Tag: media

“Ballistic Fingerprinting” a Failure? Do it Some More, Only Harder!

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That didn’t take long. According to this AP Wire story in the San Jose Mercury News that’s precisely what Maryland’s gun control groups recommend:

Report Suggests Repealing Ballistics Law
BRIAN WITTE
Associated Press

BALTIMORE – A law requiring Maryland State Police to collect ballistics information from each handgun sold in the state has not aided a single criminal investigation and should be repealed, a state police report has concluded.

About $2.5 million has been spent on the program so far. Col. Thomas E. Hutchins, the state police superintendent, said he would prefer spending the money on proven crime-fighting techniques.

Maryland was the first state to adopt a ballistic fingerprinting law in April 2000. New York is the only other state to have such a database.

The Maryland law requires gun manufacturers to test-fire handguns and send a spent shell casing from each gun sold in the state to police. The casing’s unique markings are entered into a database for future gun tracing.

“The system really is not doing anything,” Hutchins said. “The guns that we find at crime scenes may not necessarily be the ones sold in Maryland, so there’s nothing to compare it to anyway.”

Sanford Abrams, vice president of the Maryland Licensed Firearms Dealers Association, added that the system only leads police to the person who bought the gun, when many guns used in crimes have been stolen.

The report also pointed to shortcomings in how ballistics information is sent to authorities. In one case, a gun dealer test-fired guns, rather than the guns’ manufacturer, according to the report.

Gun-control groups favor ballistic fingerprinting systems, saying they are effective crime-fighting tools. Leah Barrett, executive director of CeaseFire Maryland, said state police are not using the database enough.

She said scrapping the state program could deal a setback to better ballistics imaging. “I think it’s a real tragedy because other states are looking at New York and Maryland to see how we succeed with this,” she said.

Uh, right. You’re not succeeding, Ms. Barrett. And you’re not succeeding because the fundamental philosophy is WRONG. “Using the database” more (otherwise known as “throwing more money at it”) won’t help. (Otherwise known as “escalation of failure.”) Even saying that illustrates that you don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.

Two systems are in use. Both have been in service several years. Neither one has provided a clue leading to a conviction. Both have cost million$. But the gun control groups say “they are effective crime-fighting tools.”

Effective at what?? Certainly not at “crime-fighting.”

And what’s with Hutchens? “The guns that we find at crime scenes may not necessarily be the ones sold in Maryland, so there’s nothing to compare it to anyway.” The idea behind “ballstic fingerprinting” was to identify an unknown gun from cartridge cases found at a crime scene. Did he misspeak? Was he misquoted? Or was this more deliberate obfuscation?

I ought to send my piece below to Brian Witte. Maybe then he’ll get a clue.

No Nuance Here

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Today’s MSNBC piece by Howard Fineman wherein he announces the death of the “American Mainstream Media Party” (“party” in the political sense) is one of the most concise and cogent explanations I have seen for what the news media has become, and I think his declaration that the party was founded by the action of Walter Cronkite “step(ing) from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam” is absolutely true. In fact, I keep expecting Peter Jennings to stand up any night now and declare the “quagmire in Iraq” lost and unrecoverable, (I know, he does pretty much nightly, but I mean blatantly in an editorial statement as Cronkite did after Tet) fully expecting that his declaration will cause an immediate loss of national support and a subsequent withdrawal in shame. (But then again, perhaps he actually reads his Nielsen numbers.)

When I read this paragraph though, it reminded me of something from much earlier last year:

Texas Gov. George W. Bush arrived on the national scene in the 1990s intent on dictating the terms of dealing with the AMMP — or simply ignoring it altogether. Already well-known as the son of a president, he focused on raising money and holding private chit-chats with donors and political supporters who would journey to Austin for off-the-record talks. His guru was not an image-making man (as Ailes had been for Nixon, and Deaver with Reagan) but a direct-mail expert, Karl Rove. Rove and Bush decided that most forms of “exposure” offered by the AMMP would be likely to do more harm than good. So why bother unless they could completely dictate the terms of engagement?

Back in April, PressThink did a piece on Bush’s attitude towards the press, from which I excerpted this:

…a reporter says to the president: is it really true you don’t read us, don’t even watch the news? Bush confirms it.

And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.

Which is a powerful statement. And if Bush believes it (a possibility not to be dismissed) then we must credit the president with an original idea, or the germ of one. Bush’s people have developed it into a thesis, which they explained to Auletta, who told it to co-host Brooke Gladstone:

That’s his attitude. And when you ask the Bush people to explain that attitude, what they say is: We don’t accept that you have a check and balance function. We think that you are in the game of “Gotcha.” Oh, you’re interested in headlines, and you’re interested in conflict. You’re not interested in having a serious discussion… and exploring things.

Further data point: The Bush Thesis. If Auletta’s reporting is on, then Bush and his advisors have their own press think, which they are trying out as policy. Reporters do not represent the interests of a broader public. They aren’t a pipeline to the people, because people see through the game of Gotcha. The press has forfeited, if it ever had, its quasi-official role in the checks and balances of government. Here the Bush Thesis is bold. It says: there is no such role– official or otherwise.

Fineman’s piece illustrates that, not only did the Bush campaign have that policy and execute it, it was correct (and successful). Rather and CBS attempted a major “Gotcha” and had their asses handed to them by the new media – a voice that even four years ago would probably have not been powerful enough to be heard. To Mapes and Rather it didn’t matter whether the story was true (though I’m certain they believe it yet) it only mattered that they would be believed, banking on CBS’s reputation as “the Tiffany Network.” But that credibility, previously only eroded, has now been completely washed away.

Regardless, the attack on Bush was, in the fevered imaginations of Burkett, Mapes, and Rather, “to represent the interests of a broader public.” It was to save us Red-Staters from ourselves by convincing enough of us not to vote for Bush. Bush and his advisors understood from the outset the adversarial nature of the press and did its best to neuter it. Open attack was all that was left to the American Mainstream Media Party as the election drew near. All their other teeth had been effectively pulled.

Glenn Reynolds corrects Fineman on an important point, though:

Political parties aren’t noted for their honesty or lack of bias, and when the media became a sort of political party (which it denied for years, but which is now so obvious that Fineman can pronounce its death) it became less honest, though it’s not clear that the press was ever as disinterested as it sometimes pretended. That’s why when Fineman writes, “Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto,” I think he’s wrong.

The reality of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press would be worth holding onto — if it had ever existed.

To that I say, “Amen.”

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Never Pick a Fight with a Man Who Buys Ink by the Barrel

Er, has a blog?

And it all apparently started with the “Fisk,” the line-by-line disassembly of some piece of “journalism.” It was generally done by an individual, or at best disassociated random individuals, but now it’s organized, collated and cross-referenced.

Exhibit A: Newsweek’s The Birth of Jesus, an anti-Christian hit piece published in the Dec. 13 issue. In years past this, I’m sure, would have drawn several hundred to several thousand letters of outrage and protest from believers (and remember, I’m not one), and the editorial staff would have sifted through them all to find two or three to publish in the “letters to the editor” section. In a month or two. I’m sure at least one would have been a real doozy, too. Oh, someone might have written something that might have gotten published in some obscure religious magazine, two months hence, but it would have attracted the attention of a very small audience at best.

But not today. As Hugh Hewitt, an evangelical himself, national radio talk-show host and writer, explained in his recent Weekly Standard piece The Year of the Blog, “That was then. The blogosphere is now.” He goes on to explain how two highly credentialed and religious men, Dr. Albert Mohler and Dr. Mark D. Roberts, wrote and published on-line separate detailed critiques of the Newsweek piece. Hewitt then interviewed both men on his radio program, and invited other bloggers to weigh in. The complete list of respondents is available here. Hewitt states:

What the blogosphere allowed to happen is the organization of dissent which is focused, credentialed, complete, and–crucially–publicized. No fair reader of Meacham’s piece and the commentaries on it can conclude that Meacham produced good journalism. It is simply too one-sided, too agenda-driven, and too ignorant of serious scholarship to qualify as anything other than a polemic. The exposure of Meacham’s folly doesn’t guarantee that Newsweek won’t stumble again, but it surely must give others in his position pause. The blogosphere has experts and megaphones. As Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost concluded “the mainstream media is only able to retain their influence by convincing the populace they possess special skill and knowledge. But as the Internet continues to fill with . . . debunkers, the media continues to lose credibility, influence, and power.”

Exhibit B: The Minneapolis Star Tribune and journalist Nick Coleman’s direct attack on Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker of Power Line in his column Megaphones without oversight: Blog swarms, opinion storms, and brand destruction. The response to this piece was widespread and immediate, and it’s all (or nearly all) collated at the aforementioned Evangelical Outpost. To quote:

The fact that such a large number of blogger wrote about the incident is rather extraordinary. But the true significance lies in the number of people who read about Coleman’s gaffe on these blogs. Together these sites have a daily hit count of over 350,000 while the Star-Tribune itself has a circulation of approximately 380,000. If we assume that ever(y) person who bought the newspaper today read Coleman’s column then we can deduce that for every three people who saw the piece slamming Power Line, two people read a defense of the bloggers. (Blog readership, however, has a great deal of overlap so that has to be factored into any conclusions that might be made about the overall site visits.)

Essentially, what we have are two “brands” going head to head for what Hewitt calls “mindspace” – the attention, respect, and trust of information consumers. At first it might appear that Coleman retains a slight advantage. He not only has more (potential) readers but he has them all in a central geographic location while the PL defenders are spread across the country.

But think about the implications from the perspective of “brand management.” Both Coleman and the PL crew live in the same city and both have their work accessible on the Internet. Yet Power Line was able to have a national effect and get their message across in a way that Coleman could only dream about.

The blogosphere is that megaphone Coleman is apparently afraid of, and he certainly got his blog swarm and opinion storm. What you see is thirty-nine uncut letters-to-the-editor. Each of those may have pertinent links to associated materials – something the dead-tree edition doesn’t offer. Each offers a different bit of perspective. The difference now is that you no longer have to accept just the paper’s opinion – you get, if you wish, multiple views. You get access to source materials when it comes to hard-news reporting, too.

Eric S. Raymond’s post made a point that expands on Hewitt’s above:

(The Mainstream Media is) most terrified of all at discovering how out of touch they are. In the past, your typical MSMer surrounded by other MSMers has believed that he is mildly “progressive”, merely holding the opinions that all reasonable people hold and opposed by at most a tiny and dismissable fringe of kooks and rednecks. MSMers are more undone than anything else by the discovery that the mainstream of the American population is rejecting them in droves for Fox News, talk radio, and the blogs.

And, Eric warns,

It’s a short step from this belief to Coleman’s flavor of quasi-paranoid ranting. Anybody who doesn’t think like the MSM cannot be authentic, but must instead be a paid or suborned tool of evil forces. Watch for this theme to show up more and more frequently in the next year as most of the MSM sinks ever-deeper into denial.

The old saying used to be “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

No longer is that necessarily true, and they’re waking up to that fact. The gatekeepers have discovered that the whole damned wall is down. Of course they’re afraid.

UPDATE 1/4: I found this interesting. Jack Kelly, writing in JWR on the topic of the decline of the news media concludes his piece:

Journalists tend not to like bloggers, because they report on errors we make. Dan Rather and former New York Times editor Howell Raines are unemployed chiefly because of the vigilance and tenacity of bloggers. (We journalists rarely turn the spotlights we use on business leaders and government officials on ourselves.)

People who work at journalism full time ought to be able to do a better job of it than people for whom it is a hobby. But that’s not going to happen as long as we “professional” journalists ignore stories we don’t like and try to hide our mistakes. We think of ourselves as “gatekeepers.” But there is not much future in being a gatekeeper when the walls are down.

Hmm… I wonder if Mr. Kelly reads The Smallest Minority?

The Lying “News” Media, Part: “They Never, EVER Stop”

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I was alerted via a post in rec.guns that MSNBS has done it again. Residents of Lampasas, Texas are holding a raffle to pay for new fencing around a school, and in fine Texan tradition, the prize is two rifles. One is a Kimber model 84 in 7mm-08, and the other is Marlin model 25N Ducks Unlimited collector edition.

MSNBS ran an appropriately shocked and tsk-tsking story on the raffle, and interviewed Texas Congresswoman Susanna Hupp. Here’s the transcript as I heard it. Unfortunately, I was unable to do a screen capture of the… Well, you’ll see.

Lisa Daniels:

A school raffle in Texas is raising a few eyebrows because of the grand prize. Tomorrow night one lucky winner will walk away with a deer rifle. Some are in favor of the raffle, while others are wondering whether that prize is appropriate.

With us today from Austin, Texas is Republican State Representative Susanna Hupp. Representative Hupp supports the rifle raffle, and Representative, thanks for spending some time with us today.

At this point, the picture has shifted to a split-screen showing talking-head Daniels on the left, and Hupp on the right.

Hupp:

Thanks, Lisa.

Daniels:

So, you’ll be raffling off the rifles tomorrow, and the purpose, of course, is to raise enough money, uh, to fence in a portion of a school… and I, I know that hunting is a popular sport over there, but…

Hupp:

Yes.

Daniels:

…you know what I’m going to say in this age of…

Hupp:

I like the way you say “BUT!” (laughing)

Daniels:

But! Yes. ‘Cause in this age of Columbine and a lot of other school-related shootings, can you understand why some people think this is not only a bad idea, but a really dangerous one?

Here the screen switches to full-screen Hupp.

Hupp:

Well, I can’t imagine why they would think it was a dangerous one. Um, in answer to the rest of your question, you know, here in Lampassas and central Texas we live in the land of common sense. And if we lived in another area, perhaps we would be raffling off a, uh, season tickets to a sporting event.

AT THIS POINT THE IMAGE CHANGES TO A WALL OF MACs, CAR-15’s, AK’s, folding-stock shotguns, etc., while Hupp’s voice-over continues, calmly and logically. To me, it looks like the evidence room of a police precinct, as most of the weapons are heavily worn.

But the fact of the matter is, we live in a hunting area, so we chose a deer rifle we knew the hunters would slobber over.

The image pans over the wall of eeeeevil “assault weapons” while Representative Hupp’s voice-over continues showing at least two dozen of these “spray-firing bullet-hoses.” The camera zooms in on an Uzi, then a MAC-11, then a Thompson, then pans over a suppressed Ingram, then the shot jumps to another MAC with a suppressor in a case. The text at the bottom of the screen states “Texas School to Raffle Deer Rifle Tomorrow Night.” This shot takes 28 seconds while Hupp continues to explain in a calm, reasonable voice the idea behind raffling off a DEER RIFLE. Continuing,

Hupp:

And it’s something that is, has worked far better than all the, the bake sales and cookie-dough sales and Krispy Kreme sales and everything else that they’ve done. Uh, it’s a very popular thing in Lampassas, and it’s working well, and frankly my child is a third-grader at that school, and this money is going to protect him as well as the others at that school.

At this point the image switches back to the split-screen between Daniels and Hupp.

Daniels:

And, and that’s definitely… I know the community overwhelmingly supports what you say, but I can hear parents right now watching their TV monitors thinking “Hey, this is ludicrous,” you want to put deer rifles in the hands of these kids. You’re not only sending them the wrong message, but you’re basically inviting trouble. What would you say to those moms and dads?

Let me interject here. First, Rep. Hupp didn’t see what was on the monitor while she was speaking, or I’m certain she’d have (rightly) gone orbital. Second, at the statement that “you want to put deer rifles in the hands of these kids” she got a shocked look on her face. If I was an ignorant Blue-stater with no more knowledge of firearms than Sarah Brady, the “Wall of Doom” they put up would have shocked and angered me. Knowing what I know, the fact that MSNBS was propagandizing under the VPC’s “anything that looks like a machine gun” strategy doesn’t shock me, but I’m pissed off!

Hupp responds:

Wait a minute, wait a minute! You said we’re putting deer rifles in the hands of kids? Whoever wins this raffle has to be in compliance with all the federal and state regulations. In other words, we cannot hand it to a child. But I will tell you this, again,

(as the picture switches from Hupp to a school hallway full of children)

again, in the land of common sense, uh, there are a lot of children who do go deer hunting in our area.

(Image switches to a classroom)

But that’s, but that’s not what this raffle is for. It has to go to an adult, and they have to comply with federal and state regulations.

Daniels:

We should mention that in 1991 after leaving your gun in the car, you watched as your parents were among twenty-one other people who were gunned down in a mass shooting in a local restaurant. Obviously… is, is that a big reason for the way you feel about guns? I know you’re a strong advocate of the Second Amendment…

Hupp, as the image switches to her, full-screen:

Yeah. Um, let just say that, as a friend of mine in the PTSO put it, uh, she said, “We’re use.. We are mothers using guns to protect our children.” We’re putting up… We’re… We’re raffling this rifle to raise money to put a fence around the school to protect our children. But frankly, I don’t think the double entendre or the double-meaning is lost on, uh, I don’t think it’s lost on too many people.

(Image switches back to split-screen)

Daniels:

And I know that you’re, Representative, that your defending your position, but can you understand why people think that this sounds like a bad idea?

(Image switches to a smiling Hupp who’s just been asked if she’s a moron:)

Well, you’ve asked me that a couple of times…

(Image switches BACK TO THE “WALL OF DOOM!”)

…and again I have to tell you that I’m very proud of the area I live in. Um, it is a common sense area. I will tell you that there is a six year-old girl on my little boy’s soccer team who just went out and shot her first ten-point buck.

(Image switches to that hallway full of targets students.)

Now I am not a hunter. My family are not hunters, but it is a reasonable thing to use a deer rifle as a, uh, a fundraiser in our area.

(Back to a smiling Hupp, then to the split screen again.)

Daniels:

All right, state Representative Susanna Hupp, we appreciate your coming on the show.

Hupp:

Thank you so very much for having me.

End of tape.

Somehow I think if Hupp knew how she’d been manipulated for a propaganda piece, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near as pleased or as gracious.

If you’d like to see the clip for yourself (for however long it’s up) you can view it here. Broadband is recommended, and you’ll have to watch a short commercial first. Internet Exploder is apparently required as well.

The Snowball Appears to be Losing

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I’ve chronicled the London Sunday Telegraph‘s effort at attempting to change England’s self-defense laws over the last several weeks. Today’s entries don’t bode well. Here’s the op-ed:

The apocalypse is here, in our homes
Dominic Lawson
(Filed: 05/12/2004)

Remember Robert Symonds? It is the name of the 45-year-old Putney teacher who six weeks ago was stabbed to death in the hall of his home by a burglar. His body was found by his wife while their two children slept upstairs.

It was as a result of that incident that this newspaper launched our “right to fight back” campaign, which calls for the public to be given an unqualified right to self defence against intruders in their own homes. The point that struck me so forcibly at the time was not just the horror of Mr Symonds’s death, but the fact that had Mr Symonds picked up a kitchen knife before encountering the burglar, and managed to get blows in first, then he would now, as the law stands, be facing a murder trial.

This in direct opposition to Prof. Tim Lambert’s assertion that no such thing is a given. Dominic must be another “gullible gunner” I guess.

The defenders of the status quo argue that a jury might acquit, on grounds that such self-defence was “reasonable force”. We argue that such cases should never even be considered as crimes in the first place.

Gee, that’s my assertion too!

While the public has backed our campaign – one admittedly unscientific poll conducted by BBC Radio2 suggested that 97 per cent were behind us – the Government, led by “tough on crime” Tony Blair, has been depressingly reluctant to seize the initiative. At a lunch the other day a very senior member of the Civil Service said to me: “Your campaign will never succeed. It goes against the entire administrative culture in this country.”

Of course it does. As I’ve said, once the State has made a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, they will not willingly yeild back that power.

Well, he’s probably right about that. But yesterday the outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and today the Conservative Party, have declared their support for the principle underpinning our campaign.

This is all by way of a preamble to the fact that at 7.30 last Monday evening, my wife’s cousin, John Monckton, was stabbed to death by burglars who had used a preconceived and simple act of deception to enter his well-protected Chelsea home. They also attempted to murder his wife, Homeyra, who, while still in a very serious condition, would certainly now be dead, had it not been for their nine-year-old daughter’s discovery of the scene and extraordinary calmness in calling the police.

Police who could not prevent the assaults, but could show up and take a report, of course.

I have to say that even if the law had been changed in the manner that we propose, it would have been very out of character for John to have taken advantage of it to use force against an intruder. He was the most peaceful and gentle of men. But that is not the point. The issue is one of deterrence.

Precisely. His assailants could not then know they would not be resisted, if it were the right of each and every resident to use lethal force in self defense. But because they know that such action will result in probable prosecution, they know that home invasion is a safe and often lucrative activity to engage in.

In America, where householders have an unqualified right of self-defence, only 12 per cent of burglaries take place while the owners are at home. In this country, the figure is well over 50 per cent, and as the horrible case of John Monckton shows, intruders are now deliberately choosing times when they know they will encounter someone who can be induced to allow entry into a home that is sufficiently secure to prevent an easy break-in.

And where “sufficient security” indicates a lucrative payoff.

When I debated this issue with the eminent lawyer Lord (Andrew) Phillips on the Jeremy Vine radio show, he argued that while the number of burglaries would drop if there were an unqualified right of self-defence “the number of injuries to householders will vastly increase because the burglars will get their retaliation in first… It is an iron rule, criminals are more violent than victims.”

Really? Has England really lost its “aggressive edge” to that point? Most criminals are cowards. They don’t want to risk their asses, and will find an easier way to make a living. What the law in England has done is make home invasion nearly risk-free so that even cowards can engage in it.

As I pointed out to Lord Phillips at the time, we are not arguing that homeowners should be compelled to confront intruders. They can, if they wish, listen to the advice of Her Majesty’s Constabulary, which is to lock themselves in their bathroom and wait for the police to arrive.

Two other points occurred to me later. The first is that we should not let our behaviour be conditioned and controlled by what thugs might think or desire. The second is that Lord Phillips’s argument reminds me of the former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, who maintained an arms embargo against the persecuted Muslims of Bosnia on the grounds that to let them fight against their heavily-armed Serb oppressors would lead to “a level killing field”. That well-intentioned but morally obtuse policy led directly to the first massacres seen on the continent of Europe since it was occupied by the Nazis.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? Such good intent, such bad results.

(But the philosophy cannot be wrong…)

It would, of course, be better not to have to talk in such apocalyptic metaphors. But the doubling in recorded violent crime over the past eight years is a domestic apocalypse now.

Pshaw! That doubling is due to a change in counting methods. Or something. The British Crime Survey says violent crime is down! Didn’t you get the memo?

Of course there are measures that should be carried out which do not require the public to “take the matter into their own hands”. In urban areas, it would help to see the police out in force. In Central London, for example, there is scarcely a street corner which is not being patrolled by traffic wardens. Is it too much to expect the same from the Metropolitan Police?

It was exactly such a policy that dramatically reduced violent crime in New York under Mayor Giuliani. He also introduced a tough sentencing policy. In this country the average sentence given to burglars by our magistrates – that is, the tiny minority who are detected, charged and given a prison sentence – is 3.8 months. Even the average sentence given to those convicted of aggravated (ie violent) burglary is little more than four years. Halve that for “good behaviour”.

I am quite prepared to believe the prison reformers that a long custodial sentence does not reform a person’s character. The point is that the longer such characters are off our streets the safer we all are.

Which is why I’m entertained by headlines of “Crime Down Even As Prison Population Climbs.” Well, DUH! Prison isn’t for reform, it’s for punishment and to get the criminal out of circulation. We’ve pretty much proven that “reform” is a lost cause.

Of course, even if the police were more active on the streets, and even if we had a more rigorous sentencing policy, there will still be violent burglaries, thousands of them. And at that time, no police force on earth can protect us. That is when we have, in my view, a natural right to unqualified self-defence, regardless of the law of the land.

Bear in mind, the right to self defense was called by St. George Tucker in 1803 “the first law of nature” and noted that “in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.” Welcome to England where they’ve done it again!

After John’s murder my mind was filled with violent thoughts. I imagined his killers strung up on gibbets in Trafalgar Square, being pecked at by the pigeons. Then I received a letter from his friend and fellow Catholic, Lord Grantley, who said: “John would have wanted us to pray not only for his family, but also for his murderers, that they should repent, for otherwise they would perish, a fate he would not have wished on anyone.”

For those of us of a less spiritual cast of mind, the earthly fate we would not wish on anyone is John Monckton’s own. This is time, not just for prayers, but for action.

I’m in agreement with Mr. Lawson, but these three letters to the editor are not:

Sir – Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, says the law should be changed to allow householders to use “necessary” rather than “reasonable” force to defend their homes (leader, Dec 4). But such a change would, most probably, swing the balance away from the householder.

I don’t see how that is even possible, but…

It is easy to imagine circumstances in which a jury might conclude that the force used was reasonable, but unnecessary. In the case of Tony Martin, many argued that it was reasonable for Mr Martin to shoot the burglar dead, although he was running away at the time. I suspect that fewer would argue that it was necessary. More generally, what if a householder could retreat into a secure room to escape from the intruder? It would not then be necessary to attack the intruder, but it would still be, as recognised by the law, reasonable to do so if he was invading your home.

Precisely, and your point?

Sir John also says that the force used against an intruder should be presumed to be lawful unless the facts clearly show otherwise. Your editorial argues that such a presumption should be made almost absolute. At present, juries are directed, in cases of self-defence, (a) that a man defending himself cannot weigh to a nicety the exact measure of his defensive action, and (b) that if, in a moment of unexpected anguish, the defendant had done only what he honestly and instinctively thought was necessary, that is potent evidence that what was done was reasonable.

Yet we’ve seen cases in which this was not the standard used, haven’t we?

To get any closer to an almost absolute presumption would require the law to allow people acting in self-defence to use more force than was reasonable; in other words, to be allowed to use unreasonable force.

Stephen Taylor, Northampton

No, Mr. Taylor, sufficient force. Appropriate force. Overwhelming force. Not unreasonable force. There’s a difference between violent-and-predatory and violent-but-defensive, and England seems to have forgotten it.

Sir – Most householders would probably consider that the average burglar would be more skilled than them in the use of knives, swords and blunt implements, and so would choose a firearm as the only effective defensive weapon.

An astute observation!

To support Sir John’s “unqualified right to use force”, shotgun and firearm certificates might have to be issued to millions of people.

And the downside of this would be…?

Thousand of police officers would be needed to process these certificates and to inspect the premises to ensure the weapons were suitably stored. I would suggest that, for effective use, the best place would be under the bed, rather than in a secure and approved gun cabinet.

Of course you could simply drop the useless and ineffective weapons regulations that have done diddly squat in making the country safer, couldn’t you?

Centres to teach householders how to handle and safely deploy pistols, guns and rifles would need to be established across Britain to limit the number of accidental self-shootings. Without regular training, some self-shooting or wounding of others through “friendly fire” would be inevitable in a panic situation.

Angus Jacobsen, Inverbervie, Kincardineshire

You know Angus, we keep hearing the same kind of scare-stories here about concealed-weapons permits, that there will be “blood in the streets” and road-rage killings that just don’t happen. Interesting to see the same tactics being employed across the pond.

Sir – I would ask Sir John to direct his highly trained, highly paid police force to protect my home and family, so that I am not forced to kill an intruder.

I don’t really feel up to it, however well it is regarded by the law.

Brian Farmer, Blackwood, Caerphilly

Don’t worry about it, Brian. You don’t have to do it. It would be completely voluntary. You could just sit back and reap the rewards of having neighbors willing to do it for you. Unless, of course, you wanted to put a sign out in front of your home indicating that you were defenseless and unwilling to protect yourself and your family.

No? Didn’t think so.

The thermostat in Hell won’t go down low enough, I fear. The snowball doesn’t have a chance.

Right, Left, Truth, and Observable Reality

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Quite a while back when I was posting on the now-defunct Themestream.com I fisked an essay written by another Themestreamer. (I did a lot of that.) His piece was entitled “The Aims and Abilities of Liberals and Conservatives” and while I don’t have a copy of the entire essay, I quoted from it extensively in my response, Liberal v. Conservative: Both are Necessary – which I also posted to this blog back in June of last year. I called the author “John Doe” in the posting here, but for clarity I’d like to make it known that the author I was fisking was Marriah Star, self-described philosopher and utopist. Feel free to peruse his site, because I believe that Mr. Star is the prototypical example of the modern big “L” Liberal.

What inspired this essay was one of the points of Mr. Star’s piece as I parsed it in Liberal v. Conservative:

Mr. (Star) writes that “Liberals are nomads” who are open-minded and have widely varying viewpoints due to their “various travels”, and who have a hard time getting together because they “live in separate truths, with no single reality dominating their lives”. This is, he says, in opposition to conservatives who “exist in cliques” because they “largely possess one mind.” (“We are Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”) Conservatives, he writes, “have the ability to mobilize very quickly by repeating the same thought until they convince themselves of it.” (I cannot help, however, in reflecting just how fast the Liberals mobilized themselves and repeated “we must count all the votes” until they convinced themselves that it had not happened.) (“No Blood for Ooooiiiiilllllll!!!!” comes to mind presently. And “BUSH LIED!” And others, but I digress.)
“Conservatives”, he says, “may not communicate the truth, but they have the ability to change reality so that it reflects their truth.”

Now, let me quote David Brooks from the New York Times yesterday:

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

Now let me illustrate how the LEFT has “mobilize(d) very quickly by repeating the same thought until they convince themselves of it.”


Steve Sack, Minneapolis Star-Tribune


Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Nick Anderson, Louisville (KY) Courier-Journal


M.E. Cohen, freelance


Matt Davies, New York Journal-News


John Branch, San Antonio Express-News


Chris Britt, Illinois State Journal-Register


Ann Telnaes, Tribune Media Services.

Add also: The Boston Globe‘s Scott Greenburger, The San Jose Mercury News, and on and on and on.

In response to Mr. Star’s assertion that conservatives “have the ability to mobilize very quickly by repeating the same thought until they convince themselves of it,” I wrote:

Excuse me? If Liberals “live in separate truths” then what makes the Conservative version of “truth” any less valid than the myriad Liberal versions? Because more than one person believes it at any one time? This strikes me as psychobabble. Is there “truth” at all? How does one judge? It seems to me that the objective criteria is: is your version of “truth” consistent with observable reality? If not, it doesn’t matter if you’re Liberal or Conservative, you’re wrong.

It seems apparent now that liberals do not, in fact, “live in separate truths.” They are instead largely a Borg-like collective just waiting for their marching orders from their ideological masters, telling them what to think about what just happened to them. As “Sad American” attempted to explain to the Ideological Left in her open letter to the Democrats, How You Could Have Had My Vote, a lot of people in the ideological middle are more than capable of ignoring the endlessly repeated memes of either the Left or the Right and make up their own minds. In contrast to novelist Jane Smiley’s assertion that “Red Staters” are “unteachably ignorant”, “Sad American” illustrates that they’re infinitely able to learn – and reject the teachings of their supercilious, condescending, and outright insulting would-be masters.

It would appear that the “radical middle” still has at least a tenuous grasp on observable reality, and can discern when the Left’s version of “truth” has strayed outside it.

And it would seem to me that Mr. Star’s assertion that it is conservatives who repeat the same thought until they convince themselves of it, and are able to change reality so that it reflects their truth is a bit of psychological projection of the most obvious sort.

UPDATE, 11/8: Eugene Volokh points to this Daily Kos post by Tom Schaller (associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written for the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Salon) that includes the following:

Marching order #1, therefore, is this: No matter whom you talk to outside our circles, begin to perpetuate the (false, exaggerated) notion that George Bush’s victory was built not merely on values issues, but gay marriage specifically. If you feel a need to broaden it slightly, try depicting the GOP as a majority party synonymous with gay-haters, warmongers and country-clubbers. Because I, for one, am tired of hearing whiny complaints from conservatives that, not only do I not have values, but that I fail to properly respect the values of people who are all too happy to buy into, no less perpetuate, inaccurate caricatures of the 54+ million Americans who voted Tuesday for John Kerry.

Criticizing the GOP ain’t gonna build us a new national majority. But the process is brick by brick, or perhaps, brickbat by brickbat. We didn’t decide the rules of engagement, but that’s what they are and so we may as well start firing away. Oh, and Ralph: Thanks for the help.

It would appear that “Marching Order #1” has very quickly made the rounds. RTWT. ESPECIALLY the comments. And all of Prof. Volokh’s take on it, too.

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What a Complete and Utter Crock of a Retraction.

Kerry obviously needs to directly hire CBS‘s newswriters. They obviously know “nuance” and spin. Let me fisk their own report on RatherGate:

CBS: Bush Memo Story A ‘Mistake’

(CBS/AP) CBS News said Monday it cannot prove the authenticity of documents used in a 60 Minutes story about President Bush’s National Guard service and that airing the story was a “mistake” that CBS regretted.

CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, the reporter of the original story, apologized.

CBS News claimed a source had misled the network on the documents’ origins. The network pledged “an independent review of the process by which the report was prepared and broadcast to help determine what actions need to be taken.”

In a statement, CBS said former Texas Guard official Bill Burkett “has acknowledged that he provided the now-disputed documents” and “admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents’ origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source.”

Rather spoke with Burkett about the deception:

Dan Rather: “Why did you mislead us?”
Bill Burkett: “Well, I didn’t totally mislead you. I misled you on the one individual. You know your staff pressured me to a point to reveal that source.
Rather: “Well, we were trying to get the chain of possession.”
Burkett: “I understand that.”
More of Rather questioning Burkett.

The network did not say the memoranda — purportedly written by one of Mr. Bush’s National Guard commanders — were forgeries. But the network did say it could not authenticate the documents and that it should not have reported them.

“Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report,” said the statement by CBS News President Andrew Heyward. “We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret.

“Nothing is more important to us than our credibility and keeping faith with the millions of people who count on us for fair, accurate, reliable, and independent reporting,” Heyward continued. “We will continue to work tirelessly to be worthy of that trust.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said President Bush had seen the CBS statement.

“There are a number of serious questions that remain unanswered and they need to be answered. Bill Burkett, who CBS now says is their source, in fact, is not an unimpeachable source, as was previously claimed,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Monday.

“Bill Burkett is a source who has been discredited in the past. So this raises a lot of questions. There were media reports about Mr. Burkett speaking with senior — or having senior-level contacts with the Kerry campaign. That raises questions,” McClellan said.

In a separate statement, Rather said that “after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically.

“I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers,” he said.

“We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry,” Rather added. “I feel like hell,” he told WCBS reporter Marcia Kramer.

The authenticity of the documents — four memoranda attributed to Guard commander Lt. Col. Jerry Killian — has been under fire since they were described in the Sept. 8 broadcast of 60 Minutes.

CBS had not previously revealed who provided the documents or how they were obtained.

Burkett has previously alleged that in 1997 he witnessed allies of then-Gov. Bush discussing the destruction of Guard files that might embarrass Mr. Bush, who was considering a run for the presidency. Bush aides have denied the charge.

In the statement, CBS said: “Burkett originally said he obtained the documents from another former Guardsman. Now he says he got them from a different source whose connection to the documents and identity CBS News has been unable to verify to this point.”

Questions about the president’s National Guard service have lingered for years. Some critics question how Mr. Bush got into the Guard when there were waiting lists of young men hoping to join it to escape the draft and possible service in Vietnam.

Some people have answered that charge in that Bush volunteered for a six-year stint in order to be a pilot. The waiting list for that was not as long. Again, nobody holds Clinton accountable for outright lying to avoid the draft, so what’s the big freaking deal?

In the Sept. 8 60 Minutes report, former Texas Lt. Gov. Ben Barnes — a Democrat — claimed that, at the behest of a friend of the Bush family, he pulled strings to get young George W. Bush into the Guard.

Yet Mr. Barnes – a major fundraiser for Kerry and personal acquaintance of Dan Rather – who, by the way, Dan attended a DNC fundraiser for – has sworn under oath that he did no such thing. Lying through omission, Exhibits, “A” and “B.”

Other questions concern why Mr. Bush missed a physical in 1972, and why there are scant records of any service by Mr. Bush during the latter part of 1972, a period during which he transferred to an Alabama guard unit so he could work on a campaign there.

Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Lying through innuendo, Exhibit “A.”

The CBS documents suggested that Mr. Bush had disobeyed a direct order to attend the physical, and that there were other lapses in his performance. One memo also indicated that powerful allies of the Bush family were pressuring the guard to “sugar coat” any investigation of Lt. Bush’s service.

No, the documents made it explicit that President Bush disobeyed a direct order while a pilot in the TANG. There was no “suggestion” about it. That’s what had Hurricane Dan salivating.

Skeptics immediately seized on the typing in the memos, which included a superscripted “th” not found on all 1970s-era typewriters. As the controversy raged, CBS broadcast interviews with experts who said that some typewriters from that period could have produced the markings in question.

What unmitigated horseshit. “Not found on all 1970s-era typewriters” my ass. Not found on any 1970s-era typewriters. What typewriters that did have a reduced-case “th” were not capable of superscripting them, and the only machines available at the time that could superscript weren’t typewriters at all. The only “expert” they brought in was a 1970s-era typewriter repairman. By checking the Blogosphere, they could have gotten six real experts that could prove otherwise. Lying by omission, Exhibit “C.”

Other critics saw factual errors in the documents, stylistic differences with other writing by Killian and incorrect military lingo.

Yeah, that P.O. Box 34567 was a dead giveaway, too. As was the B.S. Zip Code. But does CBS mention those? No. Lying by omission, Exhibit “D.”

Some relatives of Col. Killian disputed that the memos were real. His former secretary said the sentiments regarding Mr. Bush’s failures as an officer were genuine, but the documents were not.

Did CBS interview “some relatives of Col. Killian” for the original 60 Minutes piece?

No, it would have detracted from the strength of the attack.

Did they interview his former Secretary for the original piece? After all, she’s the one who would have typed them, and would have told them unequivocally that they were fake.

No. That would have detracted from the strength of the attack. Lying through omission, Exhibits “E” and “F.”

Some document experts whom CBS consulted for the story told newspapers they had raised doubts before the broadcast and were ignored. CBS disputed their accounts, pointing to the main document expert the network consulted, Marcel Matley.

Except Mr. Matley is a handwriting expert not a document expert, and apparently not much of an expert at any rate, as Beldar discovered. More pajama blogging.

Matley insisted he had vouched for the authenticity of the signatures on the memos, but had not determined whether the documents themselves were genuine.

And, as Jim Geraghty found, Mr. Matley violated his own rules by authenticating a signature on a photocopied document.

Some expert. Of course they “disputed their accounts.” Their accounts made CBS look like exactly what they were – partisan attack dogs for the DNC willing to ignore anything that disagreed with the Official Party Line. Lying by obfuscation, Exhibit “A.”

Last week, CBS News stood by its reporting while vowing to continue working the story. The network acknowledged there were questions about the documents and pledged to try to answer them.

Mr. Bush maintains that he did not get special treatment in getting into the Guard, and that he fulfilled all duties. He was honorably discharged.

On Saturday, a White House official said Mr. Bush has reviewed the disputed documents that purport to show he refused orders to take a physical examination in 1972, and did not recall having seen them previously.

Which he wouldn’t have since A) they were forgeries, and B) they were supposed to be personal memos in Col. Killians’ private records. CBS was playing “GOTCHA!” and got burned, but they’re still trying to spin the story frantically – ANSWER THE QUESTIONS, Mr. PRESIDENT! WE DON’T CARE THAT THEY’RE BOGUS, ANSWER THEM!

In his first public comment on the documents controversy, the president told The Union Leader of Manchester, N.H., “There are a lot of questions about the documents, and they need to be answered.”

The Bush campaign has alleged that their Democratic rivals were somehow involved in the story. John Kerry’s campaign denies it. In an email revealed last week, Burkett said he had contacted the Kerry campaign but received no response.

Meanwhile, a federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to find and make public by next week any unreleased files about Mr. Bush’s Vietnam-era Air National Guard service to resolve a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Associated Press.

Which raises the question, “Why won’t Kerry sign a Form 180, and why hasn’t the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to have his records released?” No partisanship there, no sir!

The White House and Defense Department have on several occasions claimed that they had released all the documents only to make additional records available later on.

It would have been nice if CBS had shown the same interest in the delayed appearance of the Rose Law Firm billing records. And have those later-appearing records shown anything damaging? If they had, would the forged memos have been necessary?

You’ll note that not one of CBS‘s links tie to anything outside CBS, such as Saturday’s Washington Post’s graphic comparison of the forged memos with known real ones. Lying through omission, Exhibit “G.”

What they didn’t say was far more revealing than what they did.

Why the CBS Document Scandal is Important

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As I noted in my missives to Professor of Journalism Ethics Edward Wasserman, the problem we, the “loud and bullying sliver of the audience” have with the Mainstream Media is that they’re no longer reporting facts, but instead are deliberately, and increasingly blatantly trying to tell us what to think, how to think, and when to think it. They’re manipulating us every bit as obviously as Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, yet they still think they are hiding behind a curtain of pure objectivity.

Well, Connie du Toit put the matter in stark perspective, as Les Jones noted in a recent post.

The fact that we’re arguing over issues in Iraq (if we should be there or not, if it is going well or as planned or not) also is very much related to the same issue. Has the MSM been leading, suggesting, inferring, selectively reporting, or outright distorting the issues in Iraq? Many of us on the right side of the aisle believe that the press has been doing that. We’ve never had such blatant proof of their partisanship before.

It’s not a separate story. It is not irrelevant in the grand scheme of the more important issues. If we’re deciding issues based on what the press tells us, and the press is a fraud, then on what basis can we discuss anything?
Posted by Mrs. du Toit September 15, 2004 02:10 PM

If you read the blogs, you know that the MSM is reporting only the horrific. Anything positive must nearly be dragged out of the newsrooms. The media is repeating its Vietnam experience – doing everything it can in an effort to, in its view, extract us from our self-inflicted quagmire. Dan Rather’s self-immolation is providing a light with which to illuminate this fact. As I told Mr. Wasserman, we no longer trust the media because they no longer deserve to be trusted. As Connie points out, if we don’t have reliable information, how can we make considered decisions?

Burn, Dan, burn. Burn brightly. Maybe something good will come of it.

Ed Wasserman, Part II

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Here’s my reply to Mr. Wasserman’s email:

Mr. Wasserman:

Thank you for your reply. While I could wax poetic (and epic) in a reply, I will attempt to make this brief. I’m sure you don’t need or want to read a 5,000 word essay in refutation of your single paragraph.

First, I am certain that a lot of the responses received from “the loud and bullying sliver” of the audience are of the “SHUT UP!” persuasion. There is a least-common-denominator effect, after all. However, there’s a loud and principled set of voices out there who actually want the media to do what it is they claim to do: report FACTS. Impart INFORMATION. Not “tell us what to think.”

The difference now is that the so-called “new media” has given us, the previously voiceless, a real voice – as noted in a piece in today’s LA Times. That link, if you haven’t read it, is here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blog12sep12,1,1043155.story

That piece details how the “loud and bullying sliver” shined a spotlight on the centerpiece of CBS’s 60 Minutes II expose: the Incriminating Memos – memos so obviously forgeries that mere amateur sleuths were able to expose them in just a few hours. Yet CBS, apparently in possession of them for days if not weeks, were (and I’ll be generous) completely duped into running them as credible. Dan Rather (and oh, how I wish I could superscript the “th” in Rather in an email) has stood on the bridge of the sinking ship of his (and CBS’s) stock-in-trade, credibility, and protested that they must be real because they prove what he wants to believe.

And this exposes, in Glitter Gulch technicolor animated two-story lighting, the problem we “the sliver” have with the media: You aren’t doing your job and we can no longer trust you.

Why else do you think the (now derisive) term “mainstream media” was invented? Because that media has become “yellow journalism” once again. Only now they operate under the laughable pretense of “fairness.” And some of you STILL believe you are.

Your colleagues have, more and more often, come out and admitted bias since Bernard Goldberg published his first Wall Street Journal piece on the topic. Most recently the New York Times in the person of “Public Editor” Daniel Okrent in his July 25 piece “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?” A paper that Bernard Goldberg quotes Dan Rather as characterizing as “middle of the road.”

Do you want to know why the Bush National Guard duty story can’t get traction? Because the majority of the public DOESN’T CARE. And we’re the arbiters of what is and isn’t important, in the end. We didn’t care that Bill Clinton actually lied to avoid the draft (letter to that effect available here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/etc/draftletter.html), we don’t care if Bush used connections to avoid dropping napalm on babies in rice paddies, or burning Vietnamese hooches with a Zippo in a free-fire zone. But we DO find it interesting that Senator Kerry has a memory SEARED into him of being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 – a memory that affected his voting record in the Senate. A memory that he now says (though it’s etched forever in copies of the Congressional Record, at least) was in error. We, the irritating sliver, knew about this for WEEKS before the mainstream media decided they could no longer ignore it and had to tell the public “this is wrong and this is why.”

But if Kerry can be in error about that, what else can he be in error about? And why isn’t the media asking? Why is that up to us?

We DO question the “rightness, fairness and timing” of reports now because it’s blindingly obvious to us that the “mainstream media” has an agenda: Get Kerry/Edwards Elected. It’s even been admitted by another of your own, Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek. He said as much in an “Inside Washington” roundtable discussion (available here: http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2004/cyb20040712.asp#1) back in July.

Apparently the “mainstream media” wants them to win REALLY badly.

I don’t want to correct you Mr. Wasserman, I want you to do your job. But it’s become blindingly apparent to me and many, many others that you won’t do that job any longer. Especially not when you brush aside our objections with the lame excuse:

“As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact, the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.”

RatherGate illustrates that the “minimal respect for fact” has gone right out the window. Right along with media credibility. We don’t trust the media because you no longer deserve to be trusted. So some growing proportion shouts “Shut up!” Perhaps you should think about why, rather than dismiss them offhandedly.

Kevin Baker
http://smallestminority.blogspot.com

P.S.: I’d like to continue this conversation if you’re so inclined, but if not, I certainly understand.

He surprised me once. We’ll see if he does it again.

He Wrote Back!

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I’m a little surprised, actually. A couple of posts below I put up an email I wrote to Edward Wasserman (“Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University” according to the piece I referenced from the Philadelphia Inquirer) concerning truth in journalism and how we, the “loud and bullying sliver of the audience” are asserting an “undue outside influence” on the media.

Or at least, that’s how he sees it.

Well, he responded. Here it is:

With respect, I don’t really think that the protest I’m talking about is fact-driven. (Not to say a fact-based critique isn’t fully warranted, and the instances you cite are disturbing.) But Bush supporters don’t, for instance, dispute the “facts” of his National Guard service. They do dispute the rightness, fairness and timing of the coverage of it. The Kerry people say that even if the Swift guys’ stuff was largely debunked factually, the media gave it so much attention the issue got undue credibility, and Kerry was forced on the defensive. The terrain of controversy isn’t over what’s factual, it’s about what’s important and about how much weight to put on this versus that. The people I hear from don’t want to correct me; they want to shut me up. Present company excepted.
EW

Now I’m going to have to write a rebuttal.

I wonder what he’ll have to say about RatherGate?

My reply to Mr. Wasserman is up.