Blatant Reality

According to a CNN article, Obama is accused of having ‘hijacked’ his own press followers. (My Emphasis)

What seemed to be a routine evening waiting for Barack Obama aboard his campaign plane turned into anything but when the cabin doors closed and the passengers were informed the aircraft would be taking off immediately — without the candidate.

 

The first sign something was amiss on the Thursday flight came when the pilot told those aboard — about 25 members of the media, a smaller group of Obama staffers and only a handful of Secret Service agents — that everyone was on board and that the plane would be departing for Obama’s hometown of Chicago, Illinois, momentarily.

 

The press soon noticed there were far too few people aboard for a standard campaign flight. Something was different. It’s fair to say that the term “everyone” was used a bit loosely — especially when the presumptive nominee appeared to be missing.

 

As the plane taxied, communications director Robert Gibbs admitted that Obama was remaining behind because he “wasn’t going to be back in D.C. for a while” and had “scheduled some meetings” before he left.

 

Obama staffers, including Gibbs and Linda Douglass, a newly appointed senior adviser and campaign spokeswoman, didn’t ask the reporters on board if they’d prefer to wait on the runway in Washington until the meetings concluded. They were going to Chicago. Without Barack Obama.

Personally, don’t think ‘hijacked’ was the best choice of words. Kept in the dark, yes. Intentionally misled, yes. However, ‘hijacked’ seems a little to harsh plus has some very negative overtones in light of September 11th.

With all the rumors about Obama being a Muslim and such, I don’t think reporters should be throwing around the word ‘hijacked.’

Then again, if Chris Welch was on the plane, he might just be pissed enough to compare his situation to being hijacked. Just a little way to get back at Barack for keeping those who can either be your best friends or your worst enemies in the dark.

Another climate change bill seems set to fail in the US Senate and who do liberals pick out to blame? Well when you can’t face the reality that the Senate Democrats can’t get anything done, the only thing left to do is blame a Republican. Take a look at this:

The Republican presidential nominee backed away from this year’s debate to focus on his campaign, ceding his sponsorship role to Virginia Republican senator John Warner.

 

Despite McCain’s qualified statement of support for the climate bill, his absence from the pivotal vote today gave Democrats an opening to hammer him as no different from George Bush, who promised to veto the measure.

 

“We saw this morning yet another example of Bush-McCain Republicans refusing to address one of the most important issues of our time,” Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said.

 

“Senator McCain says global warming is one of his top issues, but when he has the chance to do something about it, he doesn’t even show up to work.”

 

Neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton attended the vote, signalling that Democratic leaders anticipated the bill’s failure.

Hmmm…McCain misses a “pivotal vote” while both Clinton and Obama didn’t attend because they knew it was going to fail anyways. Harry Reid is just bitter that he can’t get anything done and isn’t getting any help from his own party (Obama and Hillary).

Democrats: Stop shifting the blame for your inability to pass your legislation. You basically have control of of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and if you can’t even get your legislation on the President’s desk so he can veto it.

I must have just caught this right before they changed it but nevertheless, I still think it is funny.

That picture is supposed to be labeled as a new X-Ray technology they have at some airports. The corrected caption is:
UPDATE: 10 airports install body scanners; Devices can peer under passengers’ clothes…

Sometimes I just have to shake my head and laugh. It’s times like these that there really is nothing more one can do.

I usually rely on my Google News Live Bookmark to give me the latest and greatest news out there. Usually I am quite pleased with what it shows me. Today, however, I’m not to sure if I should be trusting Google to bring me the most important news stories. Why have I lost my trust? Well when a story like this gets into the top three spots of my feed, I just have to wonder.

Today, the New York Times ran an article with this headline: “Carter says Hamas and Syria are Open to Peace“. When I saw this, I thought to myself, “Wow, maybe Carter isn’t completely oblivious and worthless after all.” However, I should have known not to get my hopes up to much.

As it seems to happen quite often in the MSM, the author of this piece focussed on the completely wrong aspect of the story. After you wade through all the junk about how Carter actually did something useful you get to this very important section:

Mr. Carter had tried to get Hamas to agree to several other requests and all were turned down. Those included a prisoner exchange and declaring a 30-day unilateral cease-fire with Israel — Hamas fires rockets on Israeli towns and communities in an effort to hurt and kill civilians. On Monday a 4-year-old child was injured from shrapnel after a rocket hit a home on a kibbutz and caused damage, the Israeli army announced.

 

Mr. Meshal said at his news conference that, through Egypt, he and Israel were working on a possible mutual cease-fire or period of calm so there was no reason to accept Mr. Carter’s suggestion of a unilateral cease-fire.

 

Mr. Carter said he found the Hamas leadership, including Mr. Meshal, to be clear-thinking, educated people who gave no sign of fanaticism, although he did condemn in harsh terms their use of violence. He said they did not break for prayer, talk of holy land or God. “It was secular talk,” he said.

 

“They are just as rational as you are,” he said, adding, “The thing that Meshal and I have is that we are both physicists.”

At this point in the article, I just begin to shake my head in despair. Honestly, what kind of peace talks can happen when the enemy (yes, Hamas is the enemy) won’t even agree to stop murdering innocent civilians including children? Carter didn’t accomplish anything other than finding out that he had more in common with a terrorist than the majority of the American people.

It truly shocks me that the NYT would try to spin this story into some kind of win for Carter. The real title for this article should be “Carter Fails: Hamas Will Continue Rocket Barrages” or “Hamas Won’t Agree to Ceasefire” or my favorite “Hamas Will Continue Mercilessly Killing Innocents.” Take your pick. Any of those would be ten times better than the current headline. Even a Russian news source got a better headline with “Hamas rejects Carter’s call to halt rocket fire on Israel for 1 month”

Well, I guess I can’t complain too much about this. It’s things like this that get me all riled up and give me something to write about.

Check out Gateway Pundit for some more on this.

The news agencies are finally noticing the lack of their own coverage of the Iraq War. However, they still don’t seem to understand the gravity of it.

In this AFP news article, the author blames the economy and the current presidential campaign as being the reason that the number of news stories about the Iraq War have dropped. I personally find this hard to believe. If the war was going poorly, there would be hundreds of news articles written (especially about the death toll reaching 4,000) which the Democrats would latch on to and parade around. This isn’t the case because, on a whole, the war is proceeding much better than it has.

The current economy and presidential election situations haven’t overshadowed the Iraq War in the news; the Iraq War has instead shrunk to an unimportant size. It is along these same lines that the articles states the following that I tend to agree with:

Ron Nessen, a former NBC television correspondent and White House press secretary at the end of the Vietnam War, attributed the falloff in interest to US successes in quelling violence in Iraq, which has brought the death toll of Americans and Iraqis down from the highs of late 2006 — though only to 2005 levels.

 

“Maybe I’m cynical … but good news is no news. I think you are seeing a little bit of that effect in Iraq,” Nessen, now a media expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, told AFP.

That not need be the case. I am personally interested in hearing positive news from Iraq it’s just they (the news) won’t oblige.

According to a new survey by Zogby, almost half of Americans get their news from an online source.

Nearly half of respondents (48%) said their primary source of news and information is the Internet, an increase from 40% who said the same a year ago. Younger adults were most likely to name the Internet as their top source - 55% of those age 18 to 29 say they get most of their news and information online, compared to 35% of those age 65 and older. These oldest adults are the only age group to favor a primary news source other than the Internet, with 38% of these seniors who said they get most of their news from television. Overall, 29% said television is their main source of news, while fewer said they turn to radio (11%) and newspapers (10%) for most of their news and information. Just 7% of those age 18 to 29 said they get most of their news from newspapers, while more than twice as many (17%) of those age 65 and older list newspapers as their top source of news and information.

 

Web sites are regarded as a more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets - 86% of Americans said Web sites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) who view these sites as very important. Most also view television (77%), radio (74%), and newspapers (70%) as important sources of news, although fewer than say the same about blogs (38%).

The article continues by stating that fewer than 1% of those surveyed said that the most trusted source of information were blogs which I can agree with. I know I have made a few errors and I know other bloggers have also. However, the difference between us and the mainstream media is that we often catch those errors (or have other point them out to us) and we try to fix them.

Here is another thing the survey found:

Republicans (79%) and political independents (75%) are most likely to feel disenchanted with conventional journalism, but the online survey found 50% of Democrats also expressed similar concerns. Those who identify themselves as “very conservative” were among the most dissatisfied, with 89% who view traditional journalism as out of touch.

Funny how both Republicans and Independents share such a high disenchantment with traditional media. You would think the independents would be more in the middle.

With recent articles stating that there has been a 20% increase of military suicides since last year, one must always wonder wonder how this fact might have been taken out of context. Well, I’m not going to make you wonder too long because Gateway Pundit has done some research and found that military suicides were in fact more prevalent during the Clinton years.

Israel has been taking a lot of flak in the news this past week due to it stopping the normal flow of commercial goods into the Gaza Strip. Many have said that this Israeli “blockade” eventually led to a blackout throughout Gaza. However, when looking at the facts more closely, one will find that the terrorist organization Hamas is actually responsible for the outage. Take a look at what Bob Owens from Pajamas Media has to say about this:

By Sunday evening, Gaza City was in a complete blackout. And of course, it was Israel’s fault. Or was it?

 

Hamas spokesmen blamed Israel for the power shortage, claiming that they were forced to shut down power because of a fuel shortage brought about by the blockade. That same night, Al Jazeera began live broadcasts of a “spontaneous” candlelight protest in a darkened Gaza. The heart-wrenching images were broadcast throughout the Arab world and picked up by wire services and cable news outlets internationally.

 

It was great theater, but it was far from accurate news reporting. Gaza was not without electrical power during that time, and both the darkness and the candlelight protests were the results of a calculated ploy by Hamas.

 

The Gaza Strip receives 70 percent of its electricity from the Israeli Electric Company (IEC) (perhaps the only power company in the world regularly attacked by their customers.) Egyptian power companies chip in another five percent. The energy flowing into Gaza from Israel and Egypt, and making up three-quarters of Gaza’s power supply never ceased and never slowed during the “blackout.”

And who is responsible for these blatant falsehoods being paraded as facts worldwide? If you guessed the MSM then you are correct. Remember: a little bit a skepticism can often help you find a whole lot of truth.