07/29/15

America’s Enemies Are Laughing at Us

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Time magazine is out with a colorful and glossy “Inside the New Cuba” special edition, featuring smiling Cuban kids wearing Communist garb on the cover. Page 64 has a photo showing “Cuban fans” holding up “their national flag” at a baseball game. It turns out that the really happy Cubans are those who have been defecting from the island “paradise,” as Time magazine calls the prison camp country.

Credit goes to Christine Rousselle of Townhall.com for covering these defections. They seem to be developing into a regular feature, with Rousselle providing regular updates about additional defections.

So far, eight players from the Cuban men’s field hockey team, four rowers from the Cuban national team, and two members of the Cuban soccer team have defected.

The defections completely undercut the chapter of the special Time magazine issue on Cuba that is titled, “The Big League Next Door,” which speculates that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba could “stop Cuba’s top talent from fleeing…” This chapter is written by Robert Siegel, senior host of National Public Radio, and Eyder Peralta, an NPR reporter.

Washington Nationals infielder Yunel Escobar defected from Cuba when he was 21. The Washington Post covered his story in a May 7 article, noting:

Escobar’s love of baseball was fueled by television broadcasts and video games, both forbidden in Cuba. He paid to watch MLB games and favorite players such as Alex Rodriguez, Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel and fellow Cuban Livan Hernandez on a TV with a hush-hush antenna at a friend’s house. He also grew to love Ken Griffey Jr. because of a video game he played often in secret. A friend had smuggled in a console and charged the equivalent of 50 cents per hour to play.

The entire story is worth reading and there are many touching moments, such as the story of when Escobar spent two days at an immigration detention center in Miami “and kissed the ground when he was released.”

These are the immigrants we should welcome, since they have developed an appreciation of the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. They want to enjoy and celebrate American freedom, not distort and transform the country into a Third World welfare state of cheap labor for corporations and paid-for votes for the Democratic Party.

In the Time magazine version of Cuba, we are told in the section, “Scenes from the Revolution,” that Fidel Castro “promised to clean up the government, restore democracy and civil liberties, and promote social justice.” Nothing is said about whether he fulfilled those promises.

By contrast, we are told that his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista, was a “ruthless dictator” who ran a system characterized by “economic and social inequality and a corrupt government.” The implication is that Castro changed all of that for the better.

A caption on a page of pictures of Cuban cowboys on the communist island informs us that “Before Castro nationalized all farms, almost three quarters of Cuba’s arable lands was owned by fewer than 3,000 individuals and corporations, many of them American, while most farmworkers were renters.” One of the Cuban cowboys proclaims, “It is no longer of Communism or no Communism. It belongs to us.”

You mean communism works after all? That seems to be the message of this special Time magazine Cuba edition.

It’s completely absurd but this is what passes for serious journalism. It reminds me of the old Ronald Reagan joke, reportedly told to Mikhail Gorbachev, about two men walking down a street in Moscow, when one asks, “Is this pure communism? Have we passed through the stage of socialism and reached pure communism? The other replies, “Hell, no. It’s gonna get a lot worse.”

Ben Lewis wrote an article, “Hammer & tickle,” noting that “Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy.”

These days, Oleg Atbashian makes fun of the Marxists and their apologists on a regular basis, on his “People’s Cube” website. One of his latest offerings is the new poster featuring the “Rebel without a gender.” The People’s Cube proclaims, “Che is dead, long live Conchita: a new rebel icon.”

His tribute to the Museum of Communism in Prague is a lot of laughs, as he displays some of the posters from the old communist days, such as the one announcing that communist women would have burnt their bras like their sisters in the West, “if there were any in the shops.”

Another communist poster said: “Sometimes there was no toilet paper in the shops. Luckily there was not much food, either.”

Meanwhile, believe it or not, the comedian Jack Black is being featured in a video campaign from the group Global Zero to sell the Iranian nuclear deal. He previously starred in such films as “Shallow Hal,” “School of Rock,” “Nacho Libre,” and the Kung Fu Panda films.

A comedian as the face of the Iranian nuclear deal? This is where the laughing begins to die down.

The Iranians and their Russian sponsors are the ones laughing at us now.

So are the Cuban Communists.

They may lose some people through defections, but they get an embassy on American soil where they can base their spies and recruit agents inside the U.S. government.

07/14/15

Weekly Featured Profile – Donna Brazile

KeyWiki.org

Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile…is a leading Democratic Party operative. She is an adjunct professor, author, a syndicated columnist and the Vice Chair of Voter Registration and Participation at the Democratic National Committee.

In the 1990s, Brazile was the communications director for far left Delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC). She also ran Al Gore‘s campaign for the White House in 2000.

Brazile is Founder and Managing Director of Brazile & Associates LLC, a general consulting, grassroots advocacy and training firm based in Washington, DC.

In her early 20s, Brazile became actively involved in the United States Student Association, lined up a job as a lobbyist with the National Student Education Fund and moved to Washington, DC.

Brazile attended a Youth Peace and Disarmament Conference in Helsinki, Finland, and learned “firsthand how negatively other peoples viewed nuclear arms. That was one of the factors that hardened her resolve to want to go to Washington to work towards change.” The conference was the Soviet-controlled World Federation of Democratic Youth‘s for peace, detente and disarmament, World Forum of Youth and Students, 19-23, January 1981.

In 2009, Brazile was listed as a member of the Advisory Board of Wellstone Action, a Minnesota based organization built on the political legacy of that state’s late “progressive” and Democratic Socialists of America allied Senator Paul Wellstone.

Rep. Karen Bass traveled to Havana, Cuba on June 5th, 2011, accompanied by Donna Brazile, former Congresswoman Jane Harman and Sara Stephens of the the pro-Cuban Center for Democracy in the Americas, as a “Women’s Leadership Delegation.”

The delegates participating in the Cuba fact-finding trip attended meetings with “Cuban academics, policymakers, journalists and NGO representatives.”

Donna Brazile, Karen Bass, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, Jane Harman

(more…)

12/24/14

“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.

12/23/14

The Obama-Pope Axis of Marxism

By: Cliff Kincaid

The Washington Post is a die-hard Democratic Party newspaper that occasionally recognizes Obama’s drift into Marxism. The December 19th editorial on Cuba is a case in point. Not only does the Post understand the nature of Obama’s betrayal of a free Cuba, it is beginning to wake up to the failures of bipartisan policies that have built communist Chinese economic power in the name of capitalism and reform.

The paper says that Obama “should have learned and applied some of the hard lessons of normalization with China and Vietnam—most notably that engagement doesn’t automatically promote freedom. When the United States debated extending ‘most-favored-nation’ trading status to China, we shared in what was then the conventional wisdom: Economic engagement would inevitably lead, over time, to political reform inside that Communist dictatorship.”

The paper goes on to admit it was duped. But Obama should know better, shouldn’t he?

The Post notes that the Chinese regime has been strengthened, not weakened, by policies of “engagement.” The Chinese communists “were determined to reap the fruits of foreign investment and trade—for themselves and their families, first, but also for their country—without ceding power. So far, confounding expectations, they have succeeded,” the paper commented.

In the case of Cuba, the Post said, Obama could have proposed normalization only after certain freedoms were given to the Cuban people. Instead, Obama “spurned” the “brave freedom fighters” on the island in the form of ordinary citizens risking their lives to protest against the Castro regime and to demand basic rights. Obama simply ignored their struggle.

So what are we to conclude? The Post is the paper which sent a reporter by the name of Dana Milbank to our news conferences over the years to ridicule our warnings of Obama’s Marxism. It looks like the editorial board, at least, is coming around to the realization that Obama is deliberately pursuing a Marxist policy in the case of Cuba. This is a breakthrough.

In a separate editorial, the paper called Obama’s change in Cuba policy a “bailout” of the regime. It said, “Mr. Obama may claim that he has dismantled a 50-year-old failed policy; what he has really done is give a 50-year-old failed regime a new lease on life.”

The editorial fails to take note of the role of Pope Francis in the betrayal. However, a separate article in the paper indirectly took note of the development, highlighting that while Pope John Paul II was “extremely public in his fight against communism,” Francis seems dedicated to being known as a “master builder of bridges” between the communist and free worlds. This is to the advantage of the communists.

The article notes that Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)—who is Catholic—was critical of the pope, saying he should “take up the cause of freedom” rather than facilitate Obama’s deal with the Castro brothers. But we have heard enough from the pope, in terms of his attacks on capitalism, to know where he stands.

Rubio told ABC News, “The pope is a spiritual leader and he always, naturally, is going to want to bring people closer together. And I respect that as a spiritual leader. But I think it’s also important to say that people deserve the right to be free…our nation was founded on that principle.”

The awareness is growing among Catholics that this pope is radically different than Pope John Paul II. Associated Press quotes Efrain Rivas, a 53-year-old maintenance man in Miami who was a political prisoner in Cuba for 16 years as saying, “I’m still Catholic till the day I die. But I am a Catholic without a pope.”

Miguel Saavedra, described as a 57-year-old Miami mechanic who leads an anti-Castro group and wears a Christian cross, told AP, “The church is contaminated.” He was probably referring to contamination by elements of Marxist-oriented liberation theology.

Catholic writer Vic Biorseth concludes, “I’m afraid it is true—Pope Francis is a Marxist. George Soros is probably celebrating. So is Bill Ayers, Frances Fox Piven, and especially, Comrade President Obama, peace be upon him. We will get through this, and we will be stronger for it.”

This may sound harsh, but the evidence is all around for everyone to see. Perhaps the Post will eventually wake up to that reality as well. But how long will it take?