Posts Tagged ‘media’

Wiki Leaks round up: the good, bad and unnoticed

Posted: December 9, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech, opinion/news
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The Wiki Leaks news continues to grow:

First some very ugly news from the Guardian:

A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and “quash” the story, according to one of the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

The Lonely Conservative is rightly discussed as is Stacy.

Meanwhile Atlas points out some wikileaks stuff that continues to be ignored:

According to the latest WikiLeaks document “dump,” Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.

During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. “There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”

Color me unsurprised, but the rest of the media will totally ignore this.

Meanwhile Hackers attempt to wreak vengeance on Sarah Palin for daring to oppose the leaks:

The website and personal credit card information of former Gov. Sarah Palin were cyber-attacked today by Wikileaks supporters, the 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate tells ABC News in an email.

Hackers in London apparently affiliated with “Operation Payback” – a group of supporters of Julian Assange and Wikileaks – have tried to shut down SarahPac and have disrupted Sarah and Todd Palin’s personal credit card accounts.

“No wonder others are keeping silent about Assange’s antics,” Palin emailed. “This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his sick, un-American espionage efforts.”

This will guarantee them sympathy on MSNBC and with most of the MSM. Cubachi thinks it is foolish of them:

How stupid can these people be? They just proved that they’re not all about free speech. They are all about quelling and silencing opposition with fear, and destroying America’s infrastructure. A bunch of dangerous dolts.

For those of you who don’t think WikiLeaks is a terrorist organization, what does this say where they engage in cyber warfare against our country and innocent people?

I don’t think it’s stupidity, I think they recognize the left sympathy with wikileaks has nothing to do with speech and everything about hitting the US.

As for the Terrorist part, well lets ask an actual terrorist:

‘I Never Denounced’ W.U. Violence: Ayers Compares Weather Underground to WikiLeaks

Remember terrorists aren’t terrorist if they support the left.

Meanwhile Twitter has acted:

The group responsible for “hacking” several companies which have cut ties with and services to Wikileaks as well as Sarah Palin moments ago had their twitter account suspended.

Expect the get a life crowd to go after Twitter next, as they did against Mastercard as reported here:

In what they called “Operation Payback”, the network of online activists targeted firms including Mastercard and Visa, in the latest front of the battle over leaked US diplomatic cables.

The group, known as Anonymous and thought to be 1,500 to 2,000-strong, flooded the websites of the credit card companies, and that of the Swedish prosecution authority, with millions of bogus visits.

Their attack came after the financial giants, along with the online payment firm PayPal, announced they would no longer process donations to the anti-secrecy group.

Allahpundit says not so fast on the blame game:

I’m not sure how Tapper’s so sure who the culprit is. Wikileaks itself has been DDOS’d a bunch of times, presumably by freelance “hackers,” since the latest document drop. Maybe the London group did hit Palin and Mastercard, or maybe it’s copycats who also support Wikileaks, or maybe it’s freelancers looking to get in on the action for whatever reason. The ‘Net’s becoming a freefire DDOS zone, which makes it hard to keep track of who’s firing each of the bullets.

My Money’s on the Flemish Menace

Meanwhile there are those who are celebrating the wikileaks crowd such as the Russians:

According to Russia’s English-language television news Russia Today, the Kremlin thinks that Julian Assange is too important for a Time Magazine Person of the Year and needs more substantial recognition for his work — like, say, sharing the stage with Barack Obama with a Nobel Peace Prize. The Week has the lengthy video that is unintentionally hilarious as it explores whether the US or Israel’s assassins will get to Assange first.

The story is noteworthy for the number of truthers involved in it, meanwhile on the left coast:

An Army private jailed for allegedly leaking sensitive military data is a hero and should be freed, according to a resolution under consideration by the Berkeley City Council.

The council is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to declare its support for Pfc. Bradley Manning, who’s suspected of providing WikiLeaks with classified military documents and a video depicting an Army helicopter attack in Baghdad in which 11 civilians were killed.

Sister Toldaja asks the question:

Ummmm. Can we question their patriotism yet?

Yet? I never stopped. Remember during the 80 when all those anti-nuke groups hit Reagan and it was revealed that the Soviets funded those guys all those years. I’d be shocked if they didn’t have such a connection now.

I’ll give the last word belongs to the daily gut:

Look, I’m tired of people making this a huge “transparency” issue. Thank God Assange wasn’t alive during the French Resistance, or we’d be speaking Australian now.

Bottom line: the left loves Assange because he’s attacking America.

And our lives demand secrecy – whether in times of war, or warts.

That’s pretty much it.

Update: Glenn Reynolds 3:18 A.m.

SHOCKER: Berkeley City Council Plans Vote to Honor Wikileaks Leaker Bradley Manning.

My question: Why is this a Shocker?

Why am I writing about Mildred Jefferson over a month after she died?

Posted: November 23, 2010 by datechguy in local issues, opinion/news
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Simply to make a small point.

Mildred Jefferson was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School. This is the type of thing that one might have seen moving tributes on many TV shows. Not simple editorials but large tributes in papers and perhaps even a major magazine article. After all her achievement was not insignificant, it was in 1951 that she graduated from Harvard Medical. This is in the middle of Jim Crow, before MLK.

Why is there less fuss? Because of quotes like this:

“I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.”

You see she founded National right to life applauded by Roe v Wade. That’s why you see long essays in the American Spectator and feminists for life.

I met her only one, during the hearings in Fitchburg in January. I actually had no idea who she was, but said this about her testimony:

With a quiet and calm demeanor she made the case that Fitchburg would be a less pleasant place with Planned parenthood. Her best argument however was the description of Planned Parenthood in terms of practices and their use of organizations that they fund to support their positions as if they were independent.

Consider, this is a person who is known within the movement and must have had many demands on her time and life, and yet, on a cold winter day she made the time to come to Fitchburg Mass. to fight for the lives of the unborn.

I consider myself a well-informed person and one who follows history, I am shocked that I didn’t know this woman, but I shouldn’t be, because the MSM and foes of abortion could not allow it for they might be inspired and that can’t be allowed to happen.

One of these things is just like the other

Posted: November 19, 2010 by datechguy in internet/free speech
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China 2010:

A Chinese woman has been sentenced to a year in a labor camp for retweeting a Twitter post that mocked Chinese protesters who smashed Japanese products during a recent demonstration, her fiance said Thursday.

On October 17, Cheng Jianping, under the username wangyi09, added a few words to a message written by her fiance, before resending it on Twitter.

Eleven days later on the day the couple had planned to marry, Cheng’s fiance, Hua Chunhui was taken away by the police from his office in the southeastern city of Wuxi.

Well that’s horrible! It’s a good thing we live in America where the political class would never consider suppressing those who disagree with them…oh wait

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER (D-WV): “There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.”

Hillbuzz nails it:

If Senator Rockefeller is so casually saying things that 20 years ago would have had him run out of town on a rail, just imagine what these nuts are saying behind closed doors in their Leftist cloisters.

Expect the media to give this the attention it deserves sometime after Joe Scarborough endorses Sarah Palin for president.

Here’s a topic we will be discussing on Saturday for sure

Posted: November 16, 2010 by datechguy in media, opinion/news
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Remember those DOJ hearings that the morning shows ignored for the Colbert Hearings? Well there is another interesting development:

E-mails newly obtained by Judicial Watch strengthen contentions that politics motivated the Obama Justice Department’s dismissal of a voter-intimidation case despite video of a nightstick-wielding New Black Panther Party member at a Philadelphia polling place.

The e-mails show two political appointees’ involvement in Justice’s decision to dismiss, the watchdog group says. And, it notes, those e-mails contradict what Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for Justice’s Civil Rights Division, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under oath: that decision involved “only career people.”emphasis mine

The key words here are under oath.

I don’t expect to see much of this on the MSM, they should heed the warning:

One might survive in a niche market but if your business is information and analysis and you are being scooped by people in the street you’d better look for another business pronto.

Don’t say we didn’t tell you.

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