Category Archive 'Los Angeles Times'

07 Feb 2021

A Liberal’s Response to Rural Kindness

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The snow was too deep for Cadet our basset hound.

Our first winter in our Virginia home atop the Blue Ridge, the heavens opened and it snowed two feet. I had inherited an old John Deere riding mower from the previous owners that could have a plow blade mounted on front, but that little garden tractor could not remotely handle that magnitude of snow.

My wife and I were already no longer young, and our driveway was long. We were wondering how long we’d be trapped when we heard noises outside. A neighbor, from a long way down the road, owned a Bobcat, and he was digging out everybody along Raven Rocks Road.

That kind of thing is both extraordinary and yet typical of life in rural America. Our neighbor had the right tool for the job and he knew perfectly well that almost nobody else was similarly equipped. He knew, too, that we were a long way from town, and the chances of anybody obtaining professional assistance were slim. So he just went down the whole road and dug everybody out.

I ran out and offered money, and he naturally refused. A few days later, I went to his house and dropped off a pretty good bottle of Bourbon.

One of the really nice things about living in the country, in red state, fly-over America is that people are neighborly. They believe in helping out other people who need a hand, and they regard it as their own responsibility to do that, not somebody else’s or the government’s.

So, try reading this piece on a similar experience had by Virginia Heffernan (Wikipedia profile) for the LA Times:

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing. …

What do we do about the Trumpites around us? Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who spoke eloquently this week about her terrifying experience during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans are expected to forgive and forget before we’ve even stitched up our wounds. Or gotten our vaccines against the pandemic that former President Trump utterly failed to mitigate.

My neighbors supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans. They kept him in business with their support.

But the plowing.

On Jan. 6, after the insurrection, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors. The United States, he said, “isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, this blood feud forever.” And, he added, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”

At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.

So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.

But I can offer a standing invitation to make amends. Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.

That neighbor ought to go right out and plow this arrogant liberal cow back in.

26 Jan 2009

Michaelangelo Did It Better

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Image from a wrapper on the Los Angeles Times Inaugural edition

The MSM’s image of Barack Obama remains just a little over the top, wouldn’t you say?

Hat tip to Puffer via Warner Todd Huston.

11 Jan 2009

LA Times Reporter Riding With Enemy

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Canadian journalist Paul Watson received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the naked body of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia.

What does someone like Watson do for a follow-up almost a decade and a half later? Why, he goes to Afghanistan to ride with the Taliban and record their boasts and praise their hospitality for the LA Times.

Centcom ought to have a special Hellfire missile-equipped drone following Watson. When he next goes off behind the lines to rub elbows with the enemy, its controller can just wait until the traditional pashtunwali hospitality and America-bashing is well underway, then deliver a brand new award of 18 lb (8 kg) of metal augmented explosive charge.

29 Oct 2008

LA Times Has Obama & Palestinians Video, But Won’t Release It

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Britt Hume, at Fox News, tells us that the 2003 video of Obama partying with Palestinians is breaking through into the news, despite the LA Times’ blockade.

The McCain camp has now joined those demanding The Los Angeles Times release a 2003 video that shows Barack Obama celebrating with a group of Palestinians hostile to Israel.

Peter Wallsten wrote in April about Obama’s association with former Palestinian operative Rashid Khalidi. The celebration was a farewell for Khalidi as he left Chicago for a job in New York. Wallsten called Khalidi a, “critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights.”

He says, “A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young State Senator Barack Obama… Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife… and conversations that had challenged his thinking.”

Wallsten writes that a young Palestinian read a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism. Another speaker likened Israeli settlers on the West Bank to Usama bin Laden.

Wallsten confirmed he has the tape, but told the political blog Gateway Pundit he does not plan on releasing it.

11 Jul 2006

MSM Leaks

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05 Jul 2006

Times’ Stories Compromised Three Investigations

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The American Spectator has learned from Treasury and Justice Department officials more scarifying details about the US Government’s attempts to persuade both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times to refrain from publishing the SWIFT story.

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories.

“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.

In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain more details about one of the investigations through different sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the official….
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases, they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S. Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking the stuff, had them sold on this story.”

To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for whatever reasons.”

The fact that this last especially outrageous violation of national security appears likely to motivate the Justice Department to get serious about catching the Pouting Spooks responsible, and bringing them to justice, sheds a single ray on sunshine on the appalling situation. The truth of the matter is, all they need to do is get one cowardly squealer to talk, and they can probably bag the whole lot. In that company, too, cowardly squealers are probably a dime a dozen.

27 Jun 2006

New Michele Malkin Video

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Michelle Malkin has an amusing new video, focussing on those leaking leftwing newspapers, which includes a WWII Private Snafu cartoon, written by Dr. Seuss and featuring the voice of Mel Blanc.

27 Mar 2006

Fitzgerald’s Record and Libby’s Motion to Dismiss

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Clarice Feldman has a new article on American Thinker, in which she demonstrates a pattern of protecting the reputation of Patrick Fitzgerald by such representatives of the establishment media as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Ms. Feldman also reviews the arguments in Lewis Libby’s Motion to Dismiss identifying the core argument:

The decision whether to continue the Special Counsel’s investigation long after the acts regarding the disclosure of Ms. Plame’s occupation were established required a careful balancing of the interests. On the one hand, there is a law enforcement interest in investigating potential false-statement and perjury offenses. On the other hand, there is a public interest in avoiding confrontations that Mr. Fitzgerald’s investigation and prosecution continue to entail. There is also a public interest in avoiding continued distraction of our nation’s highest officials well after it has become apparent that the alleged crime that was the intended focus of the investigation did not in fact occur. Those competing interests should have been weighed by properly appointed principal officers of the United States. Because the Special Counsel was given the power to operate without any supervision of direction in contravention of the Appointments Clause, that did not happen in this case.

On which basis, she concludes:

I think that Libby has made a persuasive hard-to-answer argument that the Prosecutor was improperly appointed and granted powers in a way that violates the Statute and the Constitution, and that the indictment should be dismissed.

01 Jan 2006

Patterico Reviews the LA Times

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The New Year is frequently selected as the occasion for surveys of the previous year’s accomplishments. Patterico’s Pontifications published yesterday a third annual review of malfeasance, distortion, and generalized left-wing bias on the part of the Los Angeles Times. Patterico’s survey will be a handy thing to have around for the next time one of my liberal friends starts pooh-pooh’ing the existence of media bias.


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