The AP should be tried for treason and/or murder.

At The Jawa Report:

AP photographer Rahmatullah Naikzad was a witness to a Taliban murder. The two women were alleged to have been prostitutes who served Western clientèle.

[…]

This page from the AP seems to suggest that Rahmatullah Naikzad also took a snuff video of the two women being murdered. [UPDATE: Yes, he did. Video added at end of post]

We would remind the AP that the act of the Taliban inviting a reporter to the murder means they wanted this news out there. The AP was clearly being used as a propaganda outlet for the Taliban.

Does this make him an accomplice or only a witness to the crime? When you know a crime is about to be committed, do you not have a moral and ethical obligation to try to prevent that crime? Even if you’re a journalist? Even if all you do is try to call the authorities, in this case someone in the Afghani government or NATO?

A quick Yahoo News photo search of Rahmatullah Naikzad seems to indicate that he’s very friendly with the Taliban. Many of the pictures show Taliban fighters posing for the AP photographer.

[…]

UPDATE II: It gets worse. A snuff video was made by Naikzad. It’s horrible. The murder of the two women is at night, so it’s not visually graphic, but the audio is awful. You can hear at least one of the women screaming after the first shots are fired.

It’s official: the AP has now replaced al Jazeera as the official outlet for terrorist snuff videos. You’ll have to scroll all the way down for video. I’ll put additional updates before it with relevant bail out warnings.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch can’t see the forest for the trees.

Or they’re just incompetent; take your pick.

Consider a recent “news story” from Jeff Schapiro about the recent General Assembly special session. First the intro:

Shame on our short-timer governor, Tim Kaine. How dare he berate the legislature for doing nothing on transportation.

On the contrary, the General Assembly was enormously productive during the six days in June and July it was, ahem, at work.

Belying the perception they are deadbeats, Virginia’s worthies actually passed nearly 120 measures. Some were important — to someone.

Yes, yes, no one cares, details please:

One was essential to making this a truly special session. It allowed legislators to pay themselves about $120,000 — for again ducking a $1 billion problem.

Wow, $120,000, which is only 0.00034% of the state’s budget, and that’s calculating the percentage using FY07 expenditures.

And considering there were 140 legislators working for 48 hours (six days), that’s only $17.86 a hour. (A lot of legislators are lawyers, for example, and would be making a heck a lot more at their office, for comparison.)

Right now, you have a state that spends $35,442,393,597.43 a year in their budget (again, FY07 numbers [Auditor of Public Accounts]). At what point, is enough enough?

From FY03 to FY07, the biggest growth, by percentage, in the Commonwealth’s budget has been in Capital Outlay Projects (126.19% increase), Education (45.57% increase), and General Government (35.78% increase) (Auditor of Public Accounts, different link). Who thinks we can find some cuts in there?

Meanwhile, transportation funding has only increased by 6.69% in the same time period (Ibid).

In the same time period that transportation only increased by 6.69%, the total statewide spending increased by 26.84%.

Back to RT-D:

The House version was carried by Del. Phil Hamilton, R-Newport News, an inartful dodger carrying water for the big companies angling to run, for fun and profit, vast hunks of the Hampton Roads road-tunnel-and-bridge network.

As Christina Nuckols, of The Virginian-Pilot, reminded her readers: Those firms are represented by lobbyists who sit in the privy council of Speaker Bill Howell, ensuring Republicans receive only objective, dispassionate advice on what could prove a giant government giveaway.

Oh my God! Those evil “big companies”!

They have some nerve employing people and giving them a paycheck for work! Those saps that work for those evil “big companies” should just quit, get on welfare, and live off the government.

What’s even worst is that the companies hire people (lobbyists) to represent themselves to the legislature. Those bastards should be executed for using their First Amendment rights.

Remember that hating corporations is #82 on Stuff White People Like.

The legislative calendar included some somber business: bills by Dels. Chris Peace, R-Hanover, and Albert Pollard, D-Lancaster, naming bridges over Interstate 95 in Caroline County for troopers Robert Tinsley Lohr and Robin Lee Farmer, both killed in the line of duty in 1978 and 1981, respectively.

Is that a complaint or what? The renaming of the bridges was requested by the Caroline County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff Tony Lippa. The idea was originally proposed by a private citizen of Caroline County, Roger Cavendish.

Delegates Peace and Pollard, along with Delegate Orrock and Senator McDougle, also introduced a resolution celebrating the life of Mildred Jeter Loving.

Are you going to bitch about that too, Jeff?

How about Bill Howell, et al., introducing a resolution celebrating the life of Fredericksburg Police Officer Todd Bahr, who was killed in the line of duty on June 6th?

Going to bitch about that one too, Jeff?

And there were tributes to war dead. Del. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, and Sen. John Watkins, R-Powhatan, sponsored separate memorial resolutions for Army Lt. Col. Jim Walton, who fell in Afghanistan last month in an attack on his convoy.

Again, is this a complaint?

Veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom would qualify for special license plates, under a measure by Del. Bill Janis of Henrico. The VMI guy and former naval officer is on the partisan special-ops squad of the House GOP Caucus.

Does that mean the license plate shouldn’t be allowed?

A prospective governor was honored by another. Sen. Creigh Deeds of Bath, running for the 2009 Democratic nomination, introduced a resolution “celebrating the life” of the late Bill Battle. Battle, defeated for the 1969 Democratic nomination, lived in Charlottesville, on the eastern edge of Deeds’ sprawling, sylvan district.

The problem?

The business of the just-adjourned session covers four pages on the General Assembly’s Web site. Some of it is heady stuff — not.

[Blah, blah, blah, blah…]

All are appointments with a $200-per-meeting paycheck. Unlike the other day, maybe the senators will actually earn it.

Okay, I guess that all the preceding was a complaint.

Does anyone notice that this reporter has time to go through and check out every little resolution that the General Assembly dealt with and proceeded to complain about the unimportance of them?

Did he write a story about the transportation bills that were dealt with? No, of course not; those aren’t important.

Is this not the very height of irony?

First, these resolutions probably take about a minute of time in each house of the General Assembly.

Second, while Jeff was tracking down every resolution the General Assembly dealt with, he missed the following:

The Republicans went from wanting (unconstitutional) regional taxes imposed on Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to offering a no-tax solution: The Republican solution include appropriating money to NoVA and Hampton Roads from airport fees and taxes and port revenues to pay for the transports needs that are partly caused by the airports and port!

Where’s the story about Jeff Frederick’s bill that would give money to localities to pay for their own roads instead of giving money to the monstrosity that is VDOT (HB6025)? That bill didn’t even make it out of the House.

How about the bill that would implement the 2002 Governor’s Commission on Efficiency and Effectiveness that died in the House Rules Committee (HJ6061)?

How about the the great idea for the state to stop paying for roads in subdivisions (HB6041)? Why should I be paying for someone else’s subdivision roads that I and 99.99% of the state will never see or use?

How about the bill that would required an independent audit of the monstrosity-known-as-VDOT (HB6023)? The Senate refused to act on that bill.

RT-D had time to nitpick about every little resolution that was passed by the General Assembly, but couldn’t do their jobs and actually tell the people what did occur during the session.

While I was picking on the Richmond Times-Dispatch, D. J. McGuire was skewering The Free Lance–Black White Hole.

He also took care of another act of outright incompetence by RT-D here.

Moral panic everywhere.

The Boston Globe stated the following in an op-ed, “SOCIOLOGISTS USE the term ‘moral panic’ to describe a sudden episode of hysterical behavior set off by exaggerated threats and fueled by endlessly reiterated stories of dangerous behavior.” (Wolfe, Alan. “This panic won’t create air safety”. Aug. 23, 2006.)

For past examples, see the hysteria regarding the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s (Journal of Religion and Popular Culture) and the hysteria over the Pokémon franchise during the late 1990s (“ChildCare Action Project“). The hysteria over Pokémon continued even after the Vactican, which according to People, “declared that the Pokémon trading card and computer game is ‘full of inventive imagination,’ has no ‘harmful moral side effects’ and is based on the love-thy-neighbor notion of ‘intense friendship'”.

For a current example, consider the recent reports that a group of teenager girls at a high school in Gloucester, Massachusetts made a “pact” to get pregnant. There was a single source for the “pact” claim, the high school principal. The family and friends of the girls, as well as other local officials, stated there was no evidence of a “pact” between the girls. The high school principal has since said he couldn’t remember where he heard about the “pact” (USA Today, AP).

But that little fact hasn’t stopped over 2,598 stories which match the search terms “+gloucester +pact” from showing up on a Google News search. There are also 4,208 hits for the same search terms on Google’s Blog Search.

A lot of the stories are of the basic “Oh my God! It’s the End of days! We must repent!” type.

All of these stories appear to miss several facts regarding teen pregnancies: It may be a shocker to some, but both premarital sex and unplanned teen pregnancies have been happening for decades.

Yes, I know, shocking for me to say that.

It may have been less socially acceptable back then (you can argue amongst yourselves as to why), but it happened.

To bury your head in the sand and ignore the facts surrounding the issue at large does nothing to help prevent the situation in the future.

For another current example, consider yesterday’s opinion piece in The Free Lance–Star.

The basic premise of the story is the following: pornography causes prostitution, which results in sex trafficking; ipso facto, if you ban pornography, no prostitution, therefore no sex trafficking.

Do I really need to point out the logical fallacy in that argument?

For the dense out there: There are records about prostitution going back to the beginning of time. So, how are Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt responsible for the “world’s oldest profession”?

Furthermore, sex trafficking has been happening for an equal amount of time as prostitution. Consult Saint Justin Martyr’s The First Apology for evidence of the use of children as prostitutes during Roman times. Or consult The New York Times for evidence of the use of 200,000 Chinese and Korean women as sexual slaves by the Japanese before and during World War II.

Admittedly, this opinion piece was better than the previous one that the paper ran, written by syndicated columnist, Michael McManus, who is clearly an anti-Semite and homophobe, and has previously essentially stated, “don’t let your kids around homosexuals, because homosexuals will sexually abuse your kids”. Of course, they did cite said anti-Semite and homophobe in Monday’s opinion piece.

Again, instead of addressing the issues that contribute to prostitution and sexual trafficking, including — but not limited to — organized crime, drug addiction, an inadequate family unit, and incompetent child protective services, The Free Lance–Star attempts to blame pornography as the sole and proximate cause of both prostitution and sexual trafficking.

What a bunch of idiots.

Hey, more insanity from WUSA9!

Anyone care to guess the original headline for this story was?:

FAIRFAX, Va. (WUSA) — Fairfax County Police Officers who take their unmarked cruisers home are going to have to live within 30 miles of Fairfax County under a new department policy now in effect.

Police officials say the vast majority of department commanders, investigators, crime scene technicians and SWAT team personnel who presently are allowed to take home their vehicles do live within 30 miles of the county line. Most of those who live beyond that limit are likely to be grandfathered into the new program. In other words, few are likely to lose the privilege.

Officers who work in marked cruisers are not allowed to take their vehicles home, even if they live in Fairfax County. Police officials say the department does not have enough marked cruisers to allow a take-home program.

Police Department spokeswoman Maryann Jennings tells 9NEWS NOW the take-home program is based upon “operational necessity.” Those officers and commanders who take their cars home are called to crime and incident scenes at all times of day and night. She says it would be far more costly to hire additional personnel to fill their positions on a 24/7 basis.

Written by Gary Reals
9NEWS NOW

The original headline for this story was: “Fairfax Police Fill Tank On Taxpayers’ Dime”.

Don’t you hate it when those damn pigs fill up cars that they’re using for work on the “taxpayers’ dime”?

I’m not sure what I should expect from Gary Reals, since he seems to think that “Judy Feder gave Frank Wolf a hard pressed race in 2006”.

I wasn’t aware that 16.36% margin of victory by a candidate (whose party did terribly in 2006) was a “hard pressed race”.

Uh, guys, that isn’t a Black Hawk helicopter.

The Rocky Mountain News:

Black Hawk helicopters buzzed downtown Denver and other neighborhoods Monday evening in a training exercise to prepare for a possible terrorist attack.

The photo accompanying the story (click for a bigger version):

Uh, guys, that’s a MH-6 Little Bird which is less than two-tenths of the size (by weight, empty) of a Black Hawk.

The dead give away is that a Black Hawk helicopter has wheels — not skids (like a MH-6).

To more specific, judging by the fact that the ‘copter has six rotors (assuming that’s not an optical illusion), it’s a MH-6M Little Bird.

Update: Nice try: The Free Lance–Star attempts to remove their jokes about sexual battery.

They have since changed the headline of the story that appears on the front page of fredericksburg.com and have removed the picture of a roll of toilet paper that appeared in the original.

Link to the new story with the headline “Man squeezed more than Charmin in local grocery store, police say” and without the picture of a roll of toilet paper.

Link to the old story with the headline “SQUEEZING WAS JUST TOO FRESH” with the the picture of a roll of toilet paper.

And if they bother completely removing the original story, don’t worry kids, because I took a screen shot of the original story which is available here.

Most racist photo accompanying a news story, ever? Plus some support for terrorist groups.

A “staff illustration from the Culpeper Star-Exponent in a story with the title “Law-enforcement officers understand, accept job hazards“:

Wow, a black guy with his arms crossed and his hat cocked to one side.

Not playing to a person’s stereotypes there, that’s for sure.

And there’s the support for terrorist groups (from the same story):

Ironically, [Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office Captain Joe] Watson said, some of the worst terrorism threats can come from home, courtesy of groups like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. In their efforts to rid the world of tyranny against animals and the environment, both groups have been accused of involvement in malicious acts and violence worldwide.

“Of course not, these great people aren’t terrorists!”

Gag a damn maggot.

From CNN:

Of particular concern are the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).

John Lewis, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said animal and environmental rights extremists have claimed credit for more than 1,200 criminal incidents since 1990. The FBI has 150 pending investigations associated with animal rights or eco-terrorist activities, and ATF officials say they have opened 58 investigations in the past six years related to violence attributed to the ELF and ALF.

[…]

The ELF has been linked to fires set at sport utility vehicle dealerships and construction sites in various states, while the ALF has been blamed for arson and bombings against animal research labs and the pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry.

No deaths have been blamed on attacks by those groups so far, but the attacks have increased in frequency and size, said Lewis.

“Plainly, I think we’re lucky. Once you set one of these fires they can go way out of control,” Lewis said.

ATF Deputy Assistant Director Carson Carroll agreed with Lewis’ assessment.

“The most worrisome trend to law enforcement and private industry alike has been the increase in willingness by these movements to resort to the use of incendiary and explosive devices,” he said.

And from the Department of Justice:

Eleven defendants have been indicted on charges including arson and destruction of an energy facility for allegedly participating in a campaign of domestic terrorism in five western states on behalf of the extremist Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) movements, the Justice Department announced today.

The 65-count indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Eugene, Ore., Thursday, alleges that the defendants committed acts of domestic terrorism in Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, California, and Colorado from 1996 through 2001. Specifically, the indictment includes the charges of conspiracy to commit arson; conspiracy; arson; attempted arson; use and possession of a destructive device; and destruction of an energy facility.

[…]

The indictment alleges that the group committed arsons with improvised incendiary devices made from milk jugs, petroleum products and homemade timers in a series of attacks in the five states. The targets of these attacks included U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, Bureau of Land Management wild horse facilities, meat processing companies, lumber companies, a high-tension power line, and a ski facility in Colorado. The indictment alleges that the group claimed to be acting on behalf of ALF and ELF.

Bravo, Star-Exponent, bravo.

From The Guardian in the UK: Jews responsible for RFK assassination.

Yeah, Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian that targeted Robert F. Kennedy because of his support for his Israel, but I guess he had no responsibility for his crime.

Who does nowadays?

The Guardian:

As a young refugee, Sirhan attended a school where teachers exhorted students to struggle for Palestinian rights. Later his family moved to California, and he was there when Israel seized East Jerusalem and other Arab territories in the Six-Day War of 1967. He told at a friend that he believed Fatah was justified in using terror to oppose Israeli rule.

Israel seized the areas, eh? I guess the fact that Egypt expelling the United Nations Emergency Force from the Sinai peninsula, and amassing tens of thousands of troops on the Egypt-Israeli border, along with closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships had nothing to do with it. Israel attacked Egypt and Syrian first so the Israelis wouldn’t be completely overran from every direction by a numerically superior force.

It was Jordan (with King Hussein hesitant to attack) that attacked Israel first, not the Israelis attacking Jordan first, by the way.

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Sirhan came to identify Robert Kennedy, who he had originally supported, as a friend of Israel. Three weeks before committing his crime, he watched a documentary about Kennedy’s involvement with Israel on CBS television. Soon afterward he heard a radio tape of Kennedy telling an audience at a Los Angeles synagogue that he would maintain “clear and compelling” support for Israel. After hearing it, a relative later testified, Sirhan ran from the room with “his hands on his ears, and almost weeping”.

Sirhan timed his attack on Kennedy to coincide with the first anniversary of the opening of the Six-Day War. At his trial, he sought several times to place his crime in the Palestinian context. “When you move a whole country, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their land, from their business,” he said, “that is completely wrong … . That burned the hell out of me.” Few Americans had any idea what he was talking about.

“The source of his rage, bitterness, and anger at ‘Jews’ was not explained in most news stories,” Mel Ayton, one of the few analysts who has fully grasped the crime’s Middle East connection, wrote in his 2007 book The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F Kennedy. “In those days most Americans had no idea what a ‘Palestinian’ was and even fewer understood their grievances.”

When news of Sirhan’s background was flashed back to the Arab world after he killed Kennedy, many people there instinctively understood what had happened. They recognised the crime as a horrific expression of the violent frustration that young Palestinians were beginning to feel. Almost no one in the rest of the world, however, understood this.

Foreign interventions and entanglements often produce unpredictable, even unimaginable long-term consequences. The murder of Robert Kennedy is one example. If Israel had never come into existence, or if the United States had not supported it, or if Kennedy had not reaffirmed that support, Sirhan would probably never have pulled his trigger.

It’s amazing the power those Jews have.

If it isn’t having Presidential candidates assassinated, it’s mucking up a church softball league (to paraphrase a pastor in Caroline County).

I guess if the United States disavowed Israel, we could all live in a happy and magic land filled with unicorns!

I guess you would have to convert to Islam too while you’re at it. Well, that’s what Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has stated (Fox News).

/sarcasm

H/t: little green footballs

What is Channel 9 (WUSA9) news smoking?

Tuesday night, at around 7 p.m., the talking head on the local news stated the Democratic and Republican primary results would be coming in soon. In the 10th Congressional District, Judy Feder was running for the Democratic nomination while Frank Wolf, the incumbent, was running for the Republican nomination. The talking head stated something similar to: “Judy Feder gave Frank Wolf a hard pressed race in 2006”.

What are these guys smoking?

Judy Feder was crushed in 2006. 2006 was one of the worst years for Republicans in decades and Frank Wolf won the race by 16.36% points.

Frank Wolf won every jurisdiction in the district (Clark, Fairfax, Fauquier, Frederick, Loudoun, Prince William, and Warren Counties and the cities of Manassas Park, Manassas, Winchester). At the worst, he won Fairfax County by 6.7%, and at the best he won Frederick County by 37.6%.

Heck, Judy Feder can’t even get money from people in the Commonwealth of Virgnia, much less from people inside the 10th Congressional District (The Washington Post): 72% of her money comes from people outside the state for crying out loud! Meanwhile, 72% of Frank Wolf’s money comes from inside the state, with 70% of the in-state contributors coming from inside the 10th Congressional District!

No bias as channel 9, that’s for sure! (Snort.)

Why is Pat Buchanan still a legitimate pundit?

The guy is a complete and utter loon. Huffington Post:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer entered the Situation Room to talk about a provocatively written book with its author. Not Scott McClellan! No, no. Pat Buchanan! Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is about how Churchill, uhm…fought a war with Hitler that was terribly unnecessary and that bad things have flowed ever forth from that terrible decision. See, by Buchanan’s reckoning, Hitler was totally anti-Semitic. But if Britain had just let Hitler take Poland, instead of giving them a guarantee of protection, Nazi Germany would have never expanded their aggression westward, and they would have only killed some of the Jews, which hardly sounds like a Holocaust, now, does it?

Or as Victor Davis Hanson puts it:

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, “Churchill, Hitler and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.” Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich!