Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
During his explanation of what motivates the hatred towards Robert Murdoch's
flagship TV show —
Hating Fox News, there's a reason for it — Bill O'Reilly asks
What would happen if Fox News were to disappear (08:05-08:30).
Taking its cue from across the Atlantic, Le Monde had introduced a fact-checking department,
Les Décodeurs, to get back to facts.
'
Welcome to the United States!
One night a year, all crimes are allowed.
In France,
the Purge films are called American Nightmare — just so you know where the really inhumane and monstrous people live and in what country the real danger to humanity comes from…
FOR ALL THE VAST INTELLIGENCE RESOURCES at his fingertips,the most powerful man in the world claims he gets a lot of his first dose of inside info on scandals and controversy — like deaths at VA facilities, IRS targeting, Fast and Furious gun-running, the Air Force One NYC flyover, and now Clinton emails — from outside news sources.
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved a propagandistically named “net neutrality” plan by a party-line vote of three to two
writes Benny Huang.… surely a momentous decision like this one can’t be made within the executive branch, behind closed doors, by a group of unelected bureaucrats? And surely they can’t keep the plan secret until it passes?
Constitutionally speaking, they can’t. According to Article I of the Constitution, the power to create law is vested in the legislative branch. Legislators are not authorized to abdicate their responsibilities to a board, much less to the executive branch, which is where the FCC resides. A decision this important requires a full hearing in the halls of Congress with a vote by our elected representatives.
But that’s soooooo twentieth century. If the events of recent months are any indicator, the United States has officially transcended the messy process of legislating. We simply don’t decide contentious issues in Congress anymore. That’s what President Obama and his proxies are for.
The trend didn’t begin in recent months, or even with the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, but it has nonetheless picked up speed like a runaway train since the Republican landslide of 2014. The president, if you can still call him that, is now facing some tepid opposition in Congress, which apparently entitles him to bypass that body entirely. It’s their fault for opposing his agenda. If they weren’t so “obstructionist” or “dysfunctional,” they’d give the president whatever he wants, no questions asked. The same principle does not apply to all presidents, of course, only this one.
… there’s the issue of President Obama’s executive amnesty for illegal aliens, which is clearly illegal, and he knows it. He even said so on Univision, warning Hispanic voters that there’s a process to changing laws and the process matters. “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case…. There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.” That was before he decided that the power was in fact his to wield. Kind of makes you wonder what took him so long to use it?The Obama Administration’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that it’s merely exercising a little prosecutorial “discretion.” Such a thing does exist but it must be exercised with extreme caution lest justice devolve into the arbitrary rule of men, which I’m beginning to suspect is this president’s goal.
Actually changing the law would require congressional action but, the administration posits, since the administration is not changing the law, there’s no need. Unfortunately, President Obama said something quite different when a group of pro-illegal immigration hecklers interrupted him in Chicago. “You’re absolutely right that there have been significant numbers of deportations… But what you are not paying attention to is the fact that I just took an action to change the law,” Obama said.
Change the law? Can presidents just do that? Apparently no one ever taught this supposed constitutional scholar that the president doesn’t get to do whatever he wants just because he thinks he has right on his side. But alas, the lesson he’s learned in Washington is quite the opposite. He’s seen that he can change immigration laws and ban a popular type of ammunition with the snap of his fingers, so what’s to stop him from regulating the internet? No one has yet stopped him. I’ve resigned myself to believe that no one ever will.
“The Secret Weapon: All of Us,” by Nicholas D. Kristof (column, Aug. 29), made my blood boil. I am a small-business owner and, yes, my clients get to the store on roads built by everyone, and we use public services paid for by everyone.Yet, none of these workers had to use their houses as collateral and none of them had to worry about paying for the health benefits of their employees, and not everyone is taking advantage of tax loopholes. This unrealistic view of the average business owner by the media drains my spirit.
So, with Hillary firmly embroiled in a private email account scandal, what story does
AOL choose to lead its Clinton family news?
a simple one-line link to a Fox News story on the Benghazi probe.) 
Update 2: perhaps someone at AOL reads No Pasarán? Or, perhaps, Instapundit? In any case, within hours of
the Glenn Reynolds re-post, America OnLine effectively and suddenly put the Hillary story (the email article, not the pantsuit article) in its number 1 position. Where it remained for… a few hours, before disappearing entirely from the 40-section news department.
Politifact’s 2014 “Lie of the Year” was proven last week not to have been a lie at all
quips Benny Huang on Patriot Update;or at least the portion attributed to conservative columnist George Will. Last September, Politifact “corrected” Will when he tweeted, “Some doctors say Ebola can be transmitted through the air by a ‘sneeze or some cough.’” His statement was later rolled up with other Ebola-related claims and deemed the biggest fib of 2014.
Not that Will’s statement was very definitive. “Some doctors” could mean only a handful, but even so, Jon Greenberg of Politifact couldn’t let it stand. His rebuttal to Will was rather hard to follow as it meandered quickly into the realm of irrelevancy. Greenberg also admitted that he was unsure which doctors Will was quoting.
… Besides common sense, there’s another reason to believe that Ebola could in fact be transmitted by cough and sneezes—the fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) said in October that the Ebola virus could be transmitted exactly that way, provided that the person on the receiving end has an open cut or sore. So yes, “some doctors” do make that claim and they work at the WHO.
This isn’t the first time that Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” turned out not to be a lie at all. Its 2012 “Lie of the Year” was a claim made by candidate Mitt Romney that the bailed-out semi-American automaker Chrysler had plans to build a Jeep factory in China. Politifact rebuffed Romney, citing a statement from a Chrysler spokesman who declared, “Jeep has no intentions of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.” Apparently, the whole thing was debunked because a corporate spokesman denied it, which is an interesting standard of proof that I’d wager Politifact employs selectively.
Then, in January of 2013, Chrysler and its parent company Fiat announced plans to open a new factory in Guangzhou, China. Which is exactly what Romney said.
Just don’t accuse Politifact of having a partisan agenda. They hate that. It’s not that they consistently side with the Democrats, it’s just that the Democrats are always right. Or at least most of the time. Since Politifact started giving out “Lie of the Year” awards in 2009, it has awarded it to conservative or Republican claims four times, often for inconsequential statements, and at least twice for statements that turned out to be true.
It awarded its “Lie of the Year” to liberal or Democratic claims only twice. Surprisingly, it even gave Obama’s “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” fib its “Lie of the Year” Award in 2013. The difference is that Obama’s lie really was a big fat whopper that everyone knew to be false but repeated endlessly in order to get Obamacare passed.
In any case, fact checking has gotten to be rather absurd. What was supposed to be a nonpartisan exercise in discerning the truth through a haze of competing claims has become nothing but partisan hackery.
It isn’t even honest partisan hackery. It’s liberals pretending not to be liberals, which I’ve noticed they do a lot. “Fact checking” is nothing more than reliably liberal mouthpieces going to bat for the Democrats while pretending to be umpires calling balls and strikes.
The American journalistic establishment, you see, claims to value objectivity.
… Fact checking is arguably the most corrupt business in America, second perhaps only to personal injury lawyers. The little charade fact checkers play, in which they pretend to help readers navigate a sea of chicanery, is really getting quite tiresome.
Ain't that true? Can't the biggest drama queen of all be found in the White House? [Barack Obama]Related: The Modus Operandi — The Vicious Circle
of Crises, Or, How the Drama Queens Operate
PS: Do I doubt that Obama is patriotic and loves America?
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will probably be disappointed when his state’s most infamous cop killer is not extradited from Cubasighs Benny Huang on Patriot Update.
Since the Obama Administration announced its intentions last month to normalize relations with the “workers’ paradise” of the Caribbean, Governor Christie has asked the administration to put pressure on Cuba to extradite Joanne Chesimard, also known by her African nom de guerre Assata Shakur,a black militant convicted of murdering state trooper Werner Foerster. She escaped from prison in 1979 and later fled to Cuba where she has been sheltered ever since.
The Obama Administration seems to be paying lip service to the Chesimard issue, claiming that “the return of fugitives is one of the issues on the U.S-Cuban agenda,” according to a USA Today article from David Jackson. Frankly, their reassurances sound like more of this administration’s empty promises. The State Department should demand that Chesimard be extradited as a precondition of diplomatic negotiations. I say this as someone who believes that our “talk to the hand” foreign policy toward Cuba needs to change. We should absolutely open up to Cuba, but we can’t have relations with them while they harbor miscreants like Chesimard.
Yet I won’t hold my breath waiting for President Obama to press his advantage to bring a cop killer to justice. After all, if Obama had an older sister she’d look like Assata Shakur, which tells me that Obama will side with her by default. He doesn’t have all the facts, nor does he ever, but he knows that the police acted stupidly…or something.
… President Obama is undoubtedly cut from the same reflexive, cop-hating cloth as the congresswomen [Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, both Democrats from the People’s Republic of California, were actually embarrassed to have voted for a 1998 resolution calling upon Cuba to extradite Chesimard], if only a little more cagey about it. I predict that he will purposely fail to bring Chesimard to justice and then pretend that he tried his hardest but it just wasn’t meant to be.
President Obama is (or was), after all, a close friend of Bill Ayers, a left-wing terrorist whose Weather Underground group bombed NYPD headquarters, among other acts of terrorism targeting police. Obama has repeatedly denied the relationship, insisting that Ayers was just some guy in the neighborhood, but Ayers himself described Obama as a “family friend” in an updated edition of his terrorist memoir “Fugitive Days” that was published after Obama was safely elected in 2008. In the same book, Ayers also admitted hosting an Obama fundraiser at his home, something which Obama supporters had dismissed as right-wing conspiracy theories.
Ayers belonged to a movement that spoke openly of “offing pigs,” rhetoric that was not unusual in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This fact has been erased from history so that the era could be remembered as a time when utopian peace activists employed nonviolence to defeat the skull-cracking reactionary establishment. But it wasn’t all peace and love. As the Yippee prankster Abbie Hoffman once said, “I think killing a cop can be an act of love.” This from a man who was a squishy liberal compared to the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. The fact that Hoffman could say that and still maintain his good standing with the progressive community speaks volumes.
The quickest way to achieve celebrity status among chic leftists is to blast a cop. Ray Luc Levasseur, Leonard Peltier, Huey Newton, and Mumia Abu Jamal are but a few of the Left’s favorite cop killers. Most leftists would never touch a police officer, of course, but only because they’re chicken excrement, hence all of the jock-sniffing they do when they find an actual cop killer. They’re like teenage girls at a Beatles concert circa 1964, only not nearly as composed.
… Even supposed examples of unwarranted violence by police, cited by leftists as part of a pattern of police brutality, are actually examples of violence against police. Poor Michael Brown, the “gentle giant” of Ferguson is dead today because he tried and failed to murder a patrolman with his own gun. Yet Brown is portrayed as the victim, his myth padded with now debunked lies about being shot in the back while his hands were raised. When the Left inverts reality to the extent that a cop is guilty of murder because he fought for his life when someone else was trying to murder him, that tells you a lot about how these people think. The only good cop is a dead cop.
… The belief system of the Left today is so twisted and bloodthirsty that it excuses and even glorifies those who gun down police officers.
Global humanitarian reasons for current U.S. immigration are tested in this updated version of immigration author and journalist Roy Beck's colorful presentation of data from the World Bank and U.S. Census Bureau. The 1996 version of this immigration gumballs presentation has been one of the most viewed immigration policy presentations on the internet.
NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically just America and seeks to educate the public about the effects of high levels of immigration on U.S. overpopulation, the environment, jobs, and wages. We use government data to conduct research on the impacts of U.S. population growth, consumption, sprawl, and current levels of immigration and educate the public, opinion leaders and policy makers on the results of those and other studies.See also their new ad
Overshadowed by the fighting in Ukraine, another armed conflict in the former Soviet Union — between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh — has escalated with deadly ferocity in recent months, killing dozens of soldiers on each side and pushing the countries perilously close to open war.In the New York Times, David M Herszenhorn writes that the
most recent clashes prompted an unusually pointed rebuke by international mediators who met on Monday in Krakow, Poland, with the Azerbaijani foreign minister, Elmar Mammadyarov.“The rise in violence that began last year must stop,” the mediators, from France, Russia and the United States, said in a joint statement, adding, “We called on Azerbaijan to observe its commitments to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. We also called on Armenia to take all measures to reduce tensions.”Instead, the violence has continued.
writes Benny Huang.Immediately following the [Chapel Hill] murders, the internet buzzed with speculation that the victims—Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha—had been targeted because they were Muslims
Noting that Craig Hicks seems to be affiliated with United Atheists of America and that the IB Times reports that his "Facebook Likes included the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye 'The Science Guy,' Neil deGrasse Tyson, 'Gay Marriage' groups and similar progressive pages", Eagle Rising's Tim Brown called the killer nothing less than a "disgusting atheist."Early assumptions were that [Craig Hicks] must have been a right-winger and a Christian, presumably because he’s white and from the “Bible Belt.” (Anyone who thinks Chapel Hill is part of the Bible Belt obviously hasn’t been there lately.)
Slowly the truth came out—Hicks, as it turns out, is on the political Left and a self-described “anti-theist” to boot. Whatever his beef with Islam may be,this acolyte of Richard Dawkins also harbors animus against all religions. His Facebook page sums up his attitude toward people of faith: “Of course I want religion to go away. I don’t deny you your right to believe whatever you’d like; but I have the right to point out that it’s ignorant and dangerous as long as your baseless superstitions keep killing people.” [Emphasis original.]
Craig Hicks’s wife, Karen Hicks, claimed that the victims’ religion was incidental to the crime, which she says actually arose from a long-standing parking dispute … It sounded as if Mrs. Hicks was desperately trying to obfuscate her husband’s true motive in order to shield him from accusations of bigotry, or worse, from federal hate crimes charges.
Yet other residents of the same apartment complex where the shooting took place confirm Karen Hicks’s version of events, saying that Mr. Hicks was absolutely obsessed with residents parking in their assigned spaces. A local towing company said that Hicks’s requests to tow unknown cars got to be so repetitive that they eventually refused to respond to his calls. He also had a reputation for being loud and aggressive. Residents reportedly held a meeting to discuss what to do about this troublesome man.
Eagle Rising's Tim Brown adds that they… Unfortunately, under federal law, the killer’s motive makes all the difference in the world. We have a thing in this country called “hate crimes,” you see, which is an utterly insipid category that really shouldn’t exist. If Craig Hicks murdered three people because they were Muslims then he will face federal charges and, theoretically at least, a stiffer sentence. If he murdered them for some other reason, he won’t.
A harsher sentence may not even be possible in this case, as Hicks stands a chance of being sentenced to death. How do you top that? Yet hate crimes charges may still be filed because it’s not enough to demonstrate that Craig Hicks killed these people; the court still has to determine if he hated them while he was doing it. Such is the stupidity of hate crimes laws.
… Nowhere in America is assault legal unless the victim happens to be unborn, though that’s another column entirely. It doesn’t matter if that person is black or white, a man or a woman, a libertarian, Unitarian, vegetarian, or Rotarian. Such laws don’t distinguish between people based on their race or their bedroom behavior. Nor should they.
But hate crimes laws do. They require jurors to peer into the mind of the assailant and determine if he was motivated by “hate.” Hating someone for parking in the wrong space doesn’t count. If he wasn’t motivated by “hate,” or if his hate was directed against groups that don’t appear on Eric Holder’s list of recognized victims, then the perp receives a lesser sentence and the feds don’t get involved.
That’s not justice.
call it a "hate crime." Let me ask anyone, is there any other crime? Is there a crime that occurs out of love? Every crime that occurs against another person made in the image of God is a crime that is born of hate, period. True, it may have been because Hicks despised their dress and religion, but he also hated Christians too.
Brian Williams … told one whopper of a tale after another for years to pump up his personal resume and give himself some "street creds" among progressives who think that Williams and his ilk are intelligent, savvy, and bearers of the TRUE WORD.
Outstanding commentary from the DiploMad (thanks to Instapundit):As it turns out, ladies and gentlemen, he lied about saving puppies from a fire; about getting robbed by a gun-wielding mugger when Williams was a teen supposedly working for a charity on the "mean streets" of 1970s small-town New Jersey; about braving Hezbollah rockets in Israel; about watching bodies float down the Mississippi River during Katrina; about seeing a man jump to his death in a football stadium; and, of course, most famously, about flying on a chopper that got shot down in Iraq in 2003. Aside from proving a serial liar, he has become one of the most fawning, outright boot-licking fans and promoters of the disaster known as President Obama. He also has served as a regular on progressive TV shows, where he plays the part of the wise, humorous, Hemingway-esque man of the world. He is the man who has seen it all, and who can with a knowing smirk or wink put down and dismiss all the deluded right-wing nuts out there. In other words, he is a hero and a product of the Hollywood-University-Media complex which has done so much irreparable damage to our nation and Western civilization.
Williams joins the ranks of other progressive "journalists" such as,
Dan Rather, who tried to throw an American election by pushing a patently false story about George W. Bush;
Janet Cook, who concocted a much awarded narrative of an eight-year-old heroin addict;
Jayson Blair, who fabricated a number of much-commented on stories for the New York Times;
Sabrina Erdely of Rolling Stone who spread the UVA fake rape story;
and, of course, who could forget, The Lord of Them All, Commissar in Chief Walter Duranty, New York Times apologist extraordinaire for Joseph Stalin and his mass murders in Ukraine.
You certainly can name many others.
I never met Williams, but during my long career did have dealings with other prominent "anchors"--one of whom nearly ended my career--and found them boring and idiotic. They were just actors: make-up, lights, dramatic pose, and read lines written by young staffers from the "best" schools. There was no journalism as most of us would think of journalism. The British have it mostly right. They call persons such as Williams, "readers," because they read the news to you. In one way, however, American "anchors" are not like British "readers." In our benighted Republic, "anchors" are vastly better paid, revered, and allowed a great deal of say over what and how they will report. In the recent past, if Williams, Rather, or Jennings did not want to report on something, then it simply must not have happened.
That little world of the "anchor," however, took a major hit with the invention of the internet by Al "Is it Getting Warm?" Gore--another fabulist of distinction. We now have millions of little "anchors" who can fact-check, provide alternative explanations for events, and bring sunlight to otherwise forgotten happenings and issues. Dan Rather, let us not forget, got brought down by bloggers. The internet also has debunked Williams. Imagine, just imagine, if we had had the internet in the time of Duranty, or even when the Saintly Walter Cronkite declared that we were losing in Vietnam when, in fact, we were winning . . .
There is something in the progressive mind-set that promotes, nay, requires compulsive lying. We see it in John Kerry and his fake stories of secret missions in Cambodia and his flying dog; Hillary Clinton and her Bosnian snipers; Susan Rice and her video explanation for Benghazi; Eric Holder with Fast and Furious; and even FDR who famously said these words now engraved on his DC monument,
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.In fact, of course, he saw none of these horrors. Those things tend not to happen in Hyde Park, New York.
The fundamental problem progressives such as Williams face is that the world is not as they would have it. Not at all. Many if not most of them have limited experience in the real world, having spent lives of wealth and privilege, sheltered in progressive educational institutions. They have very superficial knowledge of the world outside these bubbles, and rely, therefore, to a great deal on Hollywood. They incorporate into their personae the largely leftist rubbish pumped out by Hollywood.
In their world, the United States is still 1930's Alabama--or, better said, the Alabama of Hollywood. They want to unleash their inner Atticus Finch. In their world, murderers in the United States are middle aged white male business executives who kill black people instead of what happens in the real world where murderers are overwhelmingly young black men who generally kill black people. In their world, women can kung fu better and be bigger badasses than big burly guys, when, in fact, the opposite is true as shown by the progressives' contradictory and ceaseless calls for government to "protect" women from men. "I am woman! I am strong! Call the cops! Men are looking at me!" In progressive world, the KKK equals the Tea Party, when in the real world, the KKK served as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. In progressive world, Western civilization is the source for all the poverty and evil in the world, when, in fact, the concepts of liberty, justice, and human rights are Western constructs.
Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that he or she knows what's what, and that progressivism is what the world needs to deal with "problems"--after all, isn't life just a series of problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what they believe.
We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them, the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs--the sort of worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our lives.
Telling lies is essential to progressivism.
writes Benny Huang. Ajit Pai[An FCC Commissioner in person] is sounding the alarm about an attempted federal takeover of the internet
recently received the Obama Administration’s 322-page plan for “net neutrality” and he finds it appalling. He’d like to share his specific objections with the +public but he can’t because the plan is under wraps until the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) votes on it.
Would you expect anything less from the most transparent administration in history?Secret plans to regulate the internet are circulated among the unelected members of a commission, who then make huge decisions with ramifications that will be felt around the globe, and we’re not allowed to know what they’re considering until the decision has been made. Par for the course.
… Those of us who are … skeptical tend to see “net neutrality” as little more than a government takeover of the internet, something Washington has been itching to do for years. All they needed was an excuse and finally they’ve found it. Capitalizing on a popular and not necessarily unfounded distrust of corporations, the government will seize control of the freest, most egalitarian means of communication known to man…and strangle it with regulation.Surely, you wouldn’t want ISP’s to prioritize search results for a fee, would you? Just empower the government to protect you from this huge problem that you probably didn’t even know existed and you won’t have to worry.
Supporters of net neutrality are already complaining that dissenters are mere conspiracy theorists steeped in misinformation. Net neutrality isn’t a government seizure of the internet, they argue, it’s simply a set of rules that prohibits corporations from favoring users or content. Call me crazy, but I think that a policy like that could be expressed in a few sentences. Why then is the administration’s net neutrality policy 322 pages long? And why hasn’t it been released to the public?
… Net neutrality is essentially Obamacare for the web—a government takeover, sold to the public as a means of protecting us from corporations, which is in fact supported by the corporations that are supposed to hate it, which will invariably give us a crappier product at a higher price.
The problem with the internet is that it’s just too liberated for our leviathan federal government to tolerate. People can say stuff on the internet without fear of censorship. They can buy and sell things without paying the tax man. They can organize political movements that the government would rather suffocate. In short, the World Wide Web (WWW) closely resembles the Wild Wild West, and that really scares the control freaks in Washington.
… The beauty of the internet is that it’s an open space for the free exchange of goods, services, information, and most importantly, ideas. Whatever minimal degradation of that freedom that might result from your ISP providing preferential treatment to paying customers does not merit government intrusion. It’s a red herring anyway—the government doesn’t want to control the internet to protect you from Comcast, a corporation that is already abiding by the supposed principles of net neutrality on a voluntary basis. The government wants to control the internet because it’s in the business of control and it can’t stand to sit idly by while a domain of nearly limitless freedom is permitted to exist.
