05/31/16

House Votes to Turn Vets into Psychotic Potheads

By: Cliff Kincaid – Accuracy in Media

Donald J. Trump says vets are treated worse than illegal immigrants. But help is on the way. The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to make it easier for veterans to get access to officially-approved marijuana. Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), a physician, argues that the proposal is “absolutely insane.”

It is estimated that nearly 30 percent of veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. But Rep. Fleming notesevidence that marijuana “enhances psychosis and schizophrenia” in some people with these psychological problems.

Dr. Christine Miller asks, “Does no one remember Eddie Routh, the vet thought to have PTSD, who was diagnosed by psychiatrists for the prosecution with cannabis-induced psychosis, and who killed both Chris Kyle (“American Sniper”) and Chad Littlefield?”

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05/14/16

Hate Crime Turns Out to Be Death by Marijuana

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

So marijuana is harmless and doesn’t kill people? Consider the case of black Muslim teenager Hamza Warsame, who took a toke and plunged to his death. His friends from the hood blamed it on a non-existent white man who allegedly pushed the kid to his death.

The headline in last December’s New York Times story was certainly ominous: “Assertions of Hate Crime in Seattle After a Somali-American Teenager Falls to His Death.” The paper said, “The death of the boy, Hamza Warsame, has prompted outrage among members of the Muslim community here, amid assertions—it is not clear from whom—that he was beaten and pushed to his death by a white man.”

Notice how a “white man” was blamed, despite the complete lack of evidence. Where did the allegations come from? The Times seemed not to know.

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04/20/15

Forum: Should Federal Laws On Marijuana Be Changed?

The Watcher’s Council

Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: Should Federal Laws On Marijuana Be Changed?

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: Certainly there is some kinda way to decriminalize weed without legalizing. As best understood, a first marijuana-possession offense is punishable by up to six months in jail, a fine of $1,000, or both. Considered as a serious misdemeanor.

Some reform ideas include that if a cat possess five or fewer grams, they would only be liable for 30 days in jail, a fine from $65 to $625, or both. It would also be classified as a simple misdemeanor.

Perhaps the best thing would be to confiscate the weed and give a ticket not unlike a traffic violation. Sans jail time (after all the courts are jammed up beyond repair with way more serious chiz than ppl having a laugh and getting all groovy).

If busted while operating a vehicle – the auto insurance corp in question could be notified granting higher rates for cats that dig smoking rides.

Bookworm Room: I hate marijuana. I hate the way it smells. And I hate the way it makes people boring and unambitious. Having said that, I don’t think we’ve done much good treating it as a criminal enterprise over the past many decades. The result is that it’s become a romantic outlaw drug that most young people think is harmless, when it should have been subject to the same degree of opprobrium as cigarettes. After all, in both cases, people are sucking damaging carcinogens into their bodies.

If it were up to me, I’d subject it to the same legal restrictions as alcohol and cigarettes, and then I’d work hard to educate people about its myriad downsides. I’d also allow science to study carefully whether it really does have upsides in pain and disease management or whether those upsides are just part of the same romantic outlaw mythology. If marijuana really does have medicinal virtues, they should be encouraged as part of the range of choices available to people with health problems.

JoshuaPundit: It all depends on what your objective is. The fact is that for the most part prohibition doesn’t really work unless people elect to to do it themselves. That’s particularly true for marijuana, and there are some important reasons why.

First, pot is not only easy to obtain (easier than alcohol in a lot of places for those under a certain age), but it’s an aphrodisiac.

I myself preferred other drugs for the same reason I never smoked cigarettes. I simply didn’t like the feeling of smoke going into my lungs. But I frequently had marijuana around simply because a lot of girls really liked it, especially as a prelude to other activities. Faced with prohibition versus hormones, which do you think people are going to choose? Not only that, but almost everybody thinks they’re indestructible at eighteen, no? So much for any lectures about health considerations.

Second, selling narcotics is a business, and that includes the new legal ‘medicinal’ weed too. In California, one of the few growing pieces of the economy is small ‘clinics’ where you can buy marijuana provided you have a prescription. They’re almost as common as McDonald’s. L.A. Weekly has pages of ads from doctors offering the prescriptions. They’ll prompt their customers on what to say about their ‘symptoms,’ generate a prescription and for a going rate of about $35, you have a pass to buy weed legally. And the state, city and county get nifty licensing fees, business taxes and sales taxes.So money talks, which is why changing Federal law is meaningless one way or the other.

Selling illegal narcotics is a big business too. And the same thing applies.

Hezbollah, Islamic State, the Taliban and Hamas all use the profits on illegal narcotics to fund their operations, just like other criminal groups like the Mafia, the Triads, the Mexican Cartels, The Union Corse, the Hell’s Angels and other similar groups do. The profits from illegal narcotics also fund other lucrative activities like human trafficking, sex slavery, kidnapping, murder for hire and protection rackets as well as Islamist terrorism for the usual suspects. There’s a good reason Hezbollah has its headquarters in Lebanon’s Bek’aa Valley, one of the prime drug growing regions in the world.

Some of you might recall what happened to Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder. Like most of Clinton’s appointees she was looney tunes, but she manged to get this one right. All she had to do was merely suggest we should at least look at the logistics of legalizing all narcotics and providing them free in detox clinics versus the billions we were spending on the War on Drugs, the cost of crime and the huge, swollen criminal justice and law enforcement monolith we erected as a byproduct.

I guarantee you the phone calls went out that night, not from some guy in named Guido in a sharp suit with a pinky ring but from legitimate donors who got a call from someone who got a call from someone else whom knew and owed Guido. The Democrat-dominated congress erupted and got her slapped down hard in a matter of days.

Like I said, big business and it’s all part of a chain.

Your friendly local dealer is usually part of the chain too. Unless he’s dealing in very minute volumes and goes unnoticed, sooner or later he gets a visit from the marketing reps of whomever owns the territory he’s in. And after things are properly explained to him, he’s allowed to continue operating provided he kicks a percentage back upstairs. That’s also why most independent dealers also know exactly where to get whatever other adult refreshment you might want beyond weed.

But if the idea is reducing drug consumption, we see a way that self-prohibition could work, By educating young consumers in graphic detail on exactly what their guilty thrill is paying for and what its supporting, complete with pictures, there’s an even chance of cutting down the consumption of illegal drugs substantially…by making buying them uncool and socially unacceptable to those budding lil’ social justice warriors.

The Glittering Eye: I’m of mixed minds. I think the advantages of legalization are being tremendously over-estimated and the downside risks even more tremendously under-estimated.

However, I also think that legalization is inevitable so we’d be better off devoting our energies to trying to figure out what the societal implications of legalization will be rather than to fighting it.

Well, there you have it!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum and every Tuesday morning, when we reveal the week’s 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.

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02/12/15

Of Double Standards and Triple Homicides: Media Malpractice and the North Carolina Murders

By: Benjamin Weingarten
TheBlaze

On the night of Sept. 11, 2011, three men were brutally murdered in Waltham, Massachusetts — their throats slashed and bodies covered in marijuana.

Despite the gruesome nature of the crime, which one investigator described as “the worst bloodbath” he had ever seen, the national media would have never reported on this story, let alone identified the Jewish religion of at least two of the slain, had Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Muslim and close friend of the third victim, not carried out the Boston bombing.

In fact, in spite of Tsarnaev’s ties to the victims of these yet unsolved murders, to this day articles almost specifically de-emphasize the date of the crime, the fact that as the same investigator described it, the victims’ wounds were akin to those of “an Al-Qaeda training video,” and the religion of the slain.

Contrast this story with the horrific news that three Muslims were murdered execution style in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Suzanne Askar, right, rests her head on the shoulder of Safam Mahate, a student at North Carolina State University, as they stand next to Nida Allam, far left, during a vigil for three people who were killed at a condominium near UNC-Chapel Hill, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Craig Stephen Hicks appeared in court on charges of first-degree murder in the Tuesday deaths of Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. (AP Photo/The News & Observer, Al Drago)

Unlike in the Waltham triple homicide, this story was explicitly reported as I just laid it out – a man killed three Muslims – a man, mind you, who many reports neglected to note is a militantly anti-religious atheist progressive.

In spite of the fact that stories ran across practically every major publication, with articles from The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal referring to a triple murder of Muslims, social media exploded, with individuals appalled that the crime was somehow being ignored.

The #MuslimLivesMatter hashtag, adopted from the #blacklivesmatter hashtag created in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases went viral, signaling presumably that people believe atrocities are being carried out against Muslims en masse.

The juxtaposition of these two stories is instructive when it comes to today’s media.

While we might excuse the media in the case of the Waltham homicide for originally ignoring the date, nature of murder and religious identity of the victims, given their involvement with marijuana and law enforcement’s original public hypothesis that the murder was drug related, it is telling that these facts continue to be largely ignored in coverage of the murders.

Conversely, in the case of the Chapel Hill murders, religion was explicitly injected into the story from the start, leading many readers naturally to ascribe an anti-Muslim motive to the triple homicide. Meanwhile, local police believe the murders stemmed from an altercation over a parking space.

It is ironic that in the wake of President Barack Obama’s remarks about a “random” attack by a Muslim terrorist on a Kosher supermarket — note that the White House will not call it a jihadist attack on Jews — in the case of the victims in North Carolina, again from the start they were identified as Muslims. Randomness is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

French police officers storm a kosher grocery to end a hostage situation, Paris, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015. Explosions and gunshots were heard as police forces stormed a kosher grocery in Paris where a gunman was holding at least five people hostage. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

In any event, can you think of another case where the media identified the victim(s) by religion?

Can you think of another case where the media identified the victimizer(s) by religion?

In recent instances of Muslim crimes against non-Muslims, whether an axe attack on New York Police Department officers in New York, a beheading in Oklahoma, or the systemic rape and abuse in Rotherham, almost universally the media initially and often ultimately excludes details about the Muslim identity of the attackers.

Instead we are left with euphemisms for the perpetrators, such as that they are “North African” or “Asian.”

In the case of the Middle East, where Western media reports are notoriously anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish, we get stories about Israelis killing two Arabs in a mosque, only later to include the minor detail that these two Arab terrorists were killed in an act of self defense, and then only after they terrorists had murdered five Jews in a synagogue.

One case among all others perhaps best illustrates the media’s unwillingness to put truth above narrative. In one of the most egregious and egregiously neglected stories of all, as we reported last year, Anders Breivik — the Nordic terrorist responsible for killing 77 people and injuring 319 more in a July 2011 rampage in Sweden — by his own admission committed a false-flag attack meant to discredit the counterjihadists and Zionists with whom he claimed allegiance. To this day, almost no others outlets have reported on this.

While journalists should not be selecting and/or framing stories to fit their own worldview to begin with, it would be one thing if these narratives had some basis in fact. But frequently, the evidence directly contradicts the story that the media would like to paint.

In America, according to the most recently available FBI hate crime statistics, it is Jews, not Muslims, who are the most discriminated against of all religious minorities, disproportionately targeted in a staggering 60 percent of all religion-based hate crimes, a rate four times as high as that of Muslims.

In Europe, the Jewish population has continued to plummet precipitously, with Jews from France to Great Britain leaving as anti-Semitism and Islamic supremacism have increased, sentiments that are inherently interrelated.

In Israel, it suffices to say that were its enemies to lay down its arms tomorrow, there would be peace; if Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, it would be blown to pieces.

Keen watchers of the media will note that a similar pattern of narrative-setting in reporting occurs in the coverage, or lack thereof, of black-on-white or black-on-black versus white-on-black crimes, and/or cop-on-civilian versus civilian-on-cop killings.

To adopt an Orwell saying, when it comes to the media, some victim(s)/victimizer(s) are more equal than others.

Identity matters only insofar as it serves a political narrative.

These journalistic sins of omission and commission, used to craft a political message, are antithetical to the truth-seeking purpose of the profession.

With the special rights and protections granted to the press comes an obligation to soberly and objectively inform the citizenry.

Today in America, and throughout the West, this obligation is being disgracefully dishonored.

02/7/15

Christian horses found too high

By: Olga Photoshopova
The People’s Cube

Uppity Christian horsemen from the Crusades are still
trampling modern-day Muslim pacifists.

As everyone knows, the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington is a yearly event designed to put Christians in their place and advance Islam as the national religion. At today’s breakfast, President Obama once again met the expectations of the progressive movement by telling off those uppity Christians like a true Muslim would:

“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Indeed, in these dark times of Christian Extremism, what we need is a president who can inform the world about all of the Christian atrocities throughout history for which currently living Americans are personally responsible. Having effectively airbrushed “Islamic Extremism” from the lexicon, Obama completed his sermon with a prayer towards Mecca.

Christians are hereby instructed to remove incorrect pages from their Bibles and replace them with the following corrected transcript of Jesus’ words: “Thou shalt murder gays; thou shalt enslave minorities; thou shalt bomb women and children.”

Since there isn’t an equivalent in the Quran of anything so hateful as this corrected version of Biblical history, Christians need to get off their high horses and admit that Jesus had personally instigated terrible atrocities, as proven by the Crusades and the Inquisition.

As if that weren’t enough, Jesus had the audacity to die but not stay dead, to walk around alive and kicking for forty more days, and then to fly up to heaven. Such antisocial behavior allowed Christians to start getting uppity around 33 A.D., which still continues unabated to this day.

The science is settled: there are no Islamic Extremists anywhere on Earth because President Obama has never uttered the words. Christians, on the other hand, are committing terrible atrocities daily, taking hostages, cutting off heads, blowing themselves up in public places, burning people alive, and otherwise terrorizing the peaceful and rapidly diminishing Muslim community. No verification of these facts is required simply because Obama is a genius who would never tell a lie.

President Obama is seen modeling a People-approved low-horse for those who are barely Christians, pretending to be Christians, or embarrassed by Christianity.
(Photo Credit: blurbrain.com)

It is known that President Ronald Reagan liked to ride horses – all of them high – for which he is revered among Christian Extremists. He was once even injured in a fall from his high horse. Let that be a lesson to all Christians to get off their high horses and stay off.

President Reagan’s horse was so high that in order to fit it into his Presidential Library, workers had to chop off its legs. This picture gives a whole new meaning to “Reagan’s quarterhorse.” Too high a horse would not be a humble memorial for a Christian anyway.

Here, President Reagan is seen assisting his wife Nancy off of her high horse.

In view of the above, our scientists at the People’s Cube Karl Marx Treatment Center have developed recommendations on how to get Christians off their high horses efficiently: hack off the high horse’s legs or replace them with miniature low horses.

A standard horse owned by a Christian should be no taller than 36 inches. All horse-riding Christians will be subject to measuring with a pole similar to those used on amusement park rides.

This Christian got off her high horse, and the world is a lot better off.

Compliance with these measures is expected to level the playing field, bringing Christians closer to the ground where the peaceful Muslim crowd congregates.

And finally, as we discussed the subject of Christian high horses at our latest meeting, we received a few questions from confused members of the audience. People wanted to know whether the horse in question was a Christian, what exactly the definition of “high” was, and what if President Obama really meant to say that the horse was high from marijuana and the Christian should get off to avoid contact.

We will make sure to ask the White House spokesperson, Josh Earnest, for clarification on what the President really meant. Until then, the debate gallops on.

This Christian white male needs to get off his high horse. It’s offensive to Muslims.

12/13/14

Media Struggle to Save Obama, Not the Country

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A story in Thursday’s Washington Post about establishing Obama’s “foreign policy legacy” goes a long way toward explaining why the Senate Democrats and the media have been trashing the Bush administration’s very productive enhanced interrogation program as “torture.”

Titled “Obama’s foreign policy plans collide with wars abroad and politics at home,” the story by Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin made it clear that CIA director John Brennan’s defense of the agency had thwarted Obama’s plan “to move the country beyond what he [Obama] has described as the fearful excesses of the post-9/11 era.” While Obama has banned what he calls “torture,” he has failed to close the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Gitmo), established by the Bush administration to house terrorist suspects. Other problems outlined in the Post article include the continuing war in Afghanistan and a new war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS.

What Obama calls “torture” is what the media call “torture.” If you needed any more proof of a pro-Obama media bias, just look at how regularly the personalities on CNN, supposedly more moderate than MSNBC, have adopted his terms of the debate. This is the media’s way of saying that Obama was right and that it’s good he has banned this way of getting information from terrorists. Never mind that Obama’s way of murder through drone strikes is decidedly more “harsh.” Bush grilled them, Obama kills them.

Without a foreign policy “legacy” of some kind, Obama’s two terms will look like a failure and the Democrats will be doomed in 2016.

Domestically, his only real “accomplishment” at this point looks like the Eric Holder policy of suspending enforcement of federal marijuana laws. This will be a “legacy” of interest to fellow pothead members of Obama’s “Choom Gang” in Hawaii, and the emerging cannabis industry. But it’s doubtful most people will appreciate this historic development.

Obama’s signature “accomplishment” in domestic affairs, Obamacare, has been exposed as a massive fraud and deception. According to a new CBS News poll, race relations have dramatically deteriorated under the first black president. It’s true he is moving forward unconstitutionally with amnesty for illegal aliens. But House Republicans are promising to do something about that next year. The economy is still lackluster. So foreign policy is really his only hope of doing anything positive, and he’s running into the facts of life there, too. The terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is only one part of his legacy. The legacy of that attack hurts both Obama and Hillary Clinton, his former Secretary of State and likely 2016 Democratic candidate. And it’s doubtful that an Iran with nuclear weapons would qualify as a positive foreign policy legacy for Obama, either.

One can suppose that Obama will try to claim he was the one who got Osama bin Laden. But Brennan made it clear on Thursday that the enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) from the Bush-era played a role in killing the terrorist kingpin. Brennan said, “It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against bin Laden. Again, intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used in that. Again, I am not going to attribute that to the use of the EITs; just going to state as a matter of fact, the information that they provided was used.”

What Brennan is saying is that he cannot pinpoint with any degree of accuracy that a particular form of interrogation led to the terrorists divulging certain information. That’s because nobody was taking precise notes on when terrorist X or Y said one thing or another at any particular time in the interrogation process. But the record is clear that the EITs contributed to the terrorists getting to the point where they decided to spill their guts.

CNN, which is increasingly trying to sound like MSNBC, headlined the Brennan news conference as “Brennan: No Proof Harsh Tactics Led to Useful Info.” How can his phrase that “intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used” to get bin Laden be interpreted as “proof” that it wasn’t useful? CNN was lying. CNN gave the opposite impression of what he actually said.

Before he held his news conference, Brennan met with Obama and was probably instructed to finesse his language somewhat so that a certain amount of ambiguity could be left in some minds. CNN and other media tried to take advantage of that for Obama’s sake. Still, Brennan’s statement was a vindication of the Bush policy. That means that any attempt by Obama to claim credit for the death of bin Laden will ring hollow. There goes his foreign policy legacy.

These facts help explain the desperation of the media and why they have adopted Obama’s rhetoric on “torture.” They must figure that if they use the term often enough, many people will assume that the techniques were, in fact, torture. In order to drive that point home, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News used the Brennan news conference to mention some of the techniques. She referred to “waterboarding, near drowning, slamming people against the wall, hanging them in stress positions, confining them in small boxes or coffins, threatening them with drills, waving guns around their head as they are blindfolded…”

She could have mentioned the horrible deaths suffered by those in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or Flight 93 on 9/11. She could have mentioned the 9/11 jumpers—the people who jumped from the towers rather than be burned to death.

But Mitchell didn’t think it was worth mentioning any of that.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper have been fixated by a phrase in the Senate Democratic report on “rectal rehydration.” Tapper called it a form of torture. In fact, it’s a medical procedure to keep the terrorists alive when they resist sustenance. Would Tapper have preferred that the terrorists be allowed to die? Then the program would have come in for even stronger criticism. This goes to show that all of this discussion is just another attempt to tarnish the Bush presidency and make Obama look good by comparison. Tapper said he was dumbfounded by the talk of “rectal rehydration.”

No, he was just dumb.

Obama, the Senate Democrats and the media look foolish and unpatriotic. It looks like they are deliberately playing into the hands of America’s enemies in order to score partisan political points. Obama has abandoned proven techniques to get information from, and about, terrorists and has adopted in their place a policy of killing the terrorists and their families through drone strikes that don’t yield any intelligence data at all. How on earth does this make any sense?

From an objective point of view, does a Hellfire missile hitting a human being look more or less “harsh” than waving a gun over someone’s head, turning on a drill, or pouring water on a terrorist?

The answer should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. But most of our media are so determined to save Obama’s presidency that they can’t think clearly.

The Post and other media are desperate to construct a “legacy” for America’s first black president. The real concern should be saving the country, not Obama’s presidency.