Matt from Blackfive joined us for an extended session last evening so we could discuss some of the great coverage on his milblog this past week. We talked about some new developments in the Haditha massacre story which call into question Jack Murtha’s initial statements. Matt also helped us understand the real story of the call up of Marines this past week, and showed us how it was spun by the media.
We also got a preview of his awesome new book The Blog of War: Front-Line Dispatches from Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan
Next Sunday, after Someone You Should Know, we will talk to Matt about this book in depth.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin and Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Hailed as “Groundbreaking” by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening from 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Boston’s Talk Leader.
Matt from Blackfive joined us once again at 9pm for Someone You Should Know, our weekly collaboration to bring the inspirational, true stories of the men and women that are fighting for us around the world to the radio.
This week we heard the story of the 2nd Platoon Bravo Company 1st Recon Battalion. Specifically, we heard about the incredible heroics of Marine Captain Brent Morel, Marine Sergeant James Eddie Wright, Staff Sgt. Eric Kocher, Staff Sgt. Mendoza and Marine Sgt. Willie L. Copeland.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin and Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Hailed as “Groundbreaking” by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening at 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Boston’s Talk Leader.
The UN is not only a feckless organization but it is also dangerous.
The question is why, given what we know about how currupt this organization is, do people like John Kerry, George Sorros, and Peter Beinart continue to advocate that we work even more closely with the UN to promote global peace and stability? You should also ask yourself why the liberals oppose a man lke John Bolton who has been one of the few Ambasadors to the UN that has actually demanded transparency and accountability to US taxpayers. Why are American liberals so quick to condemn Bolton and so quick to reccomend working more closely with Kofi Annan who was himself in bed with Saddam Hussein (oil for food)? What does that tell you about the American Left in this country?
Lori Lowenthal Marcus has this piece in The Weekly Standard that is a must read if you really want to see how UNIFIL- the UN “peacekeeping” force in Lebanon “openly published daily real-time intelligence, of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah, on the location, equipment, and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon.”
UNIFIL–the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a nearly 2,000-man blue-helmet contingent that has been present on the Lebanon-Israel border since 1978–is officially neutral. Yet, throughout the recent war, it posted on its website for all to see precise information about the movements of Israeli Defense Forces soldiers and the nature of their weaponry and materiel, even specifying the placement of IDF safety structures within hours of their construction. New information was sometimes only 30 minutes old when it was posted, and never more than 24 hours old.
Meanwhile, UNIFIL posted not a single item of specific intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces. Statements on the order of Hezbollah “fired rockets in large numbers from various locations” and Hezbollah’s rockets “were fired in significantly larger numbers from various locations” are as precise as its coverage of the other side ever got.
I wonder if “60 Minutes,” Katie Couric, or any other “mainstream” media organizaion will do some really hard hitting investigative journalism to expose this story?
HT Janet Levy from JihadWatch
Allan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard has this to say about a once great Human Rights organization “Human Rights Watch” which I have known for a long time is a discredited partisan anti-Semitic organization many of whose former supporters, as Professor Dershowitz explains, “have become alienated from the organization, because of, in the words of one early supporter, ‘their obsessive focus on Israel’.”
When it comes to Israel and its enemies, Human Rights Watch cooks the books about facts, cheats on interviews, and releases predetermined conclusions that are driven more by their ideology than by evidence. These are serious accusations, and they are demonstrably true. Consider the following highly publicized “conclusion” reached by Human Rights Watch about the recent war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel: “Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” No cases! Anyone who watched even a smattering of TV during the war saw with their own eyes direct evidence of rockets being launched from civilian areas. But not Human Rights Watch. How could an organization, which claims to be objective, have been so demonstrably wrong about so central a point in so important a war? Could it have been an honest mistake? I don’t think so. Human Rights Watch not only failed to interview witnesses who had contrary evidence, it ignored credible news sources, such as the New York Times and the New Yorker.
He goes on to document case after case of eye witnesses who tell the same story that Hezbollah embedded themselves and their weapons among civilian Lebanese populations intentionally endangering the Lebanese civilains while they used them as human shields.
Professor Dershowitz concludes:
How could Human Rights Watch have suppressed this evidence from so many different sources? The only reasonable explanation is that they wanted there to be no evidence of Hezbollah’s tactic of hiding behind civilians. So they cooked the books to make it come out that way. Even after the fighting ended and numerous reports of Hezbollah hiding among civilians were published, Kenneth Roth essentially repeated the demonstrably false conclusions that “in none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack.” So committed is Human Rights Watch to its pre-determined conclusions that it refused to let the facts, as reported by objective sources, get in its way.
Human Rights Watch is a totally partisan anti-Israeli organization. Anybody who quotes any of their “findings” should know better. It is pathetic that a group of people would attempt to portray themselves as an organization comitted to furthering the cause of human right’s violations when their real aim is to create propoganda to turn world opinion against Israel.
Perhaps Kofi Annan will offer Human Rights Watch a seat on the UN Human Rights Council along with China and Cuba.
Excellent concise article by William Lauderback, executive vice president of the American Conservative Union on why “windfall Profits Tax” on Big Oil is a Bad Idea.
Some politicians like Democrat Ohion Rep Dennis Kucinnich has long advocated a “windfall profits tax” on Big Oil. As we have argued many times here at Pundit Review, this idea is ill-conceived and would be destructive to the American economy overall. It also contradicts the basic economic principles.
In the first place, adding more taxes to the production of gasoline will obviously only serve to send already high prices even higher. That’s not going to help anything. In the second, suggesting we essentially punish oil companies for high prices at the pump ignores the realities of the oil industry, including how prices are set and who actually owns the oil companies in the first place.
Oil companies don’t pull prices out of thin air; they are determined by open trading on the international market. Saddling U.S. producers with extra taxes makes it harder for them to compete with foreign companies, degrades the value of domestically produced oil and increases American importation of foreign fuel. It’s essentially the equivalent of granting a U.S. government subsidy to foreign oil companies.
Also, oil company profits are not just stored in a big vault somewhere; they are reinvested in exploration and production, and paid out as dividends to shareholders. These are the people that really own U.S. oil companies, and they might not be who you think they are.
Oil stocks are extremely popular with both individual investors and fund managers. In fact, if you have a 401(k), own a mutual fund or participate in a retirement plan, the chances are excellent that you yourself have some ownership in an oil company.
As I have said on many occasions. Let the free market work. Price controls (which is essentially what the windfall profits tax is) always impede the free market from functioning effectively and efficinently. The answer to high energy prices is to not only conserve (decreasing demand) but more importantly to increase abundant supply. It is axiomatic that when you tax something you get less of it. If you want more plentiful supplies of natural gas and crude oil, then it stands to reason that you should tax development and production less. If anything, we should demand that the government abolish the federal and state gas taxes they impose and extraneous ethanol and additive requirements. Additionally, we must call on liberal Democrat politicians to cease obstructing and impeding efforts by the President and other Republicans in Congress to become more energy independant by drilling in ANWAR and the outer continental shelf for oil and natural gas. In fact, if the president and congressional Republicans were actually interested in becoming more popular with the public they would support a presidential executive order to open up ANWAR and other domestic locations and begin drilling today and dare the Democrats to stop them from reducing prices at the pump. I won’t hold my breath though.
Sunday Evening, 7-10pm est
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7pm: We are happy to announce the return of Victor Davis Hanson to Pundit Review Radio. Professor Hanson is one of America’s great historians and writers, he is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.
We started the summer by interviewing Professor Hanson, and we will close the summer by doing so again. It is an honor to have him back on the show.
At 9pm, Matt from Blackfive will join us for another edition of Someone You Should Know.
Matt will be staying with us for an extended period because we have to talk about several of the stories he has been covering over at Blackfive, including Haditha developments that won’t make Jack Murtha very happy, the media spin on the Marine call-up this week and the plans of a vile anti-war group who are planning to protest at the funeral of Navy SEAL Marc Allen Lee, the subject of a recent Someone You Should Know.
What is Pundit Review Radio?
Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week Kevin & Gregg give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Called â??Groundbreakingâ? by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to your radio every Sunday evening from 7-10pm EST on AM680 WRKO, Bostonâ??s Talk Station.
Matt at Blackfive has the disturbing news that Fred Phelps group plans to protest at the funeral of the first Navy SEAL to die in Iraq, Marc Allen Lee. You may remember Marc Allen Lee from a recent edition of Someone You Should Know on Pundit Review Radio.
Listen to Marc’s story and then let it sink in that fellow Americans, fellow human beings, would protest at this man’s funeral. The following message was left on the post of Marc’s Someone You Should Know. Here it is in full,
I was one of Marcâ??s instructors and believe that in the short amount of time I had to know him, I got to know him well, not best friends by anymeans but as close as the instructor/student guidlines we have to follow allow. Marc was an exceptional student, but the thing that stood out most to me was his ability to observe when things were b.s. and when things were done for honest reasons. That being said, I believe that Marc believed in the cause and ultimately in the SEAL Teams, he gave me hope for the future of the Teams and didnâ??t let me down. I wish that every student I put through training had his dedication and his ability to understand what it meant to be a part of the team. He is a hero and is already missed greatly.
John
Matt has more details about the kind of man Marc Allen Lee was at Blackfive, go check them out and remember him and his family in your prayers.
The word ‘outrage’ is thrown around a lot these days. I’m as guilty as anyone. However, in this case, the word is entirely appropriate. All Americans, even the Kos crowd, should be able to come together on this one.
Thank you Marc Allen Lee.