Year: 2011

NPR Vivian Schiller Resigns-This Should Have Happened Over the Juan Williams Firing

Published by Papa Giorgio

Finally! NPR is showing its true colors again at the very top with the embedded liberalism (see firing of Juan Williams) of its “news” organization. This from NewsBusters:

In the wake of a video sting showing NPR executives making disparaging comments towards conservatives, National Public Radio announced Wednesday morning that it had accepted the resignation of its president Vivian Schiller. “The Board accepted Vivian’s resignation with understanding, genuine regret and great respect for her leadership of NPR these past 2 years,” said Board Chairman Dave Edwards.

The hidden-camera video, released Tuesday, showed NPR exec Ron Schiller, no relation to Vivian, calling the Tea Party “racist” and “xenophobic” and insisting that NPR would be “better off in the long-run” without the federal dollars that congressional Republicans have been seeking to rescind. A pair of NPR statements disavowed Ron Schiller’s comments, and specifically rejected his claims regarding NPR funding.

Vivian Schiller was also the target of criticism for her handling of the firing of Juan Williams from NPR for comments he made about Muslims that the station considered inappropriate. Schiller acknowledged in a speech at the National Press Club on Monday that the firing was not handled correctly.

Williams appeared on the Fox News Channel, where he is a contributor, on Tuesday night to denounce NPR for the revelations in the undercover video. “They prostitute themselves for money,” he had told Fox Nation earlier in the day.

…(read more)…

 

Religion of Peace Burning Churches and Killing Christians

Published by Papa Giorgio

From Religion News Blog:

NAIROBI, Kenya, March 7 (Compass Direct News) – At least one Christian was killed and others injured when thousands of Islamic extremists set fire to 59 churches and at least 28 homes in western Ethiopia in the past five days, Christian leaders said.

More than 4,000 Christians in and around Asendabo, Jimma Zone have been displaced as a result of attacks that began on Wednesday (March 2) after Muslims accused a Christian of desecrating the Quran by tearing up a copy, sources said.

“The atrocity is still going on, and more people are suffering,” said a source in Addis Ababa who is in close contact with area church leaders.

The Christian killed, believed to have been a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, has not yet been identified.

“One Orthodox believer, whose daughter is a member of Mekane Yesus Church, has been killed,” an Ethiopian church leader told Compass. “Ministers were injured, and many more believers have been displaced.”

A pastor based in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa noted that evangelical church leaders have reported the attacks to authorities and asked officials for help, but no action had been taken at press time.

“The church requested more police protection,” he said. “The authorities sent security forces, but they were overwhelmed by the attackers.”

John Podhoritz Exposes Third rate Reporting at the New Republic

Published by Papa Giorgio

This from John Podhoretz over at Commentary Magazine:

Chait Crime

Victor Davis Hanson catches the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait making an analogy so disgusting that I almost have to believe Chait is simply too stupid to understand the implications of what he wrote — because the only other conclusion is that he has absolutely no sense of where the boundaries of even minimally civil public discourse are. Hanson wrote a review of Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir in which he included the following sentence: “‘Take away the insurgency in Iraq,’ an acquaintance once told me, ‘and Donald Rumsfeld would have been a sort of icon of postwar America.’”

Chait’s appalling response:

Right, if you imagine that the most important thing he did was a huge success rather than a huge failure, then he’s be remember [sic] as a huge success. Not as a huge failure. Likewise, if Lee Harvey Oswald had killed someone who was about to assassinate President Kennedy, rather than assassinating President Kennedy himself, he’d go down in history as a hero.

You can be sour about Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Defense Department all you like, and plenty of people are. But offering a cutesy analogy between Rumsfeld and Lee Harvey Oswald has lowered Chait to a base level of rhetorical crassness to which even his questionable standing as an exceptionally graceless writer and amazingly crude thinker had not yet fallen. Now it has. Congratulations.