The Washington Free Beacon is a new online paper with an interesting premise:  unlike MSM papers, which treat liberalism as the norm, and conservativism as a headline grabbing abnormality, this publication gives the big scare headlines to the Left.  In other words, it’s not just that it reports the stories, but that it reports them so as to highlight Progressive malfeasance.

I like the idea.  This site gets a bookmark on my Firefox.

UPDATE:  Matthew Continetti explains what “combat journalism” is and why two can and should play at this, to date, one-sided game.

I want a job at the New York Times.  It is clearly a place that pays people to be stupid.  David Brooks gives Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 a very nice review.  Coming Apart claims that there is a big divide between rich Americans and poor Americans.  I like Charles Murray, and think he is frequently brilliant, but the heads up for him here is that there are always divides.  They’ve been by class, geography, politics, culture, etc.  To look at income and NASCAR in 2012, is awfully limited.

But I was talking about Brooks.  Brooks is horrified by the divide and has a rousing, and “NYT stupid,” conclusion:

I doubt Murray would agree, but we need a National Service Program. We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

If we could jam the tribes together, we’d have a better elite and a better mass.

And there you have my post title.  In the years between WWI and WWII and Vietnam, the big mixer-upper was the draft.  No draft, no mixing up.  We don’t have a new cultural divide.  We have an old, 19th Century era cultural divide.

Some are thinking the draft might be a good thing, but I don’t think our military deserves to have foisted upon it a random sampling of the current younger generation.

By the way, if you’re thinking that this is an unusually sour and snarky post, even by my standards, you’re right.  Both Brooks’ column and Murray’s premise rubbed me the wrong way.

Over the years, I’ve written more than 10,000 posts.  (Yeah, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it.)  They do tend to run together in my mind, but there are a few standouts.  These are the posts in which I felt that I offered an insight or analysis that is genuinely helpful to considering a serious issue of the day.  One of my all-time favorite posts in this vein is Pharaoh, the Ten Plagues, and Iran.  In it, I tackled Mr. Bookworm’s complaint that Passover is a barbaric holiday, because it celebrates the massacre of the First Born Egyptians.  Certainly, the Pharaoh’s intransigence, despite the many plagues sent to bedevil his people (plagues that surely brought death in their wake) culminates with a mass die-off in Egypt.

The death of the innocent Egyptian first born is certainly tragic, but the Bible story, I said, has a much larger and more important point:

Sheltered in his lavish palace, Pharaoh might worry about a populace starving and frightened, but that was irrelevant as long as that same populace continued to fear and worship him.  The people’s suffering, ultimately, was irrelevant to his goals.  It was only when the price became too high — when Pharaoh’s power base was destroyed because his citizens were destroyed — that Pharaoh was convinced, even temporarily, to alter his evil ways.

From that point, I drew analogies to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and current day Iran.

Today, Duane Lester found proof that, when it comes to the current crop of Leftist elites, in government and in the media, the same thinking holds true:  they do not care if the people suffer; they only care if the elites suffer.

So next time you hear some Progressive speaker go on and on and on about “the people,” ask him which worries him more:  massive mob violence on the street aimed at bringing down the capitalist system, or a single conservative loon who might get too close to someone in D.C.

A few days ago, writing with regard to the media’s decision to ignore the standing ovations Newt received during the last South Carolina debate, I asked “If the Press Ignores an Event, Does It Exist?“  The press, it turns out, wants to take that experiment in ignoring facts as far as it can go.

Today, I present you with an even more egregious example, one that sees that media ignore several hundred thousand people walking down the streets of Washington, D.C.  The event, of course, was the March For Life, something the media would prefer not to acknowledge.  As the Anchoress says:

You want the truth? You think you deserve it? The press can’t handle the truth; they can’t bring it to you.

That’s why 250 people camping out in a park gets thousands of stories, while half-a-million marching on Washington does not get reported at all, or if it does, the pictures are cropped; the attendees are caricatured, mis-named and under-represented while their opponents are over-represented.

You should, of course, read her entire post.

As I often say, I’m not yet fully recovered from my years in the Pro-Choice camp, so I won’t be marching any time soon with the Pro-Life people, even though I admire them more than my former fellow travelers.  I am, though, very much pro-truth.  And as I lawyer, I can tell you that, as a matter of law, selective omission is just as much a fraud is deliberately deceptive affirmative statements.

We all know the philosophical question that asks, “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The media is trying a variation on this question by asking, “If we completely ignore a fact, so that no one hears about it, does the fact exist?”  The media’s latest experiment with this grand philosophical question is to pretend that the audience in South Carolina wasn’t completely thrilled by Newt’s response to opening questions regarding his ex-wife’s accusations about his behavior during their marriage.

I honestly don’t know whether Newt’s direct challenges to the media mean that he has the “right stuff” to be president.  I just know that his willingness to stand up and fight the Pravda that the American media has become is a very important and necessary step in the new media age.  More Republicans should stop pandering and start speaking truth to media power. It’s time to break this monopoly by showing it the disrespect it deserves.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ever since Obama became president, the war dead have vanished.  During the Bush presidency, enemy deaths filled that papers as we were accused of mass slaughter; during the Obama presidency, I think our troops are just out there having nice cups of tea with the bad guys, because none of the latter seem to be dying.

Our own dead have also vanished from the media.  During the Bush presidency, the media relentlessly pressed numbers on us, proving that Bush was slaughtering, not only the bad guys, but our own guys.  During the Obama presidency, troop deaths have vanished from the front page, with the exception being that devastating loss to the SEALs a few months ago.

So I guess it shouldn’t come as any surprise that, when six U.S. Marines died in a helicopter crash, one that may or may not have been caused by enemy action, I had to read about it in the British press.  You guys know I don’t haunt the press for stories of American deaths so that I can gloat.  Instead, I feel strongly that, when our troops die, they should be remembered, not to score political points, but as a way of honoring their service and their sacrifice.

To the six who died:  Thank you for your service, and may you rest in peace.

One of the many blessings of our American military is that it’s a Constitutional military that has as its Commander in Chief a civilian elected by the American public.  (Although history has shown, fairly recently in fact, that the American public sometimes elects bad CinCs.)  Because the elected CinC is frequently someone without military experience, a theoretically non-partisan command hierarchy exists to advise him.

For the most part, our military does a decent job of avoiding politics.  I’m not always sure how it manages this.  For example, the current CinC just announced cuts that will reduce our military to 1930s status — and we know how well that went back then.  He did so despite the fact that world events put the lie to his happy peppy statement that the world is entering a time of peace.  Our poor military.  It gets an order from its CinC — “You must shrink” — and then has to figure out how to do that without destroying itself.

So, how does a Constitutional military handle a command from on high that is stupid, unrealistic and dangerous?  I guess it does what our military did:  It follows orders, announcing a plan to shrink, one that serious military analysts find very worrisome.  Even smart militaries have to do stupid because the rules of them game require them to do so.

Sometimes, though, the military manages to engage in unforced errors that are clearly the result of politicization.  This is not party politics, it’s just Beltway, Foggy Bottom stupidity.  After all, if you’re going to hang around the Pentagon for a while, you’re going to be infected by the political pandering that makes Washington what it is — a place and entity that nobody likes or respects.  In this case, the United States Army could not resist affirmative action’s siren song.

You probably recall reading back in September 2009 that the Army (which was now reporting to the Obama White House) appointed the first woman ever as Command Sergeant Major of the U.S. Army’s Drill Sergeant School (DSS).  What made this appointment even more exciting for those in the affirmative action business was the fact that Teresa King wasn’t just female, she was black.  It was a two-fer for political correctness.

If Sergeant Major King had been female, black, battle hardened, and brilliant, everything would have been fine and dandy.  Unfortunately, King seems to have been more decorative than functional as a Sergeant Major:

Reports from MCC’s on the ground correspondents say King’s suspension from duty was prompted by her heavy drinking, sexual relationship with a lower ranking enlisted soldier, and the fact that at least one of the college degree she listed on her resume is from a schools deemed to be diploma mill.

Almeda College where King lists as the school from which she was granted a Master’s degree in business management, has been closed by legal action in both Florida and Idaho because it was declared a fake institution.

Another embarrassing element of King’s persona – which she has built around a “sergeant no slack” façade — is the fact that in spite of her tough talk, she has never been in a combat zone, which makes gaining the respect of her battle-hardened veteran students difficult at best.

Whoops!  One wonders if King willingly went along with the charade that she was competent, or if the heavy drinking is a sign that she was an affirmative action sacrificial lamb who knew she was in over her head.

The problem, of course, is that the decorative Sergeant Major King did not hold a merely decorative position.  Unlike today’s European royals, who are meaningless figureheads, King was appointed to an extremely important institution, ones that trains the Army’s backbone:  the sergeants.  Heck, I’ve watched enough Hollywood movies to know that, without the sergeant drilling, haranguing, fathering (and mothering) the troops, there is no Army (or Marine Corp, or anything else).  For the powers that be at the Pentagon to play silly little political games to curry favor with the Obama administration, with the U.S. Military paying the price, is a shocking example of politics.  Not partisan politics, just stupid politics.

Sergeant Major King has currently been suspended from duty and the Army is doing its best to keep this story off the front page.  Funnily enough, King’s lack of qualifications should help.  If King was actually as good as she should have been, the MSM would have been all over a story “proving” that the Army is a racist, sexist organization that never gave the first black, female Command Sergeant Major a chance.  However, if the charges against King are true — that she was a shabby paper tiger who never should have gotten the job — the MSM will work tightly with the Army to keep this story out of the public eye.  For the Army, the appointment is an embarrassing example of stupid; for the media, it’s a glaring failure in their affirmative action world view.

If you’ve been trolling the internet at all the lost couple of days, you’re aware by now that Christopher Knight, who has what is apparently a paying gig at the Los Angeles Times, has taken umbrage at a political cartoon likening the profligate Mrs. Obama to Marie Antoinette, who was herself no slouch at spending other people’s money.  If you haven’t heard about this kerfuffle, let me lead you through it.

First, here’s the original Marie Antoinette portrait and the companion political cartoon:

And second, Christopher Knight’s fevered fulminations:

A baldly racist depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama that appeared Tuesday on a right-wing website is based on a 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty (1740-1786). The full-length painting hangs outside Paris in the Palace of Versailles.

The Internet image grafts Obama’s face onto Gautier-Dagoty’s lavish depiction of the French queen, dressed in full regalia. It also replaces the draped left arm of the young monarch, then barely 20, with a muscular black arm and shifts the position of the right hand to place it in front of a world globe.

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an “uppity Negro,” which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era. Obama, born into a working-class Chicago family whose roots are traced to the pre-Civil War South, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, prior to holding several high-level positions in the academic and private sectors.

The racist image appeared Tuesday on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit; the slur was later called out by Media Matters for America. A post by Gateway blogger Jim Hoft paired the picture with a clip of the first lady’s guest appearance on a forthcoming episode of “iCarly,” a Nickelodeon sit-com. In the script, Obama commends the cast for their support of military families. Responding to a cast member who mistakenly addresses her as “your excellency,” the script has Obama jokingly reply, “I kinda like it.”

The doctored painting also turned up in August 2010 on the right-wing Instapundit website, where it apparently originated.

You can read the rest here, if you want a laugh and have a strong stomach.

I’m not usually moved to comment on MSM articles (too many comments mean mine get buried, a dreadful fate for an egotist), but this time I couldn’t resist.  Here, in its entirety, is my comment:

Dear Mr. Knight: I’ve pretty much ignored the whole zombie phenomenon, thinking it’s kind of stupid to fear the living dead. (I find the actual living much more frightening.) Your post, however, is causing me to rethink my rejection of the zombie trope, because you have just provided living (or, rather, undead) proof that zombies are actually sucking people’s brains out.

Is it possible that you’re unaware of Marie Antoinette’s reputation for living extravagantly while the ordinary people around her starved in the street? And are you unable to make the connection between Marie Antoinette’s reputation (and she was Austrian, by the way, not African American) and the fact that Michelle Obama just recently went on a $4 million tax payer funded vacation, while wearing $1,200 sundresses, even as Americans have been struggling desperately with unemployment and rising prices? For the informed mind (or just the living mind), the comparisons are inevitable, appropriate and non-racist.

Sherlock Holmes famously said that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Since it must be impossible for a major publication such as the Los Angeles Times to have hired an idiot, the improbable truth we are dealing with is that, since being hired, you have had your brain sucked out by zombies.

As you already know, I’m sure, the Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem are fighting hard to segregate men and women in public spaces in Jerusalem.  I posted about the fact that Mr. Bookworm analogized this small group, which is fighting against a democratic, egalitarian government, to the sharia law that exists across large segments of the Muslim world.  I doubt Mr. Bookworm arrived at this thought by himself.  I haven’t been reading the New York Times lately, nor listening to NPR, but I’m willing to bet that their coverage implies that this comparison is real and valid.

Today, the AP managed to state outright that the Ultra-Orthodox are aping the Nazis.  Here’s the AP headline:

Ultra-Orthodox Jews use Nazi images in protest

The implication, of course, is that the Ultra-Orthodox Jews outfitted themselves in swastikas and jackboots.  What the Ultra-Orthodox really did was to dress themselves up in concentration camp garb, thereby sending the message that they are helpless prisoners of a Nazi-style Jewish government:

Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered Saturday night in Jerusalem to protest what they say is a nationwide campaign directed against their lifestyle. The protesters called Israeli police officers Nazis, wore yellow Star of David patches with the word “Jude” – German for Jew – dressed their children in striped black-and-white uniforms associated with Nazi concentration camps and transported them in the back of a truck.

The Ultra-Orthodox’s stunt was tacky, offensive, ugly, distasteful, and inappropriate.  But the more correct description of this tasteless bit of street theater would be that “Ultra-Orthodox Jews use Holocaust-era Images in Protest.”  For the AP to have implied otherwise adds one more layer of indecency to the whole protest — and, worse, it’s a layer of indecency that dovetails perfectly with the Leftist (especially the European Leftist) effort to paint Jews as Nazis.  It’s bad enough when radical Jews describe each other as Nazis, without having the media pile on too.

UPDATE:  Somehow, this post seems apropos, insofar as it explains that the OWS add-on to the Rose Bowl Parade relied on Nazi imagery to depict the Jews’ alleged influence on world finances.

When I first saw the headline — “A $2.5 Million Libel Judgment Brings The Question : Are  Bloggers Journalists?” — I have to admit that I felt a bit queasy.  When I write something snide about President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, or any of the other prominent Democrats I routinely criticize at this site, am I exposing myself to massive liability?  Well, probably not, because they’re public figures and we have enormous latitude to criticize them.  But what about a post I might write criticizing, not a political figure, but a local businessman.  Can he sue me . . . and win?

The answer, it seems to me, is that Mr. Businessman is just as likely to win against blogger as he would have been if, in the old days, I sent nasty letters to the editor, distributed flyers or otherwise widely and impugned his character.  If my statements are true, I win.  If they’re false, I lose.  I would have been at risk in the old days and I’m still at risk in the new if I choose to shout out lies from an electronic rooftop.

So why is the $2.5 million dollar libel judgment an issue?  Because the blogger in question sought to protect herself by claiming that she was a journalist, not a blogger.  She therefore contended that Shield Laws allowed her to hide her sources while successfully protesting her innocence in a defamation lawsuit.  When the judge said she wasn’t a journalist, bloggers got nervous.  After all, we bloggers consider ourselves a “new media,” providing information that the old media, usually for political reasons, often leaves on the cutting room or newsroom floor.  What’s unnerving is that, if we’re not journalists, even when we scrupulously present facts, we’re still at risk of litigation, something that has a very chilling effect even on the most honest writer.

As is so often true with legal cases, though, the details should be comforting — and this is true despite the fact that I think the judge committed a definitional error that must be redressed.  This case, though, is not going to be the one that makes correcting that legal error easy, because the facts really militate against the blogger.  By any standard, Crystal Cox, the defendant against whom the district court judge imposed the $2.5 million libel judgment, was not making any effort to conduct herself according to journalistic norms.  Instead, Cox was the journalistic equivalent of a vexatious litigant.

For those of you who have missed out on the joys of a vexatious litigant (“VL”), a VL is someone who uses the court system to dominate and harass enemies.  These people are often lawyers, and they will file in pro per suits (meaning that they represent themselves) against anyone who crosses their radar.  Since litigation is expensive, a perfectly innocent person might find himself targeted by a plaintiff who has dozens of cases going simultaneously, and who files hundreds of costly motions in each case.  The unwitting defendant can either settle immediately, even though he knows he’s being subject to judicial blackmail, or he must spend the money to answer the case and respond to all the discovery and motions.

While the judge in any given case may impose sanctions against the plaintiff, that’s an uneven remedy.  Eventually, though, if the plaintiff acquires a reputation around the courthouse, a judge can defang him by declaring him a “vexatious litigant” who can proceed in the Court system only with judicial permission.  Although it’s a draconian remedy because we are loath to deny people access to the civil court system, it’s still a necessary thing to do when someone uses the system, not as an instrument of justice, but as a tool for economic blackmail, humiliation and harassment.  As I noted, though, it’s a last remedy, not a first remedy, and a lot of people get badly burned before it goes into effect.

From everything I’ve read about Crystal Cox, her website, titled “www.ObsidianFinanceSucks.com,” was a one woman vendetta against a corporate Bankruptcy trustee and an individual employee, filled with hundreds of posts savagely attacking both of them.  Her claims against them, usually presented in the form of hyperbolic questions, rather than factual statements, accused them of fraud, illegal activity, theft, and just about everything else short of stealing lollipops from babies and using goats for impure purposes.  As the judge made clear in decisions written in both July and August, one would be hard put to classify Cox’s content as objective journalism.

Because Cox’s posts were so over-the-top, the judge concluded fairly easily that they couldn’t possibly be construed as anything other than pure opinion, which is protected under the First Amendment.  He was therefore inclined to dismiss the case against her.  One of her posts, however, had a gloss of journalistic objectivity and, more importantly, showed up at a site where it wasn’t published under the “ObsidianFinanceSucks” heading and where it wasn’t surrounded by dozens of other posts demonstrating that Cox has a monomania that leaves even her “objective” writing highly suspect.  It was in this context that the judge decided Cox wasn’t a journalist, and that her nasty post constituted good, old-fashioned defamation, akin to handing out a flyer in a shopping mall.

Where I differ with Judge Hernandez, although I think he made the correct decision regarding Cox, is in his effort to define objective journalism so as to deny Cox constitutional protection for her statements.  As far as I can tell, his definition puts most of our major media on notice that it’s at risk:

Cox tried to invoke the Shield Law, which allows journalists to protect confidential sources, but Judge Marco Hernandez ruled Cox was not a journalist and therefore not entitled to the protections. He wrote, “there is no evidence of any education in journalism, any credentials or proof of any affiliation with any recognized news entity or proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking or disclosures of conflicts of interest.”

While the New York Times, the WaPo, MSNBC and other traditional media sites can undoubtedly claim that their writers hold university credentials, it’s becoming increasingly questionable whether they subscribe to such traditional “journalistic standards . . . as editing, fact-checking or disclosures of conflicts of interest.”  Indeed, one of the things internet bloggers excel at doing is catching the MSM when it fails to follow those journalistic ethics (and one does wonder whether the MSM’s disdain for these basic requirements is something individual writers learn at those credentialed schools).

Given that the MSM so frequently falls very far short of what the judge considers to be ethical minimums, being affiliated with these “recognized news entities” in no way assures the reader that he can rely on the truth of the matter asserted in any given news report.  A reputable blog spot, one that rigorously edits, fact-checks and discloses, should qualify as journalism, and be entitled to all First Amendment protections, without having to pay lip-service to establishment conventions (journalism school, major media affiliation) that, in fact, do not provide any assurance that the content is honest, credible, complete or unbiased.

Since Cox strikes me as a monomaniac with a bee in her butt, I’m somewhat surprised that Eugene Volokh, who is one of the most reputable, insightful legal bloggers and new media journalists out there, is getting involved in this particular case:

Crystal Cox did not respond to our emails and phone calls seeking comment. It appears, however, she plans to continue to fight. She represented herself in the defamation suit, but now has legal help from UCLA Law School and blogger Eugene Volokh. He has taken the case pro bono in hopes of getting the decision reversed. Volokh has written about the First Amendment’s protection of the press, arguing it’s not solely intended for the media as an institution, but anyone doing the work of journalism.

Volokh is right as a matter of law, of course.   Judge Hernandez is simply wrong to define journalism to include only people who have trained in establishment schools and who write for establishment (i.e., Leftist) media, a bright line that would astonish and offend the Founders.

Based on what I’ve been able to glean from Judge Hernandez’s opinions, however, both of which quote extensively from some of the hundreds of posts Cox wrote for “www.ObsidianFinanceSucks.com”, Cox is the wrong defendant to use as a standard for expanding the definition of journalism to include citizen journalists writing at blogs.  Cox’s writing isn’t coherent, factual reporting, with full disclosure.  Instead, it’s a malevolent stew of opinion and hostility.  She’s a vexatious blogger, and a common law defamer, not a legitimate journalist.  Indeed, she’s a perfect example of bad facts making for bad law.  I’m just worried that, if Volokh pursues this, this bad law will be enshrined at an appellate level, rather than merely at the district court level.