Richard Rushfield of Ricochet paints a damning portrait of a news channel twenty-odd (very odd) years past its prime, and riding on fumes. “Tonight, in its coverage of the death of Whitney Houston, CNN gave its viewers a horrible glimpse into the hollowness at its core:”

As the very young Saturday anchor on duty scrambled to fill the air time, viewers and Houston fans were treated, on top of the usual grasping at straws inanities to the following:

• A parade of America’s leading ghouls and vultures fighting for their a bit of air time in the wake of the death including Al Sharpton, Dr. Drew and Hollywood publicist Howard Bragman – the latter a regular presence on Breaking News Hollywood death broadcasts, this time appearing with the stunning report that the Grammy Party of Clive Davis, Houston’s mentor, was likely to be affected by the news.
• A reporter stopping people on the street to gleefully break the news of Houston’s death and capture their stunned reactions, like some sort of Letterman prank.
• The only “news” the Cable News Network provided in these first hours has thus far been reading of celebrity tweets responding to the death.  The fun began in the first hour of the coverage when the anchor suddenly announced that Malcolm Jamal Warner had tweeted his condolences. The 140 character regrets of Kim Kardashian among others soon followed.

This seems to be what we need a major news organization for these days: to read celebrity tweets to us.  Because apparently they think 140 characters are more than we could get through on our own.

Because Twitter has been so kind to the network’s on-air “talent.”

Related: Another recent look at the MSM bungling a celebrity’s obit: “Joe Paterno, 1926-2012; CBS Jumps the Gun Reporting Obit.”

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Stunning news atop the Drudge Report, though this florid obit from AP is anything but objective:

Whitney Houston, who reigned as pop music’s queen until her majestic voice and regal image were ravaged by drug use, erratic behavior and a tumultuous marriage to singer Bobby Brown, has died. She was 48.

Publicist Kristen Foster said Saturday that the singer had died, but the cause and the location of her death were unknown.

At her peak, Houston the golden girl of the music industry. From the middle 1980s to the late 1990s, she was one of the world’s best-selling artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and peerless vocals that were rooted in the black church but made palatable to the masses with a pop sheen.

Her success carried her beyond music to movies, where she starred in hits like “The Bodyguard” and “Waiting to Exhale.”

She had the he perfect voice, and the perfect image: a gorgeous singer who had sex appeal but was never overtly sexual, who maintained perfect poise.

She influenced a generation of younger singers, from Christina Aguilera to Mariah Carey, who when she first came out sounded so much like Houston that many thought it was Houston.

But by the end of her career, Houston became a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use. Her album sales plummeted and the hits stopped coming; her once serene image was shattered by a wild demeanor and bizarre public appearances. She confessed to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, and her once pristine voice became raspy and hoarse, unable to hit the high notes as she had during her prime.

Not surprisingly, Houston’s Wikipedia page already has been updated to reflect her death.

Update: TMZ reports, “According to our sources, Houston died at the Beverly Hilton hotel. A police crime lab vehicle was seen outside the hotel just moments ago.

Related: “Whitney Houston’s Tragic Death Takes CNN to New Lows.”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

• “NBC’s Lauer to Obama: Can Mitt Romney ‘Identify With the Middle Class?’”

– Newsbusters, February 6th.

• “Sources connected to NBC tell TMZ … Lauer was done with Today and wanted out — but the word at the network is he will now re-sign if NBC ponies up way more than the $17 mil he’s currently making, “TMZ reported yesterday. “We’re told negotiations are now ongoing — but if NBC agrees … Lauer could score as much as $30 MILLION a year.”

Related: “Multimillionaire Chris Matthews: Is Mitt Romney ‘Just Too Damn Rich?’”  Matthews’ fortune is estimated at “$16 million with an annual salary of $5 million.”

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Forget six degrees of separation — CNN’s Roland Martin is separated by only one — very famous — person away from President Obama. During the 2008 NAACP speech by Obama’s infamous, presumably former spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Martin was namechecked, along with his fellow CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien (who dubbed Wright’s speech “a home run” on the air) as a “long-term friend” by Wright. Martin has also had friendly chats on CNN with Wright’s equally inflammatory colleague Father Michael Pfleger. But just as Obama threw Wright under the bus almost immediately after the aforementioned speech — with CNN quickly following his lead — when one of Martin’s Tweets hit the fan at the start of week, Martin discovered that everybody’s expendable in the MSM:

Roland Martin, tweeted on Sunday, walked it back Monday, chastened on Tuesday, suspended on Wednesday…

That’s the short version of recent events in the life of the CNN commentator and author of Speak, Brother! A Black Man’s View of America.

The tale begins on Super Bowl Sunday, when Martin tweeted:

If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!

and

Who the hell was that New England Patriot they just showed in a head to toe pink suit? Oh, he needs a visit from #teamwhipdatass.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) took umbrage, immediately tweeting back:

@rolandsmartin Advocates of gay bashing have no place at @CNN #SuperBowl #LGBT.

The organization followed up with a statement demanding Martin’s dismissal.

As John Nolte writes at Big Journalism:

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. [Not to mention the rest of the country -- Ed] He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by.

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black.

But a year ago, Martin himself was eager to join the rest of the leftwing MSM in its calls for a new civility in the wake of clip art that a crazed apolitical assassin likely never saw not leading to his shooting of Democrat Senator Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tuscon, in an editorial at CNN with the now ironic title, “After Tucson, will media tone it down?”

Note the first sentence in the quoted passage below:

If we are to embrace the notion of civility and humility in our discourse, that means not falling into our old habits. I was impressed that Roger Ailes, head of Fox News Channel, relayed to Russell Simmons’ GlobalGrind.com what he told his staff after the Tucson shootings: “I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Who knows if this edict will be photocopied and posted in the office of every Fox talk show host, and throughout its newsroom, to serve as a reminder to everyone when the nation moves further and further away from the shooting?

And he’s correct; those who vehemently oppose the views of Fox News and conservative radio hosts must also adhere to the president’s call for civility.

Maybe what we should all do is make “Remember Gabby and the Tucson 6″ buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers, as a way to stop someone in his tracks who chooses to get out of control.

Live by political correctness, die by it as well — or at least go into broadcasting purgatory. Or as Michael Graham asks at the Boston Herald, “What do the Catholic Church, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and CNN’s Roland Martin all have in common? They’ve all just been given a lesson in liberal ‘tolerance:’”

The most confused victim of the New Tolerance has to be CNN’s Roland Martin. All he did was send a tweet: “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!”For reasons I don’t understand, this makes Martin a homophobe. GLAAD demanded he be pulled off the air, and his lame joke was labeled “the equivalent of cheerleading for violence against gays” in The Washington Post.

Now this isn’t David Duke. It’s Roland Martin — one of the New Tolerance thugs who has long played the race card in service of the liberal agenda.

If the left is willing to throw him under the bus, nobody is safe. Forget “Yes We Can!” Today it’s “You’ve Been Warned.”

Considering Martin’s impeccably radical chic connections, like the supine Outer Party member Parsons when he winds up in 1984′s Ministry of Love for political re-education and/or a visit to Room 101, he must have been astonished to find himself a victim of the same forces of political correctness — and correction — he’s long since championed. But then, as P.J. Salvatore writes at Big Journalism, “Nobody Expects The Progressive Inquisition.”

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“Barbara Walters, Shameless Hypocrite: Hits Kennedy Mistress for Greed, Tells Her She Should Have Stayed Quiet,” Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters:

Almost four years ago, ABC’s Barbara Walters came out with her memoir Audition, using as its selling point a tale of her tawdry 1970s affair with married black Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.). Seldom has a TV personality been a more shameless public hypocrite than Walters was on Friday with former Kennedy mistress Mimi Alford during an interview on “The View.”

Walters battered Alford four times with the notion she was greedy, with four different outbursts like “She’ll make a lot of money!” (That one came in the introduction.) Walters asked Alford why she would hurt Caroline Kennedy and her family, and then assaulted her with the reverse idea, that she could have “saved” Monica Lewinsky from ridicule if she’d talked earlier. But mostly, she insisted the book “did not have to be written” and “You could have let it go!” [Video and MP3 at Newsbusters.]

It’s always a bit amazing for a journalist, who’s supposed to want to reveal secrets, to tell people they should shut up and not tell their story. It’s more amazing to tell someone not to write a tell-all memoir after you’ve already done so, with a ka-ching. Walters was probably signaling to Alford: “I’m famous, people want to know about my fascinating life. You’re a nobody, just trying to exploit a famous man’s aura for a few bucks.”

As an elite Northeast Corridor liberal journalist, Walters is required to take one for the team on a whole host of issues — from John Edwards (keep rockin’!) to the ACORN scandal to ClimateGate, which the New York Times famously tried to bury in 2009 with this sorry defense, the mirror image of their making their bones in the WaterGate era with the publication of the Pentagon Papers:

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

To which Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard responded at the time, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published.”

But for Walters and many “journalists” on the left, silence at the appropriate time, in the cause of either advancing the Official Narrative or keeping the old legends preserved intact is an even greater reward.

Or course, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan has noted, “just shut up” has long been the motto of the left:

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Kathy Shaidle spots Timothy Noah of the New Republic (link safe; goes to Hot Air) with a bad case of the vapors over the newest revelations concerning JFK’s improprieties, in article titled “JFK, Monster:”

Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.” Kennedy didn’t just have a thing for Social Register girls; he had a thing for humiliating Social Register girls. He also had a thing for humiliating his fellow Irishman, Dave Powers.

Maybe Kennedy wasn’t this much of a creep all that much (though Alford also tells of him once forcing her to take an amyl nitrite “popper” in Bing Crosby’s living room). But the poolside ritual of humiliation is not easy to reconcile with any kind of worldly tolerance for Kennedy’s peccadilloes. Perhaps the fairest conclusion to make is that Kennedy did some good things in his public life (and also some bad), but that he was capable of monstrous cruelty that’s hard to forgive and also hard to equate even with that of successors like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon (or with any in his less polished younger brother Ted, whose own private life had plenty of dark moments but whose public accomplishment ultimately outshone JFK’s). Clinton shared many vices with President Kennedy, but I can’t imagine him ever doing anything like this.

“I can, very easily. So can my readers,” Kathy writes, dubbing Noah’s response a textbook example of liberals as “naive sophisticates:”

As a matter of fact, isn’t one of the most famous quotes about the Clintons that of the female Democrat who claimed she’d have blown Clinton, just to thank him for keeping abortion legal? [Nina Burleigh, then-White House correspondent for Time magazine -- Ed.]

It’s always surprising what liberals claim they “can’t imagine,” despite all the stubborn protestations of “backward, paranoid” right wingers.

You don’t usually have to “imagine” it, guys. It’s usually right in front of you, and you’re just refusing to see it, because we’re the ones showing it to you.

Which dovetails into a related post of mine from November of 2010:

Ann Althouse spots an endless reoccurring cliche amongst Leftwing Elites:

Welcome to my world: Dane County, Wisconsin, home of people who tell themselves they are the smart people and those who disagree with them must certainly be dumb. They don’t go through the exercise of putting themselves in the place of someone who thinks differently from the way they do. But how would it feel to be intelligent, informed, and well-meaning and to think what conservatives think? Isn’t that the right way for an intelligent, informed, and well-meaning person to understand other people? If you short circuit that process and go right to the assumption that people who don’t agree with you are stupid, how do you maintain the belief that you are, in fact, intelligent, informed, and well-meaning?

What is liberal about this attitude toward other people? You wallow in self-love, and what is it you love yourself for? For wanting to shower benefits on people… that you have nothing but contempt for.

You see this worldview manifested endlessly among the left, whenever you hear the hyperbolic phrase, “I can’t understand why anyone would be a conservative/Republican/libertarian/vote for Bush/vote for Reagan, etc.” Well, why the heck can can’t you? Is it really that difficult to mentally spend a few minutes in our shoes? We’re always asked by the left to celebrate diversity, and to try to understand those not like ourselves. How hard it can be to get a handle on why someone has a different view on say, income tax rates, transfer payments, small business, and government handouts than you do? Or why he likes to get his news from channel #360 on his DirecTV dial than say, channel #202 or #356?

Another example of this mindset can be in the title of Harry Stein’s terrific book last year, which grew out of a conversation he had with a self-described “liberal,” when Harry dared to supply the voice of reason at a dinner party in 2008 and suggest that the young would-be emperor, soul-fixer and lightworker had no clothes.

Perhaps the ultimate mote in a far leftist’s eye can be found here.

Also Related: Paul Rahe at Ricochet on “American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil.”

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“Navy names littoral combat ship after Gabrielle Giffords,” the Chicago Tribune reports:

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next Independence variant littoral combat ship will be named after Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head last January when a gunman opened fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store.

Six others, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, [and George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge John M. Roll, whom the Tribune either forgot to mention, or doesn't want to include because it clutters the narrative -- Ed] were killed in the shooting and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.

Mabus said the ship’s sponsor will be Roxanna Green, Taylor-Green’s mother. In naval tradition, a ship’s sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Giffords was presented with an artist’s rendering of what will be the USS Gabrielle Giffords at a Pentagon ceremony Friday afternoon.

You can see an illustration of the ship here. Curiously, it isn’t powered by windmills, nor does the Tribune seemed too upset about the potentially inflammatory rhetoric tacit in the ship’s ultimate purpose.

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Ace asks a question that all of us have pondered at one point or another in the career of Barack H. Obama. “Has he gone insane?” As Ace notes in his headline, “Obama’s Compromise: I’ll Just Mandate That Employers Contract With Insurers To Cover Contraception For Free, and Hence Employers Cannot Be Said To Be Paying For It:”

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here’s how this works.

I’m an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama’s brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we’ll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama’s genius solution is:

Hey, we’ll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we’ll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh… That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that’s being done here is that people are lying about the costs — now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn’t; it’s x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn’t; it’s y).

All Obama’s doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama’s mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey concurs with that last sentence:

Basically, the Obama administration told religious organizations to stop complaining and get in line.  This “accommodation” only attempts to accommodate Obama’s political standing and nothing more.

Update: The LA Times’ Jon Healy calls this new position “magical thinking”:

Here’s where the magical thinking comes in. The following is from the fact sheet the White House released Friday:

Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services. For example, there was no increase in premiums when contraception was added to the Federal Employees Health Benefit System and required of non-religious employers in Hawaii. One study found that covering contraception lowered premiums by 10 percent or more.

Making everyone in a pool carry coverage whether they need it or not spreads the cost, saving money for those who really do need it and who’d choose to carry it if it were merely optional. But costs faced by the insurer are the same — and when the care is provided with no out-of-pocket costs, the insurer’s costs are likely to go up because more people will use it. Such is likely to be the case with contraception.

Also, let me emphasize one point that this does not address.  The government is forcing religious organizations to both pay for and facilitate activities that violate their religious doctrine.  If anyone thinks that passes muster with the First Amendment, that’s even more magical thinking than this funding shell game.

Mr. Obama has engaged in magical thinking throughout his public career. However, I’m not sure if the L.A. Times is the best source to attack him from that angle, lest anyone recall this infamous moment from the paper.

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“Rick Santorum Is Right: Gas Prices Caused the Great Recession,” Derek Thompson writes at the Atlantic, though he cautions high gasoline prices were but one of several factors. It’s a fascinating post, especially considering the pro-Obama publication running it.  It was, not coincidentally, home to the MSM’s uterus detective during his most manic phase, obsessed with destroying a vice-presidential candidate who had the obvious solution to reducing energy prices — and thus jump-starting the economy:

In 2009, economist James Hamilton published a paper that retroactively forecast what an oil shock, like the one we experienced in 2007-08, would do to GDP. And guess what? His model accurately predicated much of the collapse in GDP that resulted from the Great Recession — as if there had been no housing bubble or financial crisis! The oil spike was that bad.

Still, there was a housing bubble. And there was a financial crisis. How do we account for them and still hold onto the gas story? Here’s a one-paragraph theory of the Great Recession that begins with gasoline. Cheap gas ruled in the 1990s. This encouraged families to settle down farther from the cities where they worked. In the 2000s, super-low interest rates, declining lending standards, and an appetite for mortgages on Wall Street (among other factors) further encouraged sprawl and residential development in the ‘burbs. As the price of gas went up, families stopped buying homes 30 minutes from the city. For folks shacking up in the exurbs, higher gas bills ate into mortgage money. For companies, higher energy bills shocked productivity. Classic oil-shock + housing development arrested + financial crisis = Great Recession.

There appears to be pretty strong correlation (if not causation) between national gas prices, which accelerated after 2005, and housing starts, which declined after 2005.

Say, what was different about America in 2005?

The video above provides the answer. And how did the entire elite media react in late 2008 when gas prices had temporarily cratered? NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all begged the Office of the President Elect in lockstep unison to tax the daylights out of energy and get those prices back into the stratosphere — and the economy stuck in the mud of Obamaville.

(Update: Video moved to top of post to avoid positioning conflict with our advertisement.)

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The weekend before the election of 2004: Walter Cronkite tells Larry King* that George Bush and Karl Rove had captured Osama bin Laden and were evidently holding him in cryogenic storage at the Ministry of Defense alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice.

Flash-forward to election year 2012: “Current TV** host Cenk Uygur claimed President George W. Bush had no interest in finding Osama bin Laden,” adding that Bush was “sitting on his ass.”

Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment.

Related: “Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.” Fancy that.

* The Piers Morgan of your parents’ generation.

** No, we’re not sure what that refers to, either.

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We already know about the JournoList, and the Obama administration emailing MSNBC to “correct” them mid-show. And the Washington Post’s then-ombudsman admitted immediately after the 2008 election how deeply in the tank her paper was (and is) for the then-president elect. Now a new article at the Washington Beacon notes that the New York Times’ angel investor dropped by the Obama White House this week for a chat, which his admittedly liberal paper “unexpectedly” chose not to disclose:

The world’s richest man quietly slipped into Washington, D.C., this week for a series of powwows with top Obama administration officials – but you would not know it if you read the New York Times.

Univision’s Jordan Fabian reports that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim held a series of closed-door meetings with senior Obama officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

Slim is worth an estimated $63 billion, and owns more than seven percent of the New York Times Company – though the eponymous newspaper of record didn’t deem it necessary to report on its partial owners’ D.C. trip. (Slim also loaned the Times $250 million last year, which earned him warrants to bump his holding in the company to nearly 16 percent.)

Often referred to as “Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly,” Slim has been accused of employing mafia-esque tactics to retain control of his 70 percent stake in the country’s telecom industry. Last week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development accused Slim’s telecommunications companies of overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth in Mexico.

Overcharging customers and stymieing economic growth? No wonder he feels so close to Mr. Obama.

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Deadline Hollywood reports that AMC Entertainment had a rough 2011:

The exhibition chain reports this morning in an SEC filing that it had a $72.8M loss in the last three months of 2011 — more than double its $32.8M loss in the quarter a year ago — on revenues of $557.3M, down 7.6%.  Attendance fell 8.7%. With a decline in the number of 3D and Imax films which come with higher ticket prices, patrons on average paid 1.4% less to get in than they did a year ago.

From Hollywood and the White House’s perspective, that’s nothing but good news, right? If, as President Obama said last fall, America has “gotten a little soft,” less movie watching should help ameliorate some of the national flab he perceives, right? Robert Redford is anti-energy, and less movie attendance should help reduce our energy consumption a little bit. Less toilet paper being consumed in the restrooms should make Laurie David and Sheryl Crow happy.  Then there’s the main consumer product that movie theaters distribute. If, as James Cameron said in 2010, “DVDs are wasteful…It’s a consumer product like any consumer product.” If DVD are a wasteful consumer product, isn’t movie watching as well? It sets the Hollywood cycle of selling consumer products in motion — and sells plenty of non-Michelle Obama-approved junk food in the process.

And speaking of eco-puritans at the intersection of DC and LA, “Al Gore’s Current TV Could Go Belly-Up If Keith F’n’ Olbermann Doesn’t Start Delivering Big Ratings,” Ace writes.

If, as Al claims, we have less than four years left to save the planet, shouldn’t he eliminate his channel voluntarily to help reduce his carbon footprint?

Flashback: “Prominent Environmentalist Finally Discovers His Religion’s Catch-22.”

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Member of mostly peaceful Occupy Newfoundland accused of stabbing 22-year old woman; “Occupy NL movement shocked by charges,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports, in an article written by Claude Rains’ Louis Renault character from Casablanca:

David Harrington, 19, was calm as he was led into court. Harrington will remain in custody until he enters a plea later this month.

He is charged with stabbing a woman as she walked to her job at McDonald’s on Torbay Road.

Harrington is a familiar face to many in the downtown. He has no fixed address, and recently spent time in Harbourside Park, with the Occupy NL movement.

“Absolutely surprised, because from what I know of Dave, this is not something Dave would do — he has no reason to be up into the east end,” Canning told CBC News. “It doesn’t make fricking sense.”

Nice epitaph for the entire Occupy movement, which has had plenty of violence swirling about it. I’m sure all of this is purely a coincidence.

(Via the Corner.)

Related: Mostly peaceful Occupy DC plans mayhem for CPAC.

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Heathrow’s flight controllers would never cut it at O’Hare or Minneapolis:

Heathrow Airport faced questions last night as to why half of all flights were cancelled hours after it stopped snowing.

BAA, the Spanish-owned airport operator, incurred the wrath of passengers after 600 flights were grounded at Heathrow despite just three inches of snowfall, disrupting the plans of as many as 18,000 travellers.

The disruption was in stark contrast to airports across Europe where, despite record low temperatures, flights took off as normal.

But why wouldn’t Heathrow’s flight controllers be unnerved at the thought of any snow, based on the stories that their hometown newspapers were running a decade ago?

Related: “Global Warming Engine Unexpectedly Slows,” Walter Russell Mead writes. Though not before England’s James Delingpole writes at Ricochet.com, “Memo to the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven’t had quite enough death threats yet…”

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At the DC Examiner, Charlie Spiering writes:

An obvious victim of CNN’s graphic-heavy election presentation, news anchor John King called Mitt Romney “Governor Mormon” last night, during coverage of the Nevada election results.

“If you look here among faith, obviously Governor Mormon is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” King said. “He’s a Mormon and he also won big among Mormons.”

Romney won the vote of 9 out of 10 Mormons in Nevada.

“Bigotry will slip out,” Glenn Reynolds writes, clearly in nowhere near as charitable a mood as Spiering. Nor should he be. A year ago, King apologized on-air for a guest using the word “crosshairs,” which for a time was a temporarily-loaded word amongst King’s fellow left-leaning members of old media — even on one that for years hosted a show with an almost identical title:

On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language” (audio available here). This action stands in stark contrast to an incident over a year earlier where former anchor Rick Sanchez took four days to apologize for using a unconfirmed quote attributed to Rush Limbaugh.

Since King himself set the standard, clearly, he must apologize for using his own similarly potentially inflammatory language or risk being called a hypocrite.

Well, again, especially given his network’s repeated penchant for religious bigotry.

Update: As a commenter asks below, does King ever refer to Harry Reid as “Senator Mormon?”

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“Politico: Enough of the ‘Indignation Industry,’” Ace writes:

I wish they were serious about this. I’d sure like an end to the left’s incessant “He said a dirty word” childish tattletaling and, even worse, the silly crap we on the right respond with in kind, to make the point.

I get the reason to make the point, to notify the left of what the same rules feel like when used as a weapon against them. But despite that defensible point, I feel silly about doing it. It doesn’t feel like us. It feels like them. It feels like imbeciles who shriek at the sight of a mouse.

Jonathan Martin of Politico recently referred to the “cracker counties” of Florida (those bordering Georgia and Alabama), and the right has taken him to task for his very own Macacca Moment.

After he complained how silly that all was, now a fellow writer at Politico writes about how silly the game is, generally.

I agree. But let’s remember that going forward, huh? Let’s not just realize it’s silly when applied against a co-worker, eh?

* * * * *

Back to Politico’s point: It’s a great point. I’m glad someone in the liberal media made it.

And I expect they’ll drop what they know about the essential falseness and triviality of the Indignation Industry the next time the Democratic Party and Obama for America needs them to.

Especially given that it’s Politico, which makes its living pitting various American political factions against each other — invariably, given the Website’s liberal allegiances, using conservatives as punching bags.  It’s awfully rich of them to pretend to get offended when someone calls them on their shtick.

(And don’t miss Ace’s thoughts in the same post on why Romney is running. Romney’s reasoning as a candidate is a sort of Reader’s Digest condensed version 0f the decisions Bush #43 made in office, determined to avoid the mistakes his father made as president.)

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Walter’s newspaper, which breaks out the airbrushes yet again:

Today’s speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sanctions on his country and its determination to persist in its quest for nuclear capability was a significant news event. Khamenei served notice on the United States that he would not be bluffed into giving up his nuclear plans. Though he conceded the economic pressure on his country has hurt, he said Iran is undaunted and would retaliate against the United States should its nuclear facilities come under attack. All this was reported in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, which posted a story on the speech Friday morning.

However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.

Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime’s murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.

As we noted when Jill Abramson became the paper’s lead editor last year, “The Gray Lady Sure Knows Her Way Around an Airbrush.”

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“The Sun says tweets and blogs threaten future of paper,” the Financial Times breathlessly reports:

Online news sources such as Twitter and celebrity-focused blogs could put newspapers like The Sun out of business, its editor told a parliamentary committee on Thursday.

Dominic Mohan said that if such sites were able to report scandals that newspapers were forbidden to write about because of privacy injunctions, readers and advertising money could flow from the press to the internet.

Mr Mohan told the privacy and injunctions committee of peers and MPs: “We are competing for eyeballs with social media.”

Needless to say, this isn’t exactly breaking news.

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In the new issue of Commentary, Andrew Ferguson does a great job of deconstructing the Princess Di-level of mourning that Christopher Hitchens received upon his demise from some quarters — many of whom should have known better:

Most unexpected of all, at least by me, was the overpraise for Hitchens’s habits of mind, and for his politics, which supposedly placed him courageously at odds with the establishment. “He offered a model of how to think,” wrote one grief-stricken acquaintance. The PBS historian Simon Schama mourned the “unfillable space where his prose rocked and rolled in face of the demure, the hypocritical, and the ignorantly self-important.” [Which is a nice description of your average NPR staffer -- Ed]

Such excess obscures the most obvious conclusion we can draw from Hitchens’s politics, which is that he was a crank. In the early 1980s he was convinced that the Reagan administration had colluded in the Soviet Union’s downing of the airliner KAL 007. A few years later he was a vigorous promoter of the “Secret Team” theory that fit the Iran-contra scandal into a world-girding conspiracy of international bankers and private militias. A handful of memorialists dismissed his hatred of Bill Clinton as a lapse in judgment, but maybe you had to be there to see how unhinged it was: He really did believe that Clinton had been an accessory to the murder of a pair of hillbillies back in Arkansas. And the Queen, that “whore,” was almost as evil as the Albanian dwarf.

There were lots more opinions where these came from, and any combination of two or three of them, expressed with Hitchens’s ardor and bloody-minded indifference to fact, would have got any one else run out of polite society. In media circles—not to be confused with polite society, I know—even the whole package couldn’t disqualify Hitchens. Where his polemics failed as models of logic or casemaking, they excelled as attention-getters. Only his later embrace of Republican foreign policy threatened his hallowed place among media people, but the threat was temporary and finally inconsequential.

After his death, I puzzled over the universal praise and its intensity. I thought of his charm, his learning, the preternatural fluency of his writing. But surely mere talent and amiability weren’t enough to indemnify him so thoroughly among the journalistic class that memorialized him so excessively. No, that required fame, the ultimate inoculation.

And then I remembered the Dreyfuss story. Hitchens might not have been famous back then, but he wanted to be, and he worked hard at it, and in the end, as he knew, he could reap fame’s rewards from a class of people for whom mere fame is the ultimate intoxication—far more impressive than learning or talent or rigorous argument. The scurrilous opinions might bring him fame, but the fame would guarantee that the opinions wouldn’t matter.

It’s maybe not the best fate for a man who once might have hoped that his ideas would be taken seriously, but it’s the fate Hitchens chose. At least that’s my theory. And I knew the man for more than a quarter of a century. Did I mention that?

Exit quote: “Andrew Sullivan, a well-known blogger, reprinted a New York magazine story about his arrival at a Hitchens party: Sullivan, the magazine reported, greeted [the host] with a hug and a kiss. ‘I want tongue. Give me tongue,’ Hitchens implored, to no avail.”

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I’m sure this is entirely a coincidence:

“Soaring Beef Prices Force Shoppers To Find Other Foods.”

– CBS Philadelphia, January 30, 2012.

“First lady pushes Jay Leno to eat healthy hoods.”

– AP, January 31, 2012.

To borrow a line from James Lileks, why didn’t Leno tell his fellow “progressive” that he remembers a time when the motto on the left was “my body, my choice.” Or was that just the ’70s equivalent of “Stuff Liberals Say?”

Related: The one campaign promise Obama has kept.

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