November 30, 2014

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Roger Simon on the Ferguson Hall of Shame which include the NY Times, Al Sharpton, and others. 

That the photograph of Walter Duranty — the New York Times Moscow correspondent who deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s 1930s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians and won the Pulitzer for it — still is on the newspaper’s wall of fame with their other prize winners is apparently no aberration. The New York Times has no moral center. In fact, it’s despicable. On November 24, they published the home address of Officer Darren Wilson.

By now most of America knows who Wilson is — the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer exonerated for the murder of Michael Brown, the supposed 6′ 6″, three-hundred-pound “gentle giant” who was reportedly on his way to college, but it turns out was holding up convenience stores and trying to grab Wilson’s gun and bashing him in the face all while the officer was sitting in his police car. …

… But the real top of the Ferguson Hall of Shame goes to the people who brought us Ferguson from the beginning. I mean the real beginning. I mean… what happened to black America in the post-civil rights era? Why has such a wonderful group of people who fought so hard against a racist society and won, who brought so much to American (and world) culture had the guts torn out of their community? Why is what was once one of our most family-oriented groups now virtually without family, seventy percent of their babies born out of wedlock? That was unheard of when I was a young civil rights worker in the sixties. And the endless black on black crime? Where did that come from? What caused that? Forget Brown. Forget Wilson. They’re trivial by comparison. Those are the real questions.

I submit that some of the answer is above — it’s part Al Sharpton (and his ilk) and part the New York Times. When I say the Times, I mean the liberal ideology for which they remain the standard bearer, even in their weakened state. They lead the way for the dependent welfare state that has pushed generation after generation of black people deeper and deeper into self hatred and shame, the inevitable psychological result of the welfare state, culminating on the streets of Ferguson and across the country today. …

 

 

Ann Coulter has Ferguson thoughts.

The riot in Ferguson reminds me, I hate criminals, but I hate liberals more. They planned this riot. They stoked the fire, lied about the evidence and produced a made-to-order riot.

Every other riot I’ve ever heard of was touched off by some spontaneous event that exploded into mob violence long before any media trucks arrived. This time, the networks gave us a countdown to the riot, as if it were a Super Bowl kickoff.

From the beginning, Officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown wasn’t reported like news. It was reported like a cause.

The media are in a huff about the prosecutor being “biased” because his father was a cop, who was shot and killed by an African-American.

Evidently, the sum-total of what every idiot on TV knows about the law is Judge Sol Wachtler’s 20-year-old joke that a prosecutor could “indict a ham sandwich.” We’re supposed to be outraged that this prosecutor didn’t indict the ham sandwich of Darren Wilson.

Liberals seem not to understand that they don’t have a divine right to ruin someone’s life and bankrupt him with a criminal trial, just so they’re satisfied. …

 

 

Robert Merry in the National Interest posts on the president’s big Ferguson failure.

… One crucial question here is whether Michael Brown’s fate was sealed by an underlying problem in American society or was the result, in significant measure, of his own actions. Another is whether the grand-jury decision was further evidence of racist sentiments lingering in the American body politic or a measured, conclusive examination of the evidence.

If the latter, then there is no reason to use those events as a springboard for a discussion of American racism. If the former, then there is every reason to use the Ferguson events not only as a broader discussion point, but also to question the entire justice system in Ferguson and St. Louis County.

That’s what Obama did. “We need to recognize,”  he said, “that this is not just an issue for Ferguson. This is an issue for America.” He said the Ferguson events “speak to broader challenges that we face as a nation” and noted  “a deep distrust” between law enforcement and communities of color.

Obama emphasized that “there’s never an excuse for violence, particularly when here are a lot of people of goodwill out there who are willing to work on these issues.” Then he added:

“On the other hand, those who are only interested in focusing on the violence and just want the problem to go away need to recognize that we do have work to do here and we shouldn’t try to paper it over. Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America’s isn’t everything that it could be.”

That was the crux of the Obama statement. If you don’t recognize problems in race relations and if those problems aren’t addressed effectively, then black people are going to get angry when events happen such as those in Ferguson, and those angers are going to erupt into violence. Thus did the president seek to put the onus on the country for any violence that erupted in Ferguson. In doing that, he actually placed some of the onus on himself. …

 

 

Robert Tracinski on how the media should not screw up the next Ferguson.

I hate to say, “I told you so.” No, really, I hate it. The city of Ferguson, Missouri, is in flames yet again as angry mobs—largely composed of outside agitators—vent their rage against “the system” after a grand jury refused to indict a white police officer for shooting a young black man. All of that destruction could have been prevented if the media knew its own business and didn’t need constant reminders from people like me about how to report on the use of deadly force.

Specifically, I warned them about Zimmerman Amnesia, the dogged failure to learn from the media’s mistakes in reporting previous cases.

“[H]ere we go making all of the same mistakes we made in the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, where reporters did their usual bang-up job of writing the story first and then gathering the facts—only to see much of the early narrative about the shooting dissolve before the case even reached trial. Everyone was shocked when a supposedly open-and-shut case ended with an acquittal, even though it was clear that many of the details were ambiguous and left room for reasonable doubt. Which made that case little different from hundreds of others involving the use of deadly force….

We ought to know from past experience how horribly inaccurate early reports about violent incidents can be. We ought to know how much can be distorted, misrepresented, and misunderstood by seemingly official or sympathetic sources on all sides, how long it can take for accurate information to come out, and how equivocal the results can be, with the evidence so evenly balanced as to convince partisans on both sides that they are right. But when every new politically charged shooting comes along, we forget what we should have learned, and there we all go, back to making confident pronouncements about who we think did what, who is the villain, and what is the remedy.”

That’s exactly what happened. The early reports were very clear that Michael Brown was a good, kind-hearted young man bound for college, that the shooting was totally unprovoked, that he was shot multiple times in the back, that he was executed in cold blood. Then the evidence, as it emerged, knocked down each of these claims one by one. …

 

 

Car and Driver has the list of cars in the massive 7 million car Takata air bag recall; a few Ford and GM products and lots of Chrysler and Japanese brands.

The automotive world and beyond is buzzing about the massive airbag recall covering many millions of vehicles in the U.S. from nearly two dozen brands. Here’s what you need to know about the problem; which vehicles may have the defective, shrapnel-shooting inflator parts from Japanese supplier Takata; and what to do if your vehicle is one of them.

The issue involves defective inflator and propellent devices that may deploy improperly in the event of a crash, shooting metal fragments into vehicle occupants. More than 7 million vehicles are potentially affected in the United States.

Initially, only six makes were involved when Takata announced the fault in April 2013, but a Toyota recall in June this year—along with new admissions from Takata that it had little clue as to which cars used its defective inflators, or even what the root cause was—prompted more automakers to issue identical recalls. In July, NHTSA forced additional regional recalls in high-humidity areas including Florida, Hawaii, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to gather removed parts and send them to Takata for review.

Another major recall issued on October 20 expanded the affected vehicles across several brands. For its part, Toyota said it would begin to replace defective passenger-side inflators starting October 25; if parts are unavailable, however, it has advised its dealers to disable the airbags and affix “Do Not Sit Here” messages to the dashboard.

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