthorization bills that enable troop funding. And this spring he ginned up support to pass a law that undercuts the National Security Agency’s ability to use metadata to root out terror plots. Mr. Cruz, citing “privacy rights,” co-sponsored the bill, along with Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Al Franken and Barbara Boxer.

[snip]

It may have seemed like a good idea to Mr. Cruz at the time. But after Paris, he finds himself with a national security agenda that is increasingly at odds with the public will. Florida’s Marco Rubio (who opposed the NSA bill) had fun this week reminding Americans of the stark foreign-policy differences between himself and the Texan, noting that Mr. Cruz has supported laws that “weaken U.S. intelligence.” Mr. Rubio, who has delivered at least 10 major foreign-policy addresses in the past few years, is running as the unabashed hawk, calling for robust new U.S. world leadership. Mr. Cruz may have walked himself into playing the counterpoint—a Rand Paul stand-in.

Strassel is snide — and she is wrong. Cruz is absolutely right to place limits on the NSA and meta-data. As is developed at some length my post about a talk by Mary Theroux of the Independent Institute, all of us should be deeply suspicious about our government at this point — a government that hoards people’s information like a miser and that is becoming ever more out of control and the master, not the servant, in this country:

The government’s spying on American citizens is so enormous we literally cannot comprehend its scope. The data collection (which is in the multiple zetabytes) grossly violates our inherent Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. NSA employees before Snowden tried to blow the whistle on this beginning around the year 2000, and got ferociously persecuted by the government because of their efforts. Snowden’s spectacular leak broke that log jam.

But here’s the really important thing that Theroux said: The government gets so much data, it’s useless for the stated purpose of crime and terrorism prevention. As it comes in, it’s simply so much white noise. It certainly didn’t stop 9/11 or the Boston bombing. In this regard, think of England, which has more CCTVs per capita than any other country in the 1st world, and maybe in any world. Nevertheless, these cameras do nothing to prevent crime. As the number of cameras has increased, so has the crime rate. The data is useful only after the fact, to help (sometimes) apprehend the criminal.

Well, one can argue that ex post facto apprehension is a good thing — but it’s a good thing only if there’s been a clear violation of a pretty well known law (e.g., don’t beat people to death or don’t rob a jewelry store). We’re looking at something much more sinister here. Think of the volume of law in America and, worse, think of the staggering volumes of rules interpreting those laws.

As Theroux noted, Stalin’s chief of police famously said (and I’m paraphrasing) give me the man and I can find the crime. We Americans have a government that’s sitting on data that can be used to criminalize us after the fact the current government (Republican or Democrat or Third Party) doesn’t like us. It’s like a landmine under every American.

No thinking citizen should trust a government that produces a Lois Lerner and then protects her from indictment, even though at least one of the charges against her is that she released private data the IRS held to Democrats for partisan purposes. Nor are abusive employees the only problem. Don’t forget that the government is so dysfunctional that the Office of Personnel Management allowed personal information for millions of employees (including social security numbers and security check information) to get into hackers’ hands. Our government has proven itself to be both corrupt and incompetent, yet Strassel excoriates Cruz for refusing to give it an even longer leash.

Here’s the reality: All that meta-data the government collected has yet to be used to stop a single terrorist incident. All it does is collect more and more information that our government can use against us. It is an Orwellian nightmare that Stalin and other authoritarians of whatever stripe could only dream of having. If it had stopped the Tsarnaev brothers, or any of the other attacks on our soil, perhaps we should feel differently, but there is no evidence that it has made any real difference.

Our Founding Fathers had several guiding principles, one of which is that the good intentions of a benevolent government could not be trusted in perpetuity. The Founders loved George Washington and would have elected him King, but they were worried that a George Washington III might prefer to be a tyrant.

Much more good stuff at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with Obama Has Just Begun, submitted by Fausta’s Blog. Hanson, a classist and historian as well as a stunning writer tells us baldly that this last year of Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency is likely to be the most dangerous for the country – and why. This is a must read.

Here are this week’s full results. A number of our members – Fausta, GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD, Nice Deb, The Noisy Room and Puma By Design were unable to vote this week, but were not subject to the 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and every Tuesday morning when we reveal the weeks’ nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere and you won’t want to miss it… or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that, y’know?

11/28/15

USA TransNational Report 11-28-2015

USA Transnational Report USA-based, Worldwide Coverage and Analysis

Interview with Sheriff Marcus Kohan! 8 AM EST THIS SATURDAY (11/28) MORNING!

Topics to be addressed:

The “New Order” in the Middle East – post shooting down of Russian war plane U.S. State Department – Iran never signed the nuclear deal! What now? How are so-called “refugees” being brought to the United States? Who are they? New Oathkeepers efforts in Pennsylvania to organize local communities for safety in perilous times & Obama’s undermining of U.S. and international security…

11/28/15

Media Bias That Makes You Sick

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

On Thanksgiving Day, it is appropriate to say thank you for Accuracy in Media and the rise of conservative media.

The cause of “media activism,” now popular at some American colleges and universities, is taking an ominous and interesting turn. If this trend continues, the moderators of the stacked anti-Republican CNBC presidential debate will look like moderates.

Quite literally, the purpose of this new kind of “media activism” is to make you sick.

A so-called “Media Activism Research Conference” is being held next year in Canada to expand even further the “progressive” causes available to journalists. The event is described as a “Gathering for Grassroots and Transformative Media” at Lakehead University and “an opportunity to develop collaborations and networks among anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, trans, queer and Indigenous alternative media activists and activist-researchers by sharing knowledge, skills and experiences on grassroots and transformative alternative media.”

Brace yourselves for one of the seminars, which concerns “Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics: Direct action vomiting against homonormative consumerism.”

According to my research, and I may not have gotten to the bottom of this, it seems as if media activists in Canada are exploring vomiting as a form of social protest against capitalism. The concept of “social justice” is taking on very strange and bizarre adventures in academia.

One member of the Anarchist Studies Network defines vomit itself “as emblematic of the unsustainable contradictions inherent in capitalism, and of the body’s rebellion.”

A Lakehead University professor, Dr. Sandra Jeppesen, actually wrote an article entitled, “Projectile: stories about puking.” Apparently, to vomit is to reject the capitalist system.

Jeppesen is the point of contact for this field of study. Identified as a professor in media studies, cultural studies and anarchist theory, she was awarded almost $500,000 in research funding from the federal government of Canada two years ago, in order to “study how social activists are using ‘cutting-edge’ digital technologies to further social causes around the world and what the rest of us can learn from them.”

In fact, this forthcoming media conference is underwritten by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the government of Canada.

If you are as curious as I am, you may find it interesting that “anti-consumerist vomiting” is described in a broader context, and that “Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in mutually informing ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include liberatory theories and practices of embodied genders and sexualities in private and public, direct actions to visibilize and extend queer publics, and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race, disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among others.”

I don’t know how to precisely translate this material, except I did discover that “liberatory pedagogy” refers to “educational theories and practices intended to raise learners’ critical consciousness concerning oppressive social conditions.”

A paper on the topic explains, “As students and educators join the struggles to recognize oppression and domination within the sphere of popular culture, individuals whose voices were once silenced will become heard. For this reason, liberatory pedagogy seeks to empower individuals and encourage them to formulate reflective communities in and outside of the classroom that highlight social justice.”

An entire paper by Jeppesen, entitled, “Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics: Direct action vomiting against homonormative consumerism,” goes into detail on this. I almost got sick reading it.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, things aren’t too much better. Some of our “progressive” journalists are still recognizing—and being recognized by—Playboy founder and publisher Hugh Hefner, whose Playboy Mansion was a notorious hangout for such personalities as accused serial sex abuser Bill Cosby.

Some “progressives” consider Hefner a champion of the First Amendment.

Malkia Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice, was just given a 2015 Hugh M. Hefner Foundation First Amendment Award. We are told that during her acceptance speech, “In a small ceremony that took place beside the Playboy mansion’s infamous grotto, Malkia started off by thanking her mother, a former Black Panther who passed away in 2005, and the nearly 200 organizations that make up the Media Action Grassroots Network.”

In the Playboy Mansion and its “infamous grotto,” a place known for sexual orgies, it appears that the notorious Bill Cosby exercised a lot of power over women, some of whom may have been drugged.

Nevertheless, Cyril seemed proud of the award and proclaimed, “My mother was a member of the Black Panther Party in New York City. She ran the Party’s Breakfast Program and was editor of their national newspaper, but she was my first teacher. I sat on my mother’s shoulders at rallies for undocumented migrants, queer youth rights, women’s reproductive freedom. And I sit on her shoulders today.”

The Black Panther Party was notorious for targeting police officers as “pigs.”

The so-called “grassroots organizations” of the Media Action Grassroots Network include the George Soros-funded Ella Baker Center, formerly headed by Van Jones, the Obama Green Jobs Czar who lost his job when his communist background came to light. He is now a CNN commentator.

The Hefner awards are determined by “judges” from the media, who in the past have included Margaret Carlson, a journalist at Bloomberg News; Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher, The Nation.

Each award includes $5,000 and a commemorative plaque. The awards represent just some of the millions of dollars over the years that Hugh Hefner has paid to the media and various “progressive groups.”

Taking money from a pornographer and vomiting to protest capitalism are some of the current “progressive” trends in the media.

And you thought media bias couldn’t get any worse?