Israeli commandos boarded ships of a flotilla — dubbed an “aid mission” of pro-Palestinian activists — headed for the blockaded Gaza strip. Fighting broke out and at least 10 people have been reported killed, with the death toll likely to rise.
Trouble immediately broke out:
One of the commandos told reporters he descended by rope from a helicopter onto one of the six ships in the convoy and was immediately attacked by a group of people waiting for them.
“They beat us with metal sticks and knives,” he said. “There was live fire at some point against us.” (more…)
UPDATE: O’Keefe promises more undercover investigations. Full update after the jump.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Four conservative activists accused of trying to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses. The most prominent activist, James O’Keefe, was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service and fined a $1,500 fine. The 25-year-old is known for wearing a pimp costume in a video that embarrassed ACORN.
Magistrate Daniel Knowles III sentenced the three others to two years probation, 75 hours of community service and fined them $1,500.
The FBI has said O’Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of two men who posed as telephone repairmen and asked to see the phones. O’Keefe spokesman Denis Calabrese disputed an earlier allegation that a fourth suspect waited in a car with a listening device, which was not mentioned in court records.
I have just received word that the New York Times is preparing to go public with a list of names of Americans covertly working in Afghanistan providing force protection for our troops, as well as the rest of our Coalition Forces. If the Times actually sees this through, the red ink they are drowning in will be nothing compared to the blood their entire organization will be covered with. Make no mistake, the Times is about to cause casualty rates in Afghanistan to skyrocket. Each and every American should be outraged.
As chronicled here, here, here, and here the Central Intelligence Agency via the New York Times has been waging a nasty proxy war against the Department of Defense over its use of former military and intelligence personnel to do what the CIA is both incapable and unwilling to do: gather the much needed intelligence that keeps our troops safe.
According to Washington Post columnist, David Ignatius, “[T]he U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan,” and the senior military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, Maj Gen Michael T. Flynn went so far as to publish a stunning report calling for “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself.” (more…)
Admittedly, Media Matters doesn’t have a deep well of credibility, but even I was shocked by the sloppiness of this hack-attack yesterday. Their headline:
Nate Silver takes the Hot Air out of Cato’s stimulus attack
And opening line:
Right-wing blogger Allahpundit put some Hot Air behind a piece of Cato Institute research that sought to attack stimulus spending as unfairly tilted in favor of Democratic congressional districts.
Except, you know, it wasn’t a Cato study. It was a Mercatus Center study. If Media Matters had even bothered to look at the actual study, pausing just a few moments from launching their attack, they would have seen that. Here is the study, technically a ‘working paper,’ but the title page is very clear, Mercatus Center: George Mason University.
Media Matters also identifies the study’s author, Big Government Contributor Veronique de Rugy, as a “Cato Scholar.” But, their own link for de Rugy makes it clear that she is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and used to work at Cato. AKA, in the past. Does Media Matters even follow their own links?
Sure, these may seem like minor points, but getting obvious facts so completely wrong is indicative of the drive-by, hit-and-run style of analysis employed by Media Matters.
There is, actually, a much more substantial error on their part.
I am calling to all of you freedom-loving Americans to come once again to Washington D.C. to gather on the Capitol steps on Saturday, at 12 o’clock noon.
We must come by the thousands.
Speaker Pelosi will stop at nothing to fulfill her corrupt conquests. She will bring all of the corrupt ACORN liars to try to bully all the Democrats that may be having pangs of guilt knowing quite surely what their votes can and will do. If they’re bullied into saying “yes,” it will destroy America.
Join me and Rep. Michele Bachmann in Washington DC at 12 noon EST so we can give all the Democrats who know what the end result will be the courage to say: “No, do not pass this destructive bill.” (more…)
It looks like Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes is on track to win another endorsement from ACORN!
This week, Hynes announced that “no criminality has been found” after his investigation of the videotapes made by investigative journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, which show ACORN employees counseling the pair on getting a mortgage for a house of prostitution.
(They got a choice of government loans: Phat Fannie Mae, Prince Freddie Mac or Barney Fresh Daddy Frank … aka “Sir Fix-A-Lot.”)
I’m just glad to know that Hynes conducted a thorough “investigation” first. Who did he have screen the videotapes, Gov. Paterson?
If his investigators had actually watched the videotapes, they would have found ACORN employees apparently advising a pimp and prostitute on how to defraud mortgage lenders, deposit prostitution money in a bank, hide money from the government and avoid detection while running a whorehouse with teenage girls from El Salvador.
I’m not a lawyer — oh, wait, yes, I am — but I count approximately a half-dozen state law crimes being discussed on those tapes, from money laundering to advancing prostitution.
In the weeks leading up to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last week, there was a sidebar skirmish involving two of the CPAC sponsors. The new gay conservative group, GOProud.org, which was formed in 2009, wanted to make a splash at CPAC and introduce itself to the conservative movement. But long-time sponsor, Liberty University, would have none of it:
Obviously as an exhibitor or participant, you don’t necessarily have to think that everyone agrees with you, and some people might even work against you [notes Liberty Law School Dean Mat] Staver. But as a co-sponsor, even though not everybody would have the same mission, not everyone would agree with the same tactics, and some would actually focus on economics whereas others might focus on social issues and others might focus on national defense – the fact is they’re all conservative in nature. You wouldn’t expect, however, a co-sponsor to actively work to undermine another co-sponsor, and that is in fact what GOProud does.
Liberty dropped, GOProud stayed, and CPAC took some heat. So coming into CPAC, GOProud knew its presence would be controversial and their members were prepared to address opponents at the exhibit booth. But last Friday, when a series of student activists spoke at the podium, no one imagined the undercurrent would erupt the way it did.
Alexander McCobin addressed the GOProud/Liberty sponsor issue head-on and praised CPAC for being inclusive and standing up for the principles of freedom and liberty. McCobin was met with praise and applause for his remarks. (more…)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The conservative online news entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart is, for the moment, doing little to dispel stereotypes about bloggers. During a recent visit to his home on the west side of Los Angeles, Breitbart, 41, is working from his own basement. Barefoot. At the beck and call of his own kids.
But that basement is light and airy, with a decent view of the city. A young assistant works there with Breitbart to help funnel wire service stories to Breitbart.com, his main news aggregation site. And his reach, thanks to a brawling rhetorical style and a protege who taped the undercover ACORN videos last year, is only expanding.
Over the past year, Breitbart has hired editors to run a new network of conservative blogs called BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com and BigJournalism.com. No matter the focus, the media are a prime target throughout. (more…)
Today is the day that I have been invited to go on MSNBC for the very first time. At no point during the ACORN story was I put on the hot seat to defend the work of James O’Keefe. My thesis from day one has been that the mainstream media is biased in favor of the left and MSNBC is its most obvious case study.
So when MSNBC led the charge on Tuesday against James O’Keefe when he and three others were arrested in New Orleans at Senator Landrieu’s office, it came as no surprise that the cable network seized upon a narrative that presumed O’Keefe’s guilt, falsely extrapolated that he was being charged with felony wiretapping and instantaneously coined and repeated endlessly the new buzz phase, “Watergate Jr.”
Thus it came as no surprise to me that Keith Olbermann’s super sub, David Shuster, called me early Wednesday. ”Watergate Jr.” pushed MSNBC to send Shuster down to New Orleans to own the destruction-by-media of James O’Keefe and anyone in his proximity. I immediately told Shuster that I had been getting emails about his absurd, over-the-top and rush-to-judgment journalism. He told me that I had him confused with Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann, that he has “no horse in this race.” He asked that I come on his show and that he would give me a fair interview. He proceeded to send me the following emails to formalize the request. See below (emphasis mine):
As you see, Shuster is attempting to lure me into this story based upon the false premise of his objective neutrality. Notice he says, “As I said, I don’t have a horse in this race.” A simple Google search of David Shuster and James O’Keefe immediately finds that Shuster went into a Twitter frenzy to tar and feather James O’Keefe and propagated what are now provably false lies about the Landrieu case.
“We have no knowledge about or connection to any alleged acts and events involving James O’Keefe at Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. We only just learned about the alleged incident this afternoon. We have no information other than what has been reported publicly by the press. Accordingly, we simply are not in a position to make any further comment.”
A conservative activist who posed as a pimp to target the community-organizing group ACORN and the son of a federal prosecutor were among four people arrested by the FBI and accused of trying to interfere with phones at Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office.
Activist James O’Keefe, 25, was already in Landrieu’s New Orleans office Monday when Robert Flanagan and Joseph Basel, both 24, showed up claiming to be telephone repairmen, U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office said Tuesday. Letten says O’Keefe recorded the two with his cell phone.
Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.
The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young. Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)
It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.
The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.
Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success. (more…)
Is this the Boston Globe’s “Dewey Defeats Truman” moment? (See Big Journalism’s header, above, for the memorable Chicago Tribune goof.)
The Hub’s ultra-liberal broadsheet today “inadvertently” posted an interactive election-results dummy on its website, boston.com — which, amazingly, forecast a Coakley victory.
Queried by the Boston Phoenix, the city’s alternative newspaper, a spokesman for the Globe replied:
AP was testing an election data feed to its Massachusetts clients. During corresponding tests at our end, the feed of AP’s hypothetical test data was inadvertently posted for a few minutes on a single subsection page within our site. As soon as the error was discovered, it was removed. We regret the mishap.
Take a look at the “mishap” for yourself from these screen shots. (more…)
In case you’ve ever wondered why you never got the straight story on Islam directly after Sept. 11, and still haven’t, and why the media seems in the tank for jihad, here’s a clue.
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) issued this directive a couple of weeks after 9/11; for sheer propaganda, their “Diversity Guidelines” are hard to beat. In fact, the enemy who attacked our country in an attempt to bring it down may just as well have been writing the narrative.
The “guidelines,” adopted at the Society’s national convention on October 6, 2001, urges journalists to “take steps against racial profiling in their coverage of the war on terrorism and to reaffirm their commitment to use language that is informative and not inflammatory.”
Will the Chicago Machine corruption story break wide open in 2010?
If you think Chicago crook and long-time Obama buddy Antoin Rezko is serving out his jail sentence, think again.
Antoin “Tony” Rezko is a forgotten man. During the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton tried to make Barack Obama’s connection with Rezko an issue.
On June 4, 2008, Rezko was convicted in federal court on 16 charges of corruption. For a day or so, he was big news.
After that, a national media that ignored Obama’s connections with the corrupt Chicago political machine lost all interest in Rezko. After all, there was an “historic” election to influence, and anything that made Obama’s shady past the subject of a national conversation had to be squelched. (more…)
Yesterday, I reported on the horrific rape of a two-year old by Keith Winfield in 2005 in Massachusetts. Then-Middlesex County DA Martha Coakley failed to take action to bring charges against Mr. Winfield. Today, the story takes another turn. In part II of the Curling-Iron Rapist Case, let’s look at two of the key players in the case: The lawyer for the family of the raped toddler, Larry Frisoli, and his brother and legal partner, Frank Frisoli.
Larry Frisoli was a highly-respected and high profile lawyer who had handled the wrongful-death suit in the famous and horrifying Jeffrey Curley case, where an 8-year Jeffrey was savagely kidnapped off the street and brutally raped and murdered. Larry represented Jeffrey’s family, and won a symbolic $328 million wrongful death suite against the perpetrators in 2000. The perpetrators went to prison for life and were broke. That same year, Larry Frisoli was named “Lawyer of the Year” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.
Attorney Larry Frisoli
Fast forward to 2005, when Larry Frisoli was called by the family of the raped toddler to represent them. After the mother of the raped toddler took the child to the hospital, the hospital notified DSS that the child had been molested and or abused. The DSS came to the parent’s home, and tried to take the child away; thinking the parents had perpetrated the crime. The parents called family friend and attorney Larry Frisoli to sort out the madness.
As we now know, and what seemed clear to Larry and his clients very early in the case, was that the child had been left in the care of Policeman Keith Winfield, the uncle of the child, the prior day. Officer Winfield, during his hour alone with his 23-month old niece, raped her with a hot curling iron. (Read the full story at BigGovernment.com)
2009 was the breakout year for the irrepressible Andrew Breitbart, 40, a conservative firebrand operating deep in enemy territory in Los Angeles, and the sky will be his limit in 2010. A regular presence on Fox News and a Washington Times columnist, Breitbart cut his teeth working for Matt Drudge’s eponymous website and also had a spell with the Left-wing Huffington Post. He took on Hollywood in his group blog site BigHollywood and broke the ACORN scandal when the young unknown filmmakers Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe approached him with undercover footage of employees of the Left-wing community organising group condoning under-age prostitution by illegal immigrants. The mainstream media were slow to pick the story up but eventually they could not ignore it.
The public editor of the New York Times eventually conceded that his newspaper needed “to be alert” to such stories “or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself”. Outspoken and fearless, Breitbart has extensive contacts throughout journalism and revels in partisan combat, venturing onto shows like Real Time with Bill Maher which most conservatives steer clear off because they view it – accurately – as a hostile, liberal forum. Has also founded BigGovernment and BigJournalism sites while his Breitbart.com is a major driver of web traffic. Deeply versed in the potential of the internet and an accomplished talk radio host, Breitbart has issued a clarion call for conservatives to seize back the media. ““I want to be the kingmaker,” he said recently. “I want to find the best voices so that ideas and truth that have been suppressed for too long can find their way to a mass audience.”
When I arrived the first time and walked through the streets, the people stared at me cold. At first glance, it was an unwelcoming place.
My dear friend Jean-Marc de Matteis, whom I hope is alive and well tonight, smirked a bit and said, “The thing with Haitian people is that they’ve been through a lot. It’s a hard life here and people wear it on their faces. But that’s not the true nature of Haitian people. Watch what happens if you make eye contact and simply say ‘bonjour’ to someone.”
I did. And I always got a smile. Sometimes a quick flash of a smile and back to a glare, but the glare became an easier glare. Sometimes they’d smile a massive smile and say “bonjour” back. It’s an amazing feeling of getting a smile 100 times out of 100 attempts. The country really was a welcoming place.
I don’t exaggerate when I tell you I said “bonjour” to almost everyone with whom I made eye contact. And Port-au-Prince is a crowded place, which means a lot of people to greet. My friend and interpreter, Alain Charles, who, as of this moment I cannot locate — and it’s taking me enormous restraint to not cry — took notice and would often laugh whenever I said “bonjour.” To him it seemed like I was kind of insane. Like I would if he tried it in L. A. or New York City. But I loved doing it. (more…)
ANCHORAGE,Alaska (AP) - Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, will take her conservative message to Fox News as a regular commentator, the cable channel announced Monday.
“I am thrilled to be joining the great talent and management team at Fox News,” Palin said in a statement posted on the network’s Web site. “It’s wonderful to be part of a place that so values fair and balanced news.”
Fox said that according to the multiyear deal, Palin will offer political commentary and analysis. She also will host occasional episodes of Fox News “Real American Stories,” a series featuring true inspirational stories about Americans.
Considering the fact that Ms. Palin recently ran a close second behind Sec. of State Hilary Clinton as the most admired woman in America, and considering that Ms. Palin’s book has sold astronomically well since its release on Nov. 17th, it’s a no-brainer that a network would pick her up. It’s not a bad idea to have such a popular woman affiliated with your brand. (more…)
If I’d known my fall and winter season would consist of zero 10-hour beach days, only two games of beach football and a single surf session, I would have for sure given those ACORN videos a little more thought.
Yep, September 10, 2009 hit me like a freight train; that day marked only my second trip to NYC. The first trip was a 6-hour visit a few weeks earlier that consisted of my dashing around the city in stilettos and trashy clothes gathering footage of ACORN workers acting shady.
Wake up, America
Needless to say, this go-around was a little different. Now, producers were interrogating me over at the Fox New Headquarters and I was having my hair and makeup done by professionals. All while watching myself in leather top and giant hoop earrings on multiple television screens, and begging God that I could keep my cool on national television with Glenn Beck.
That was the beginning of a raucous adventure, a whirlwind of a week between Sept 10-16 that’d make any type-A curl up in a ball and beg for mercy, and might’ve led to my insanity had I allowed myself to get caught up in the chaos it caused. But I was so absorbed in the moment and focused on getting the ACORN videos, and the truth of our story, out to the public that nothing fazed me. Plus, all the new experiences and people were extremely intriguing and I wanted to be sure and soak it all in. (more…)
Two weeks ago the U.K. Guardian gleefully reported that the self-proclaimed "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, the best-selling writer on the environment, professor, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, had made a serious acquiescence to the global warming climate change global climate disruption movement that could...
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Got a Tip?