Alternative Media is Today's Free Press

From George Scaggs, at Pajamas Media:
The rise of a new press is nothing less than an attempt to re-establish a free press — an essential component of a free society. Sadly, this too has also been misconstrued and confused in the public mind. In our modern age, everything is politicized precisely because government has involved itself in virtually all aspects of life. Having willingly assumed a supporting role in advancing the concept of government which infinitely expands in size and scope, big media has been a central player in this phenomenon.

Big media joins together with government, academia, and various corporate interests to constitute what Angelo Codevilla succinctly identified as “the Elite Ruling Class” in his prodigious essay on the subject.

This relatively minute class is adept at manipulating that plurality of Americans who have come to view the state as an entity that does “for them” rather than “to them,” creating a self-perpetuating momentum. Over time, modern society has become conditioned to adopt whatever this ruling class chooses to foist upon it. Anything goes, from light bulbs to TSA pat-downs.

Used as a tool to keep the whole sordid system propped up, one of big media’s primary roles is to simply parrot big government’s daily proclamations, aiding in creating the perception of omnipotence.
RTWT.

This reminds me of the John Hawkins debate on blogging. Bloggers help keep America free.

I might have more on this later today, but I'll be running around a bit. Hopefully soon though ...

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Economic Freedom Improves Lives

From the reviled Charles Koch Foundation, "Economic Freedom" (via Doug Ross):
Progressives hate freedom.

RELATED: At Nice Deb, "DSCC Responds Lamely to Koch Bros Letter."

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The Meaning of Independence

At the clip, the finale from Saturday night's fireworks at Pechanga:
That was on of the better fireworks shows I can recall. A full video is here. The show was twenty minutes long and the finale was just spectacular.
And check out this essay from E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post, "What our Declaration really said":
Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future that we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe — or have convinced themselves — that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

We are closer to that point than we think, and our friends in the Tea Party have offered a helpful clue by naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor.

Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy. It implies something fundamentally wrong with taxes themselves or, at the least, that current levels of taxation (the lowest in decades) are dangerously oppressive. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.

We need to recognize the deep flaws in this vision of our present and our past. A reading of the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our forebears were not revolting against taxes as such — and most certainly not against government as such.
Dionne so badly misses the point on the tea parties, to say nothing of the Declaration of Independence, that I feel bad for him. Keep reading at the link. Anyone can cherry pick the founding documents to find passages and quotations to fit their agenda. Progressives like Dionne are depressed that it's been conservatives and libertarians who've been much more successful in capturing and representing the spirit of individual liberty animating our political culture. I keep seeing progressives argue that the founding documents called for the expansion of government. I mean, c'mon: Dionne is arguing that opposition to taxation is not an element of the Declaration of Independence. But history disproves it, for the ability to tax is the ability to destroy, so to understand opposition to taxation is to realize that government extraction from the people destroys liberty. But again, I feel sad for people like Dionne, because they're getting worried that Americans have awoken from the slumber of affluence and industry, and taken a closer look at how the political class is destroying our very foundations.

In any case, Jeff Jacoby offers the big picture, "Philosophy, faith and the Fourth of July."

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Preserving Liberty

Glenn Reynolds has a piece at the Washington Examiner, "Sunday Reflection: Three things you can do for liberty" (via Lonely Conservative).

One of his suggestions? Get active:
It's surprisingly easy to get involved in politics locally, and you can acquire responsibility and influence quite rapidly if you're good with people and willing to put in the work.

Alternatively, you might join a Tea Party group. Those are still springing up all over, and are already having a dramatic influence on both national and local politics.
The tea parties have matured quite a bit since they first broke out in 2009. But joining some kind of group helps form the networks to all kinds of activities and meetups, and some of these involve ties to candidates and party organizations. It'a amazing, really, how substantially local activists and organizations have been mobilized by the Obama regime in Washington. I don't quite recall anything like it, and the Republicans have a lot to worry about from the grassroots as well. Liberty knows no party, and it's time to cut government and restore some freedom.

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Melanie Phillips Quits Britain's Spectator Magazine

She has two announcements, "Why I left the Spectator," and "My blog's new home."

There's very little written regarding an explanation why, although Phillips writes: "Those interested to learn more can do so in the update on this CiF Watch post, the original quote from which led to this apology." The apology issued was to Alastair Crooke, Director of Conflicts Forum, "an international movement which engages with Islamist movements broadly ..."

Given Mr. Crooke's background, folks probably have an inkling as to what happened: Melanie blogged about Crooke, he got mad, launched legal action, harming the Spectator financially, and Melanie Phillips felt it necessary to resign.

That just the line of logic, but let's see if I can piece some of this together. For one thing, reports indicate that Alastair Crooke, a former member of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency, had direct and ongoing contacts with Hamas as part of his official business at the British consulate in East Jerusalem. A 2007 blog post by Israeli Eliyahu m'Tsiyon has the details, including a quotation from Melanie Phillips which is no longer available elsewhere. And London's far-left Guardian reported on this, "UK recalls MI6 link to Palestinian militants." These are some really sinister dealings, and Phillips wrote about them. See Jihad Watch, "Melanie Phillips on Alistair Crooke." And following the links takes us to FrontPage Magazine, "Alistair Crooke's Meeting with Sheikh Yassin." I don't see the exact date of Crooke's departure from MI6, but even left-wing sources report on his deep ties to global terrorism. See Mother Jones, "The Spy Who Loved Hamas. And Hezbollah. And Iran."

Now note that the Spectator published an apology to Alastair Crooke, cited by Roy Greenslade at the Guardian:

A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on Jan 28 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we apologise to Mr Crooke.
Again, I'm piecing things together, but it looks like Spectator issued the apology as part of a legal settlement, which has the New Statesman's Mehdi Hasan jumping for joy:
... was this a voluntary or enforced departure? The blogger Guido Staines beat me to it, but I can't help but notice how the Spectator has had to apologise to Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, on its website this week, after a blogpost by Phillips made "false" allegations about Crooke's past. Phillips's decision to move on might just be a coincidence but a well-connected source tells me that the payout to Crooke cost the Spectator "tens of thousands of pounds" and left Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil "furious" with her.
So we're now back to Melanie Phillips' blog entry, where she writes, "For legal reasons, I cannot go into the details."

The legal reasons appear to be (further) threats of legal action, but Melanie Phillips has rejected the premise of the apology. And CiF Watch says Phillips made "no such" allegation regarding threats from Alastair Crooke.

Well, we know that Alastair Crooke's collaborating with terrorist organizations, and as Melanie Phillips was writing about it, my sense is that someone made threats, and since this controversy involves people at the highest levels of British power, clearly some pro-jihadists had strong incentive to destroy Melanie Phillips. And what's more fascinating is that so called right-wing outlets are simply crippling under threats and apparent litigation. Indeed, Mehdi Hasan can't contain his glee:
Blinded by their monomaniacal obsession with Islamists under every British bed, members of the UK media's neoconservative faction have been the subject of other (successful) legal complaints and libel actions in recent years.
These legal complaints look sketchy, "successful" or not, given all that we know about Alastair Crooke. Clearly, if Melanie Phillips was speaking truth to power her own health and livelihood became increasingly at risk. And this is something I've been writing about quite a bit, since Scott Eric Kaufman and Carl Salonen launched campaigns of workplace intimidation against me, including libelously false allegations of sexual harassment, with potentially very damaging personal consequences, simply for speaking truth to their evil deeds. And while I'm not an author of such prominence as Melanie Phillips, some allegations against me have gone all the way to California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat. So the similarity is to the lengths at which progressives will go to literally destroy those who speak the truth. Remember, for radical leftists and jihad enablers, "truth is the new hate speech." And I want to remind people of my report on Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, who announced on Canadian television:
The thing is, you don't care about freedom of speech until you've lost it. But I'm here to tell you that I will never, ever give up the fight for freedom of speech.
Neither will I.

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Steven Crowder on the Free Enterprise System

Via Theo Spark:

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In Defense of 'Hurtful' Speech

Some big news today on Geert Wilders' acquittal, at Telegraph UK, "Geert Wilders 'delighted' after being cleared of 'hate speech'."

And he writes about it at Wall Street Journal. A snippet:
The biggest threat to our democracies is not political debate, nor is it public dissent. As the American judge Learned Hand once said in a speech: "That community is already in the process of dissolution . . . where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists to win or lose." It has been a tenet in European and American thinking that men are only free when they respect each other's freedom. If the courts can no longer guarantee this, then surely a community is in the process of dissolution.
RELATED: At Atlas Shrugs, "PAMELA GELLER, BIG GOVERNMENT: GEERT WILDERS VERDICT: WEST 1, ISLAM 0."

And EXTRA LULZ: Lizard Loser Charles Johnson is bummed that Wilders was acquitted: "Dutch Hatemonger Geert Wilders Acquitted of Inciting Hatred."

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Syria Crackdown

The Wall Street Journal reports, "Gunfire, Arrests as Syria Continues Crackdown":

Gunfire reverberated Tuesday in the southern Syrian city of Daraa where the dead still lay unclaimed in the streets a day after a brutal government crackdown on the popular revolt against President Bashar Assad, residents said.

Meanwhile, diplomats scrambled to find a way to stop the violence, appealing to Mr. Assad to withdraw his forces and seeking a special session of the United Nations's top human-rights body to condemn the bloody crackdown on protesters.

A Syrian human-rights group said authorities detained dozens across the country, mainly in several Damascus suburbs and in the northern coastal city of Jableh.

The Syrian army, backed by tanks and snipers, launched a deadly raid before dawn Monday on Daraa, where the uprising in Syria started more than a month ago. At least 11 people were killed in the southern city.

A relentless crackdown since mid-March has killed more than 400 people across Syria, with 120 dead over the weekend, rights groups said. That has only emboldened protesters who started their revolt—inspired by uprisings in the Arab world—with calls for modest reforms but are now increasingly demanding Mr. Assad's downfall.

See also earlier graphic video, at Pajamas Media, here and here (content warning). And at check The Lede for updated coverage, here and here.

Further, there's analysis at Frontpage Magazine, "The Bloody Streets of Syria." And especially, Fouad Ajami, "The Freedom Movement Comes to Syria":

Terrorism has always been part of the Assad regime's arsenal. It killed and conquered its way into Lebanon over three decades starting in the late 1970s. It fought and bloodied American purposes in Iraq by facilitating the entry of jihadists who came to war against the Americans and the Shiites. And in the standoff between the Persian theocracy and its rivals in the region, the Syrians had long cast their fate with the Iranians.

Under Bashar, the Syrians slipped into a relationship of some subservience to the Iranians—yet other nations were always sure that Syria could be "peeled off" from Iran, that a bargain with Damascus was always a day, or a diplomatic mission, away. It had worked this way for Assad senior, as American statesmen including Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were confident that they could bring that man, at once an arsonist and a fireman in his region, into the fold.

The son learned the father's tricks. There is a litter of promises, predictions by outsiders that Bashar Assad is, at heart, a reformer. In 2000, our emissary to his father's funeral and to his own inauguration, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, praised him in such terms. He was part of the Internet generation, she said.

But Bashar is both this system's jailer and its captive. The years he spent in London, the polish of his foreign education, are on the margin of things. He and the clans—and the intelligence warlords and business/extortion syndicates around him—know no other system, no other way.

"We need our second independence in Syria," an astute dissident, Radwan Ziadeh, recently observed. "The first was the freedom from the French and the second will be from the Assad dynasty." Would that the second push for freedom be as easy and bloodless as the first.

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Lindsey Graham Blames Kooky Koran-Burning Pastor for Animalistic Beheadings of United Nations Workers in Afghanistan

This story got going yesterday with Senator Graham's comments on Face the Nation. I've never been a Graham-hater, but I'm definitely not a fan at this point. The dude fails the most basic lesson of the First Amendment: The antidote to offensive speech is more speech. I hate flag burning, but the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling in Texas v. Johnson is central to preserving the marketplace of ideas. By allowing someone to burn the flag we uphold the values for which the flag stands. It's extremely offensive. But as symbolic speech it affirms our freedoms.

So I cringe at this interview with Senator Graham at National Review. I denounced Koran-burning last year during all the controversy surrounding the Ground Zero mosque. Pastor Terry Jones is an idiot, and while I support his right to burn Islam's holy book, the same rule applies: Burning the flag is extremely offensive, and so is Koran burning. I don't endorse either form of expression, but I wouldn't attack either as un-American. That's not to say burning the Koran is the right thing to do, especially with how freighted the act is in this environment. But one lone wacko is not responsible for rampaging murderous Muslims 6 thousand miles away. What's evil is the reversal of responsibility game that everyone's playing, from the White House on down. And the headline sets the debate at New York Times, "Afghans Avenge Florida Koran Burning, Killing 12." And also, "Afghans Protest Koran Burning for Third Day." Well, at least the editors at the Baltimore Sun get it. "The U.S. has condemned Quran burning; will Afghans condemn the violence?":


There's no doubt that the publicity-seeking Florida minister who burned a Quran to demonstrate his hatred of Muslims committed a pointlessly provocative and reprehensible act. But the reaction of Afghan rioters who killed at least innocent 20 people in retaliation for what they saw as an intolerable insult to Islam is even more indefensible. And while there are plenty of Americans willing to speak out against anti-Muslim intolerance, where are the Afghan leaders willing to condemn the violence committed by their fellow Muslims?

And check this out:


To their credit, the national news media withheld the lavish coverage it had previously provided the minister's obvious play for attention. As a result, Mr. Jones' reckless provocation initially went largely unnoticed in the Muslim world. But then for some reason known only to himself, Afghan President Hamid Karzai chose to resurrect the issue in a speech on Thursday, in which he sharply criticized U.S. forces for accidentally killing innocent civilians and called for Mr. Jones' arrest for the "crime" of insulting Islam.


Having lived in the U.S., Mr. Karzai knows perfectly well that U.S. law doesn't permit police to arrest people simply for exercising their right of free speech — however repugnant such speech may be. He also had to know that publicizing Mr. Jones' lunacy during a televised address might very well stoke extremist elements in his own country to commit acts of violence and cause the loss of innocent lives. But whatever twisted political calculation led him take such a risk, Mr. Karzai's criticism of his American partners and his calls for Mr. Jones' arrest have only grown more strident since the rioting began on Friday.


One almost gets the impression the Afghan leader is deliberately fomenting unrest among his people, perhaps in a desperate attempt to deflect criticism from the corruption and incompetence of the government he leads. He has always been a shaky ally whose integrity was doubtful at best.


But Mr. Karzai's is not the only voice in Afghanistan. Where are the other leaders of that country who have the moral authority to condemn the violence and the courage to speak out against bigotry and intolerance? Mr. Jones acted recklessly and without regard to the danger others might find themselves in as a result of his shameless self-promotion and puffery. He is a vain, selfish man, the exact opposite of what a true spiritual leader should be. Perhaps that is why he has never been able to attract a flock of followers and relies instead on the anonymous audiences provided by the television news cameras to get his twisted message across.


Yet for all his failings, Mr. Jones did not commit a single act of violence or cause any person physical harm. It was the mullahs in Afghanistan, who whipped their congregations into a frenzy, and the rioters themselves who are to blame for the 20 deaths so far around the country, including seven at a United Nations compound, and injuries to dozens more.

Nope. Not a single act of violence, but Graham's ready to criminalize political opinion in America. (And President Obama's "condemning" the "hate speech.") Boy, wouldn't want to offend those murderous mobs across Afghanistan.


See also Mark Steyn, who calls Graham a "wretched buffoon": "Re: Lindsey Graham and the First Amendment."

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Michele Bachmann at David Horowitz West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes, April 2, 2011

Well, if at first you don't succeed!! Here's Congresswoman Michele Bachmann after her keynote address last night to the awards dinner at David Horowitz's West Coast Retreat:



It's been a whirlwind weekend, and I have lots to report --- and loads of great photos to post. But I'm about to grab a quick shower and head back up to Palos Verdes for Day 3 of the conference. Check back later this afternoon for an update!

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Michele Bachmann at David Horowitz West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes, April 2, 2011

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