Mich Rep. Conyers Staffer Arrested for Carrying Gun in Courthouse

-By Warner Todd Huston

A staffer for Michigan Congressman, Democrat John Conyers, was arrested for bringing a concealed gun into a federal courthouse in Detroit but faced little by way of sanction or punishment as a result.

Rep. John Conyers’ office manager, Betty Petrenz, had the pistol in her purse as she entered the court building and told police that she simply forgot she had it in there.

She faced no prosecution and was given what one prosecutor called “a gift” for a penalty. She received a ticket for having a gun on federal property and got what is called “pretrial diversion,” a sentence that involves neither jail time nor a fine. It merely requires the person to be on good behavior for a specified period of time after which the ticket is dismissed.

Tresa Baldas of the Detroit Free Press found that three other people who also accidentally brought their guns into the courthouse were treated a bit differently.
Continue reading


Mich Rep. Conyers Staffer Arrested for Carrying Gun in Courthouse”


Miss Alabama 2013 Proves American Freedom is Dying

-By Warner Todd Huston

Mary Margaret McCord, the dull witted “beauty queen” from Alabama, said during the 2013 Miss USA contest that she’d trade freedom and liberty for safety. This empty-headed twit proves that the liberals have won. We have lost our freedom if people care so little about it that they would trade liberty and freedom for government-sponsored “security.” Our system of mis-education, an edifice so infested with liberals, did this to us all. The liberals are killing America. But conservatives are also at fault here. They are at fault for allowing our educational system to be taken over by the anti-American, hardcore left.

This Ben Franklin axiom is obviously no longer taught in our schools:

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Continue reading


Miss Alabama 2013 Proves American Freedom is Dying”


Marshall University Professor Suggests Using Military to Kill NRA Members/Conservatives

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Charlestown Gazette recently published the editorial by a Marshall University professor who advocated using an “M1A Abrams tank, supported by an F22 Raptor squadron with Hellfire missiles” to kill NRA members, Republicans, Conservatives, and those who support the Second Amendment.

In an anti-gun piece that could best be described as a foaming-at-the-mouth tirade, Professor Christopher Swindell employs incredibly overheated rhetoric, punctuated by constant name calling, spiced with grammatical errors and out right lies to expound upon his hate for those with whom he disagrees.

Early in his piece, for instance, Swindell describes the rhetoric of supporters of the Second Amendment as “knuckle-dragging Cretan talk.” Yes, he wrote “Cretan talk.” A twofer that is both misspelled and needlessly capitalized.

Would it surprise you to learn that Christopher Swindell is a professor of journalism in Marshall University’s journalism and mass communications department? (swindell@marshall.edu)
Continue reading


Marshall University Professor Suggests Using Military to Kill NRA Members/Conservatives”


Dem. Senator Durbin Not Sure if Bloggers Deserve Constitutional Protection

-By Warner Todd Huston

In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, senior Illinois Senator, Democrat Dick Durbin, expressed his doubt as to whether bloggers deserved Constitutional protection for their work online.

On the May 26 broadcast of the Sunday show, Durbin told host Chris Wallace that he wasn’t sure if bloggers or “someone who is Tweeting” should be given protections under a media shield law.

Durbin noted that he was not prepared to ask for a special counsel to investigate Eric Holder and his snooping on the business and personal phone calls of nearly 100 reporters of the Associated Press, but he went further to question just who a media shield law would cover.

But here is the bottom line–the media shield law, which I am prepared to support, and I know Sen. Graham supports, still leaves an unanswered question, which I have raised many times: What is a journalist today in 2013? We know it’s someone that works for Fox or AP, but does it include a blogger? Does it include someone who is tweeting? Are these people journalists and entitled to constitutional protection? We need to ask 21st century questions about a provision in our Constitution that was written over 200 years ago.

Durbin did not go on to attempt to clarify what those limits should be.

Continue reading


Dem. Senator Durbin Not Sure if Bloggers Deserve Constitutional Protection”


Judge Goes Easy on Teacher Who Claims ‘Hypersexuality’ For Sleeping With Students

-By Warner Todd Huston

A Virginia judge slashed the sentence of a high school teacher because she claimed she’d been diagnosed with a “hypersexuality” disorder.

On May 23, Campbell County Circuit Court Judge John T. Cook sentenced William Campbell High School teacher Kathleen Cawthorne, 32, to 11 years in jail. However, in a turnabout Judge Cook suspended all but four months of the sentence because he agreed that Cawthorne had a “debilitating” condition.

Judge Cook said that he felt Cawthorne could not control the “sudden sexual urges” that overcame her.

During sentencing, Cawthorne came before the court to apologize for her actions. The teacher was arrested in April of 2012 for engaging in a relationship of a sexual nature with a student. She also participated in “sexting” with the young man.
Continue reading


Judge Goes Easy on Teacher Who Claims ‘Hypersexuality’ For Sleeping With Students”


Square Mobile Payment Systems Modifies User Agreement to Prohibit Gun-Related Purchases

-By Warner Todd Huston

Square payment services is one of those new payment applications that merchants can put on a smart phone and, along with the plug-in hardware, is used like a credit card swipe machine to accept payments made by their customers. This month, however, Square has changed its user policy and is now prohibiting merchants from using the service to sell anything firearm related.

The new user agreement has altered its “Your Square Account” section to add a new category for things that Square won’t allow its service to be used for.

The new prohibition reads: “(23) sales of (i) firearms, firearm parts or hardware, and ammunition; or (ii) weapons and other devices designed to cause physical injury.”

This is the next battle for gun owners to fight. Liberals and anti-Constitutionalists continue to lose with efforts to curtail our freedoms via Congress and the courts so they are attacking our credit, banking, and sales sectors attempting to scare them into putting an end to the selling of firearms and firearm related items at the retail level.

Another area of attack comes in the field of investments. Some Democrats and anti-gun zealots are targeting investment firms that hold stock in gun companies. Others are trying to intimidate cities and individuals into pulling investments out of gun companies.
Continue reading


Square Mobile Payment Systems Modifies User Agreement to Prohibit Gun-Related Purchases”


Feds Killing Off Private Bus Lines Based on Fraudulent Study

-By Warner Todd Huston

The story of the coming demise of Chinatown bus lines in New York City is a tale of multiple failures in both government and the media and shows that both have a bias against entrepreneurs that kills new, start up ideas with unfair regulations, faux public advocacy, and dismal reporting.

A “Chinatown buss” was a new idea in the late 90s pioneered by Chinese immigrants in the Big Apple. These were private buses that cruised the streets looking for fares like cabs do, picking customers up at curbside, not having fixed bus stops or routes, and going where ever the customer wanted to go within a defined area of the city. Because they originated in New York’s Chinatown area, they became known as “Chinatown busses.”

Unfortunately, their success led to their downfall when nosey politicians like Senator Chuck Schumer began to take notice of them. Schumer and other New York pols began to call for a crack down on the busses and started looking to hit them with an avalanche of stifling regulations meant to “save lives.”

To assist Schumer in that jobs-killing endeavor the National Transportation Safety Bureau jumped to conduct a “study” of the safety records of Chinatown busses and purported to have found that these busses had a death rate “seven times higher” than that of other services.
Continue reading


Feds Killing Off Private Bus Lines Based on Fraudulent Study”


Obama’s ‘Poverty Plagued’ America

-By Warner Todd Huston

In a stinging indictment of President Obama’s tenure in the White House, at The Daily Beast Stuart Stevens slams President Obama for the devastating “new normal” that his failed economic polices have brought to the country. Stevens also blames the Old Media complex for ignoring the pain inflicted on America by those same failed policies.

Stevens begins his April 9 piece relating the sort of economic facts that the rest of the media conveniently ignore. He points out that even as the administration claims that unemployment is only around 8 percent, so many people have dropped out of the work force that the unemployment stat is but a hollow representation of the true unemployment rate.

He also points out that 16 million Americans have been added to Obama’s food stamp rolls since 2008, “a 46 percent increase and greater than the population of Ohio,” Stevens says. “More than 50 million Americans now live in poverty. That’s one in six Americans, and one in five American children.”

This, Stevens says sharply, is the worst since LBJ was president and it was so bad then that the Texan launched a “war on poverty” to try and cure it.
Continue reading


Obama’s ‘Poverty Plagued’ America”


NBC’s Chuck Todd: Is Gay Marriage Issue a Sign the Economy is Coming Back?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Chuck Todd presented an odd premise on last Sunday’s Meet the Press. Since the issue of gay marriage is now before the Supreme Court of the United States, Todd wondered if this meant that the economy is back on track because people’s attention has drifted from the economy to gay marriage?

During the March 31 broadcast, Todd noted that we are suddenly beset by a major debate on gay marriage and abortion. The NBC newser then pointed out that in the past the “big polarizing issues of the last two generations” have benefited Republicans.

Panelist Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal didn’t really think that we were exactly seeing any new focus on social issues because these fights have been going on for half a century. It was just part and parcel to our political climate, she pointed out.
Continue reading


NBC’s Chuck Todd: Is Gay Marriage Issue a Sign the Economy is Coming Back?”


VIDEO: What Can Washington Politicians Learn From America’s Moms?

Bankrupting America asks American mothers what Washington D.C. could do better. Their answers are so filled with common sense, that one wonders how Washington could be so stupid.

Listen to your mothers, Washington!

http://BankruptingAmerica.org


Twitter Agrees to Allow Vladimir Putin to Censor Russian Content

-By Warner Todd Huston

Twitter has bowed to pressure from Russian Czar Vladimir Putin to block all content blacklisted by Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision in Telecommunications, Information Technology and Mass Communications.

Putin’s government reports that since early March, Twitter has “actively been engaged in cooperation” with Russian authorities already. Twitter has already deleted pinpointed accounts and is restricting access on the basis of “five information materials” as determined by Russian authorities.

In a statement from the Kremlin, Twitter’s cooperation with the massive censorship policy was praised.
Continue reading


Twitter Agrees to Allow Vladimir Putin to Censor Russian Content”


Sarah Palin Drink Big Gulp at CPAC 2013

-By Warner Todd Huston

Governor Sarah Palin appeared this morning at CPAC 2013. This woman always, always draws a great and enthusiastic audience and this year was no exception.

Palin’s speech was filled with lots of Palin bromides about freedom, liberty and conservative, small government. She had many laugh lines, as always. One was when hubby Todd bought her a gun rack for her 4X4 and she had to buy a rifle to go in it for him. “He got the rifle,” Palin said, “and I got the rack.”

But it was what she did right exactly afterward that brought the house down. Palin reached under the podium and brought out a Big Gulp and began sipping from it.

This was, of course, a direct slap at New York’s “independent” mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The place simply erupted in applause.
Continue reading


Sarah Palin Drink Big Gulp at CPAC 2013″


CNN Mocks Rand Paul’s Filibuster, No Wonder CNN is Losing Credibility

-By Warner Todd Huston

During a long stretch of the day in the U.S. Senate, Kentucky’s junior Republican Senator, Rand Paul, led a filibuster to decry the Obama’s administration’s seeming disregard of due process, the rule of law, and American’s civil rights. This, apparently, is funny to CNN. Makes one wonder why CNN imagines itself a news station!

Obama’s administration has admitted that it sees nothing inherently wrong with using flying drones to kill Americans here in our own country. This is something that Senator Paul and millions of other Americans (on both sides of the aisle, by the way) think is wrong.

As Obama’s nomination for a new CIA chief came to the floor, Senator Paul launched an old fashioned, talking filibuster to block the nomination in order to get his point across that killing Americans without due process, without proper warrants and trials is simply wrong.

This was something that CNN’s Erin Burnett thought was worthy of mocking.

Here is what CNN’s viewers were treated to during Burnett’s show…
Continue reading


CNN Mocks Rand Paul’s Filibuster, No Wonder CNN is Losing Credibility”


Visual Aid: The Stupidity of What Constitutes an ‘Assault Weapon’

-By Warner Todd Huston

First of all, there is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” But, despite that fact, when half-wit leftists try to define what an “assault weapon” is, all they really end up doing is describing what such a weapon looks like not what the weapon does.

Essentially you get this…

Note that the two weapons in the illustration above are both single shot muskets. But when all sorts of cosmetic bric-a-brac is added to the musket, it sure makes it appear more menacing.

All the fancy grips, plastic stocks, bayonet lugs, scopes, all this stuff is superficial, cosmetic, and none of them make the weapon any more dangerous than when it started out.

Well, this is where we are with the nonsensical “definitions” that liberals foist on us all as they attempt to define what an “assault weapon” is. All we get are what it looks like, not what it does.

As the photo above proves, ANY GUN can be made to LOOK LIKE an “assault weapon.” But what a gun looks like has precisely nothing to do with what it can do, how quickly it can fire, how supposedly “dangerous” it is.
Continue reading


Visual Aid: The Stupidity of What Constitutes an ‘Assault Weapon’”


Democrats Want Background Checks… Except When They Don’t

-By Warner Todd Huston

One of the main discussions in this ginned up, fact-free anti-gun debate coming from the Democrats and their fellow extreme leftists is that they want “universal background checks” for gun purchases. So, “background checks” are a good idea to left-wingers… but in all cases? As it happens, NO is the answer to that. Democrats don’t want universal background checks in all cases.

Jams Bovard shows us this fact quite clearly in his recent Wall Street Journal piece headlined, “Perform Criminal Background Checks at Your Peril.”

Now, Bovard isn’t talking about the gun debate with his piece. In fact, he never mentions guns even one time. Bovard, you see, is talking about background checks as a condition for employment.

As it happens, Democrats and the Obama administration are attempting to eliminate background checks for prospective employees claiming it is a “civil rights” issue.
Continue reading


Democrats Want Background Checks… Except When They Don’t”


Iran Arrests a Dozen Journalists for ‘Anti-Revolutionary’ Acts

-By Warner Todd Huston

In a coordinated attack on the press, Iranian authorities have arrested between 11 and 14 journalists for “cooperating” with “anti-revolutionary” media outlets.

Amnesty International reported that between January 25 and 28, up to 14 journalists were arrested during raids on newspapers offices.

“This latest example of locking-up Iran’s journalists is a result of draconian restrictions on reporting which violate the right to freedom of expression and must be relaxed,” said Ann Harrison, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

“All journalists who are imprisoned in Iran merely for peacefully doing their job should be released immediately and unconditionally.”
Continue reading


Iran Arrests a Dozen Journalists for ‘Anti-Revolutionary’ Acts”


VP Biden: Mental Health Checks Could Have Stopped Vir. Tech Shooting

-By Warner Todd Huston

After a discussion on gun control at an event in Richmond, Virginia, Vice President Joe Biden claimed that better mental health checks could have stopped the shooting on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007.

Biden said that he and those he consulted during the recent gun banning commission he chaired which was completed in mid January had reached a “pretty broad consensus” of policy recommendations that would include “mental capacity” to determine who would be allowed to purchase guns in the future.

“One of the problems that was pointed out here was that there was an adjudication of the young man that committed the crime at Virginia Tech, and yet he was able to go out and purchase two weapons,” the Vice President said.

In 2007 Seung-Hui Cho, a student at the university, killed 32 at the Blacksburg, VA campus. Cho used two handguns that he had purchased legally. The killer, though, had a history of mental health issues that apparently didn’t come up in his background checks when he purchased the weapons.
Continue reading


VP Biden: Mental Health Checks Could Have Stopped Vir. Tech Shooting”


Danny Glover’s Revisionist History: 2nd Amendment Was for Protecting Slavery

-By Warner Todd Huston

Actor and hardcore progressive Danny Glover should add revisionist historian to his growing resume of left-wing activism after a recent visit to Texas A&M University where he told students that the Second Amendment was mainly meant to keep African Americans in slavery and to kill Native American peoples.

During his January 17 appearance at the university, Glover thought to teach the students attending about the real purpose of the Second Amendment.

I don’t know if people know the genesis of the right to bear arms. The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect, for settlers to protect themselves from slave revolts and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their lands or revolts from people whose land was stolen from. That was the genesis of the Second Amendment.

This is simple historical revisionism. Slave revolts had yet to become the constant, nagging fear it was later to become for southern slaveholders. There was no such preoccupation in the late 1780s during the debate over the Constitution or in the decades previous to that and it certainly wasn’t a cause for northerners to worry.

Glover is completely wrong in every respect.
Continue reading


Danny Glover’s Revisionist History: 2nd Amendment Was for Protecting Slavery”


Bait and Switch: Law Goes From Protecting Your Email to Allowing Gov’t Into Your Email

-By Warner Todd Huston

A new law that was originally meant to strengthen the privacy of your email was recently re-written to allow government more access to your private emails and other digital files.

When H.R. 2471 went to the Senate, Democrat Senator Pat Leahy quickly rewrote the whole thing to allow federal policing agencies to have the power to search your digital files without a warrant.

As CNET reports it,

Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.

This is, of course, an example of the government going too far for security. And you know the old saying so often attributed to Ben Franklin, “Those who would trade in their freedom for their protection deserve neither.”

Also, I can’t stress more, here, that is the Democrats doing this. This is not a GOP effort.
Continue reading


Bait and Switch: Law Goes From Protecting Your Email to Allowing Gov’t Into Your Email”


VIDEO: FreePac Speech of Former President of Poland Lech Walesa

-By Warner Todd Huston

On Friday, October 26, I attended Freepac, Chicago held at the Schaumburg Convention Center. The event, sponsored by Freedomworks, had many fine speakers including Judge Andrew Napolitano, former President of Poland Lech Walesa, John Fund, CL Bryant, Deneen Borelli, John Tillman, Congressman Joe Walsh, and Adam Andrzejewski, hosted by Freedmworks CEO Matt Kibbe.

Here is the video I took of Lech Walesa.

Continue reading


VIDEO: FreePac Speech of Former President of Poland Lech Walesa”


Did Steven Spielberg Say the GOP is Just Like the Slave Holding South?

-By Warner Todd Huston

As he unveiled his epic new movie based on Abraham Lincoln’s civil war era presidency, Steven Spielberg said he doesn’t want his film to become a “political football” in today’s presidential election. But as he talked about it further, it seemed as if he went on to say that today’s Republican party is somehow just like the slave-holding Democrats of the antebellum south.

That’s right, Spielberg implied that today’s Republicans are just like the old south’s racist Confederates.

These comments were delivered during a Q & A at the New York Film Festival on Monday, October 8, after he debuted his new film starring Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones as Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, a zealous anti-slavery activist.

Mike Fleming reports that Spielberg delayed the release of his film until just after the election in order to keep his work out of the current presidential election.

“I just said, please don’t release this until the election is over. I didn’t want it to be this political football going back and forth,” Fleming reports Spielberg as saying.

Of course, it is admirable that director Spielberg wants to make sure that a film based on history is not abused as a “political football” in today’s political contest. Unfortunately, Spielberg, a big Obama supporter, went on himself to use history to make modern political points.

After pronouncing his disdain for abusing history for political points, he did just that, saying:
Continue reading


Did Steven Spielberg Say the GOP is Just Like the Slave Holding South?”


AUDIO: Obama is FOR a Communistic Redistribution of Income… He SAID So in 1998

-By Warner Todd Huston

During the campaign in 2008, Barack Obama had a revealing moment in Ohio when he told Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher (Now running for Congress in Ohio) that he wanted to “redistribute the wealth.”

His supporters cried that anyone that called Obama a communist based on this revealing slip was making a mountain out of a mole hill. They said he was “taken out of context” and didn’t mean what his detractors were claiming he meant.

But did he? Did Obama mean that he is for a socialistic, big government confiscation of wealth to have it redistributed to those that have less? Again, his supporters clam this is an outrageous misread of his ideas. But his supporters would have to contend with what then Senator Obama said at a conference at Loyola University in 1998.

At that October 19, 1998 conference, Obama said in explicit and direct terms that he is for redistribution of wealth.
Continue reading


AUDIO: Obama is FOR a Communistic Redistribution of Income… He SAID So in 1998″


NPR Fawns Over Interview Programmed by White House

-By Warner Todd Huston

Journalists used to pride themselves on their independence. They once thought that hard questions were their stock and trade especially when it came to hurling those questions at politicians. But even as they congratulate each other for their efforts — as NPR did recently — it appears that hard questions and independence is much lower on their list these days where it concerns President Obama. As it happens journalists are only asking those questions that are pre-approved by the White House.

On September 11, NPR’s Morning Edition gave a very warm welcome to Michael Lewis whose interviews of Barack Obama are soon to debut in the October issue of Vanity Fair. On NPR Lewis’ interviews were called “compelling narratives” and his every utterance was given breathless audience.

Lewis was presented as a quintessential journalist, exploring the life of the president of the United States with inside, unparalleled access. But not once did NPR note to its audience that Lewis submitted his story to the White House for its pre-approval before it went to Vanity Fair.
Continue reading


NPR Fawns Over Interview Programmed by White House”


Media Blackout: GAO Says Obama’s Welfare Waivers Illegal

-By Warner Todd Huston

On Sept. 4, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made a startling assertion saying that Obama circumvented the law when he summarily waived the work requirements in the welfare law. Perhaps not as shocking, to date, few news outlets seem interested in the story.

In its Sept. 4 letter, the GAO found that Health and Human Services (HHS) should have formally submitted a letter of its intent to make the changes to Congress and the Comptroller General before any waivers can be legally issued.

The letter also said that the GAO had not determined if HHS had the legal right to even make such waivers available. The GAO is basically saying that the Obama administration is breaking the law with its waivers.
Continue reading


Media Blackout: GAO Says Obama’s Welfare Waivers Illegal”


The Free Press Act: A Proposal to Reinvigorate Our Freedom of Speech

-By Warner Todd Huston

In this day of mounting threats to our freedoms it is time to reinvigorate our Bill of Rights and so Senator John Kyl (R, AZ) has introduced S. 3493, The Free Press Act. This bill aims to prevent nuisance lawsuits meant only to quash freedom of speech, to stop the intimidation of journalists, bloggers, and those testifying before government.

One would have hoped that such a bill would be unnecessary, but in our day of increasing attacks on freedom of speech perhaps the time has come to reaffirm and remind us all of the legacy our founders left to us.

The biggest development overseas in the campaign to eliminate free speech and freedom of the press has been the constant use of defamation lawsuits to silence the sort of speech certain parties are not fond of. These barrage attacks are often called “lawfare” and, sadly, they have come to our shores, as well.

In our system these attacks on free speech are called “SLAPP lawsuits.” These lawsuits come in two varieties, one against people who testify before government committees or in hearings and, two, increasingly against people who write opinion editorials or news reports. This could also apply easily to bloggers.
Continue reading


The Free Press Act: A Proposal to Reinvigorate Our Freedom of Speech”


Happiest Nations Also Have Freedom of the Press

-By Warner Todd Huston

A University of Missouri study has found that nations with the happiest citizens share something in common. They also have an established tradition of a free press.

Missouri University Journalism student Edson Tandoc, Jr. and co-author, Bruno Takahashi from Michigan State University, correlated data from 161 countries and applied that to the 2010 Gallup Poll measuring happiness around the world, Freedom House’s press freedom index, and other data and found that, “the more press freedom a country enjoyed, the higher the levels of life satisfaction, or happiness, of its citizens tended to be.”

“The road to happiness isn’t direct; it is a complex path or web that includes many different influences and interrelationships,” Tandoc said. “Things like improving the economy alone are insufficient for increasing happiness. Protecting press freedom is also an important component of the happiness web.”

The authors also found that countries with a higher level of press freedom had better quality of life quotients in many other areas, as well.
Continue reading


Happiest Nations Also Have Freedom of the Press”


NYTimes Looks for ‘Golden Lining’… in Genocide?

-By Warner Todd Huston

By some accounts, since the coming to power of Zimbabwe’s terror-inducing Robert Mugabe, up to 480,000 people have lost their lives. Of those not killed outright or starved to death, tens of thousands of people had their property stolen and their livelihoods ended, they were beaten, raped, and left for dead. As these outrages were occurring the nation’s economy was devastated, a one-time economic bright spot in Africa reduced to ruins. And in all this violation of human rights the New York Times sees a “golden lining”?

How could there be a “golden lining” in all this murder — even genocide — and destruction? Well, apparently out of the ashes of a country, the genocide of hundreds of thousands, and the human rights violations of millions more, the fact that a few thousand small farmers have risen up to some modest success raising tobacco is somehow a great success.

In a Friday, July 20 piece, Lydia Polgreen is all excited over this year’s tobacco crop haul of 330 million pounds of the golden leaf (hence the “golden” lining).

Of course, this is down from the 522 million pounds that was realized in the year 2000, but it’s better than nothing, one supposes.

Polgreen goes on to laud all the progress that this handful of black small farmers have had this year and that success, she and other Mugabe apologists think, might signal that Mugabe’s genocidal “land reforms” might be a howling success. But even her own announcement of success is prefaced by the horrors.
Continue reading


NYTimes Looks for ‘Golden Lining’… in Genocide?”