“When Apple CEO Steve Jobs put the New York Times at the center of the ceremonious unveiling of his company’s iPad tablet device, the implication was clear: this is the future of the news–or at least Jobs wants us to think it is. He stands to gain not only financially but politically as Apple becomes a major gatekeeper for information….

…Before critics of liberal bias rejoice, however, consider that the tech world is probably just as far to the left as the journalism world. Jobs has given a total of $241,700 to the Democratic Party, and has donated to the campaigns of Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, and Rahm Emanuel, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Google only last year allowed Christian and pro-life groups to place anti-abortion advertisements on its search engine. It made the decision grudgingly, and in the face of a legal battle.

With records like these, the gatekeepers could actually consolidate a liberal hold on the news media, even while wresting control over distribution from (overwhelmingly liberal) content providers. The result: Old Media lives on, and very little changes in terms of its political bent.

“Silicon Valley used to be libertarian, but we are all Keynesians now,” one technology entrepreneur told the Wall Street Journal. The Valley’s liberal bent showed through late last year when Twitter ended a list service that blatantly favored Democratic politicians.

If the devices consumers use to consume news control what news is delivered and how–the Kindle’s control over eBooks and Apple’s control over music iTunes suggest that they will–the companies that manufacture those devices will in effect retain control over the consumption of news. If those companies continue to be made up primarily of people with liberal leanings, technology will only drive the news further to the left.”

And this is a problem?

January 30, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Aussies are getting ready to ban homebirth

“AN ONLINE poll has found huge opposition to draft Federal Government laws which would effectively ban homebirths and could lead to women choosing to freebirth.”

I have long stated on this blog and elseware that the Global Elites are moving to ban homebirth outright and lock up any midwife or father who dares to deliver a child.

Australia should provide a neat microcosm of how WE THE PEOPLE will respond to this Medical Facism as they move to ban homebirth.

As we Freebirthers say, IF YOU WANT THE JOB DONE RIGHT, DO IT YOURSELF! But have at it Nanny State Busybodies, go ahead and ban homebirth and then watch the Mothers of Australia take personal responsibility for their childrens health. You might just have a couple of them giving birth on the steps of the capitol in protest.

The article concludes with these sobering words:

“Proposed changes to the controversial legislation – which sparked a recent protest of 2000 homebirth supporters outside Parliament House in Canberra – would also see midwives forced to work alongside obstetricians.

Ms Winder said the government would be “grossly underestimating the backlash” if it passed through the senate.

“Women are very angry, passionate and strong-willed on this topic and feel that their rights as a woman are being threatened,” she said. “Many members commented that they are appalled that the government thinks it has the right to choose where and how they birth their babies.”

Iowahawk: Guest State of the Union Review by T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII

January 30, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

A nice smackdown of the Rinos and Rockafella Repubs who luv Obamamessiah, and the only commentary I am willing to share at this blog on the Prez’s State of the Union. Farce is about all that speech deserves.

Read this whole piece at Iowahawks blog, and if you want a really, really good laugh Read T. Coddingtons Dad who recently roasted Norm: Norman Podhoretz: By Jove, I Like the Cut of This Hebrew’s Jib

Too funny for this teapartying walmart shopper…

“It seems now scarcely possible that 15 months have transpired

since I proclaimed my endorsement of Barack Obama on the pages of The National Topsider. As is clear now as it was then, Mr. Obama was the only sane choice for well-bred, commonsense conservatives; but, alas, as Christ himself noted, a prophet is without honor in his own land. For simply giving voice to this inescapable truth, I found myself branded as an apostate and banished by the state college neanderthals who now control that once-respected journal founded by my own father in 1948. Such is the sad state of conservatism that one of its best minds is forcefully escorted from his birthright by an obese security lummox named Lamont.

An obscene calumny, yes, but I request no tears on my behalf. In my new role as conservative pundit-without-portfolio, my exile to this dreary internet Elba has afforded the unfettered opportunity to hone subsequent theses on our national zeitgeist, as well as my badminton backhand. I have emerged, in the assessment of many, as the leading chronicler of the many ills that afflict conservatism. For more than a year I have warned that absent a rapprochement with the telegenic and wildly popular President, the conservative movement risked losing its few remaining serious intellectuals and being overrun by the unsightly hordes of Wal-Mart untermenschen typified by the loathesome “Tea Party” rabble. As is now obvious, events have proven me right. Yet I take no delight in this vindication; no more than Cassandra in her presaging the fall of Troy.”

This just in….Howard Zinn died of a bleeding heart

January 30, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Howard Zinn RIP

David Horowitz sums up a life that was:

“The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave. I also knew that while I was interviewed for ten minutes, out of what I said only a 20 second sound-bite would make it onto the air. I don’t begrudge NPR this selection. That’s what their obit was and would have to be, a collection of sound-bites.

Sure enough the bottom-feeders at FAIR pounced on my bite and accused me of spitting on Zinn’s grave. So here’s what I said that was cut from the interview. I’m not putting quotes around it because it’s from memory, but it’s pretty close to some of my remarks and captures the sense of others: No one should celebrate the death of another human being unless they are child-molesters or murderers. Howard Zinn lived to a ripe old age (87), and bad human being that he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him an extra few years; he’s done about as much damage as he could.

Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain. Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.

When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.”

Pajamas Media: Climategate – NOAA and NASA complicit in data manipulation

January 30, 2010Jenny Marie Hatch Leave a comment

Read Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts 110 page report here

Recent revelations from the Climategate emails,

originating from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, showed how all the data centers — most notably NOAA and NASA — conspired in the manipulation of global temperature records to suggest that temperatures in the 20th century rose faster than they actually did.

This has inspired climate researchers worldwide to take a hard look at the data proffered, by comparing it to the original data and to other data sources. An in-depth report, co-authored by myself and Anthony Watts for the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), compiles some of the initial alarming findings with case studies included from scientists around the world.

We don’t dispute the fact that there has been some cyclical warming in recent decades — most notably from 1979 to 1998 — but cooling took place from the 1940s to the late 1970s, again after 1998, and especially after 2001, all while CO2 rose. This fact alone questions the primary role in climate change attributed to CO2 by the IPCC, environmental groups, and others.

However, the global surface station data is seriously compromised.

There was a major station dropout — and an increase in missing data from remaining stations — which occurred suddenly around 1990. Just about the time the global warming issue was being elevated to importance in political and environmental circles.

A clear bias was found towards removing higher elevation, higher latitude, and rural stations — the cooler stations — during this culling process, though that data was not also removed from the base periods from which “averages,” and then anomalies, were computed.”