Contra Costa Times Watch

2011-10-28T14:07:00.001-07:00

Contra Costa Times' Obsession With Occupy Wall Street/Oakland
October 28, 2011 - San Francisco CA - PipeLineNews.org - Heavy coverage of the Occupy Oakland movement, featured prominently in the last two editions of the Contra Costa Times, reveals the paper's heavy handed, concerted push to support this revolutionary, neo-communist uprising.
So brazenly biased is the newspaper's coverage, one must assume that its ongoing narrative had to have been approved at the highest editorial levels [such as they are] at this San Francisco Bay Area daily newspaper.
The facts are as follows - over this 24 hour period, the CC Times devoted well over 300 column inches [computation based on number of columns in this 6 column format newspaper multiplied by the length of each column in inches] to this effort. This amount of coverage on a single [non-disaster] issue is pretty much unprecedented, especially given this newspaper's plummeting page count.
Above the fold, large font headlines supporting this hack journo include:

"Iraq veteran injured in clash"
"Protesters come out in force, peacefully" - oddly adjacent an image of the "peaceful" protesters violently tearing down cyclone fencing sections].
"All eyes are on Oakland"
"In wake of injury, a call for healing"

PipeLineNews.org's investigation into the motivating ideology behind Occupy Oakland and by extension, its parent, Occupy Wall Street, revealed it to be of neo-communist origin with a latent capacity for extreme violence [see, Occupy Oakland October 19, 2011, Taste The Madness].
So compelling is this evidence that any journalist should be able to draw a similar conclusion. That this doesn't happen at the Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area News Group products simply reveals that these organizations made the decision to cheerlead Occupy Oakland/OWS despite the obvious damage that such blatant bias may cause these periodicals long term.
What motivates a community newspaper to champion a movement whose organizers certainly hope will prove to be an existential threat to capitalism and Western democratic principles?
The most reasonable explanation is that the Contra Costa Times' editorial staff and the journalists it employs share much of OWS' driving ideology and therefore instead of merely covering the events surrounding the movement, the size of which pales in comparison to that of the Tea Party, they act as pamphleteers for the movement, not reporters. They have become stenographers for the hard left.
This newspaper has a lot to answer for regarding its ongoing and seemingly increasing leftwing bias. Perhaps the Contra Costa Times' advertisers need to be informed as to exactly what is going on. They may displeased to find their advertising carrier doesn't really seem to support the basic idea of capitalist commerce upon which these businesses depend.
©2011 PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved.

2011-10-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

Bay Area News Group's Journalistic Malfeasance Over Occupy Wall Street Coverage

October 17, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Considering its coverage of the Occupy Wall Street freak show, which included the declaration 'THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE..."Protest Has Legs..." writers with the Bay Area News Group - a pretend journalistic enterprise which can be observed slowly sinking in the West - have apparently refused to undertake even the most cursory search of primary source documents to determine the protesters' goals.

While we don't expect much better from this "newsgroup's" assemblage of journo hacks and stenographers for the left, the sheer boldness of the combined newspapers' agendized efforts to conflate what is clearly a violent revolutionary movement [well over 1,000 arrested so far] with the peaceful, polite and politically effectiveTea Party would be ludicrous if it weren't such an obvious abuse of journalistic protocols - concepts with which these writers seem to be unfamiliar.

As we noted in an October 7 piece Occupy Wall Street Movement Driven By Neo-Marxist Rage, any reporter with a shred of curiosity and access to a computer could connect the same very large dots.

"Despite the best efforts of the MSM - and disappointingly many "conservative" pundits - to portray the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as a grassroots, populist response to supposed excesses by the securities and financial services industry, this backwater of human debris is in fact driven by a neo-Marxist rage that should be impossible to ignore - yet that is exactly what is happening.
One only has to briefly page through their official documents, the so called "Occupied Wall Street Journal" [see, http://www.breakingcopy.com/occupied-wall-street-journal-pdf] and the occupiers non-negotiable "13 demands," [see, http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-occupy-wall-st-moveme/] to determine the ideology of its participants..."

One might also consider - given its near identical tone - how the Revolutionary Communist Party of the USA views these protests.

"Occupy Wall Street: Showdown and Victory – This Is So Not Over!
In the damp predawn dark of Friday, October 14, an enormous roar of jubilation went up in the canyons of Wall Street as more than 3,000 people cheered the news that New York City had backed down from unleashing their police on the Occupation of Wall Street. A victory was achieved, new ground seized.
Read on...

Prisoner Insights on "Occupy Wall Street"

Occupy Wall Street Spreads Across the U.S. and World

A Night Under Skyscrapers and Stars at Occupy Wall Street: "A Dialogue Is On" [source, Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States homepage, http://rwor.org/]

When the Communist Party of the US is a more reliable source of information on this movement than is the preening, not-so-free press, it becomes instantly clear that the MSM has been caught once again lying their collective asses off. These folks aren't in the truth business, their agenda lies elsewhere, a place which abides neither honor nor integrity...one need look no farther than 1600 Pennsylvania for the source of their inspiration.

2011-07-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lefty Bias At Contra Costa Times

July 29, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org/CC Times Watch - Back in 2005, as a side project we started [2005] a blog Contra Costa Times Watch with the idea in mind of documenting the biased journalism consistently presented by the San Francisco Bay Area's Contra Costa Times.
We essentially closed the project in 2006, having proved to our satisfaction, using numerous examples, a consistent pattern of left-wing bias at the newspaper, and feel we had a hand in driving the then editor out.
However, going into an election year where clear thinking on the part of the American voter is vital, we now find it useful to resurrect the project.
This example will be brief. It involves one of the many techniques that lefty journos use to subtly [oft times not so subtly] manipulate readers.
In today's [July 29, 2011] CC Times' Morning Report section, the headline, above the fold article deals with the efforts by DC legislators to deal with the Fed's debt authority.
The story was picked up [this is usually done by the wire editor in most newspapers] from the New York Times [see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/us/politics/11boehner.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=carl%20hulse&st=cse For Boehner, Lofty Goals Checked By Reality]. Written by Carl Hulse, it details the last minute negotiations still underway by the GOP to present a united front in the debt limit debate.
The piece is, as is almost always the case with the NY Times, well written and edited. Surprisingly for that organization, the article is also a reasonably fair presentation of the facts.
But a funny thing happened to this item on its way to the Contra Costa Times. Running above the piece a new headline has been substituted [generally the responsibility of the copy editor in many print publications] which screams "GOP blows chance by torpedoing own plan."
The difference should be obvious to media/political junkies as well as the general readership. While the NY Times' headline fairly characterizes the text that follows, that appearing in the CC Times is clearly inflammatory, biased and seems designed to mislead. For many people "reading" the newspaper means a quick scan of headlines and maybe a more in depth reading of particular pieces later.
The headline was designed with this casual reader in mind, who could well be influenced by its negative tone - gathering that the budgetary difficulties in DC are to be laid at the feet of the GOP.

The facts are quite different and disquieting. Democrats have failed to produce a budget in over 800 days [see, http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/just-reminder-its-been-800-days-senate-passed-budget_576441.html] have presented no legislation at all to deal with the credit extension and president's most recent proposal failed receive a single vote in the Dem controlled Senate...enough said.
Oddly, the online version of the article carries a much fairer headline, obviously the work of whomever fulfills the function of online copy editor. [see, House puts off debt vote, after conservatives balk, http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_18569096?source=rss].
Since this is a re-christening of sorts we will leave it there for now with one brief note: CC Times Staff, we are watching and we know how the game is played.

2011-07-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

Contra Costa Times Times Watch - Announcement

July 29, 2011 - San Francisco, CA - Contra Costa Times Watch - Editors at the Contra Costa Times, we are back. Batten down the hatches, you are in for a bumpy ride.

Today's posting to follow.

[Editor's note: We started this as a side project to our main journalstic effort PipeLineNews.org which carries exclusive news content almost entirely devoted to U.S. national security, with a concentration on the threat posed by Islamism and the seditious doctrine of Shari'a [Islamic law]. We have been online for nearly 12 years continuously].

2008-07-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Hot Lanes To Hell - A CC Times Vote For Gestapo Traffic Restrictions?

July 24, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - CC Times Watch - In an above the fold, front page story, "HOT lanes expected to curb traffic" published on the 23rd, CC Times reporter Denis Cuff [an affable guy, as many local reporters are] writes rhapsodically about a proposed 800 mile network of toll roads, designed to force consumers into car pooling.
The plan is simple, and insidious.
Either jump into a car full of strangers or pay the price monetarily - 20 to 60 cents per mile [at first of course] for the privilege of using the roads your taxes have ALREADY paid for.
Quoting various spokespeople from Bay Area governmental traffic agencies - yeah the imbeciles who have brought you crappy, crowded pockmarked freeways and dumbass HOV lanes which further congest traffic because no one uses them, among other things - Mr. Cuff's piece paints a rosy picture of this being the future of transportation in the East Bay.
The article reads as a press release from the agencies involved, no dissenting views, no realization that freedom of mobility is elemental in this society and that expanding it rather than contracting and restricting it seems far more in keeping with our founding principles.
There are many subtexts here, among them:
1. Why are these types of governmental plans, which are obviously calculated to hamper freedom accepted so often by local media as being desirable?
2. Why are such far reaching decisions being made by faceless bureaucrats who are completely insulated from the repercussion of their actions, beyond the recall of citizens?
3. Where is the equity in citizens being charged to use roads for which they have already paid?

Our feeling about these related issues is that media types come out of the same mold - trust me we have talked to hundreds of these people over the years, from the New York Times to small podunk enterprises with mini circulations - and generally they believe that government is the solution to most problems. Given that attitude, restricting traffic is just another tool along with restricting urban growth, green zones, mitigation with private land holders to allow them to partially develop their property and a thousand other methods of turning communities of free citizens into ant farms.
There, we said it - ANT FARMS.
That is what your government has in store for you if you don't take action, if you don't stop the green nazis from incrementally restricting your freedoms [choose the area, remember that a few weeks ago nearly half the Supreme Court voted to deny that the Second Amendment even exists] until one day, you or most likely your children will live in a gray world which will make Orwell's 1984 seem like a Jamaican holiday.
Seriously...what is needed here? [The list is waaay too long, but here are a few observations]
Who the hell edits the CC Times? [Yes we know whose names are associated with those titles] do they confer with their writers at all or are they simply cut out of the same mold and serve mainly as human spell checkers rather than actively trying to produce a balanced perspective which might step on the toes of schmoes like the Metro Transportation Commission?
FACT: Publications like the CC Times are merely news aggregators, with the exception of their local stories, the quality of which has just been demonstrated, they are amalgams of similarly motivated op-ed pieces disguised as reportage from the big boys of the industry [NYT, Washpost, the LA Times and AP].
As a start it might be nice to at least admit that there is a problem in balance and then devise a method of dealing with it long term. Perhaps hiring a non-liberal [GASP]to help the editing process might help? Hell just having a conservative as a copy editor would spare us the glaringly ridiculous headlines which add nothing to the story and often present a skewed summation of what the piece is actually is about.
The next suggestion might be to inject a degree of openness into the newsroom and the editorial process. How about some public meeting where key newspaper employees actually meet with the public? These same folks DEMAND openness and sunshine laws in government, why not in their own professions? [yeah we know the answer to this and it will NEVER happen]

Ok this segment is getting long, don't want to tap out the bile, stay tuned, we are just warming up...

2008-07-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK...AND WE'RE PISSED!

You Have Seen This, Right? - Obama VP Finalist - Little Johny Edwards - Busted In LA With Mistress And Love Child

July 22, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - John Edwards, former Democrat presidential candidate and currently on Obama's "short list" for VP was this morning busted by the National Enquirer in the Beverly Hilton hotel with his mistress Rielle Hunter,and their love child.

Confronted by the Enquirer's phalanx of reporters and photographers Edward's reportedly ran and hid in a bathroom for 15 minutes before being escorted past the reporters by hotel security personnel.

What does this mean aside from another Democrat being outed as a seamy, lying scumbag?

Consider this the Clinton's first salvo in the destruction of Obama a massive shot across the bow, stealing the spotlight from the freshman Senator as he prances across the Mideast and Europe as he sows whatever it is that he sows.

It may be news to some, but of course not to us, that the Clinton's have controlled both the National Enquirer and Star Magazine since 1999, when their former Treasury Secty, Roger C. Altman - through his company Evercore Capital Partners LLC - bought both tabloids for $294 million, acquiring them from American Media Inc. [source, New York Times, Investment Group Buys The National Enquirer and Star Magazine, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9804E3D8113AF934A25751C0A96F958260]

Obama, be afraid, be VERY afraid....

Ok, Edwards is a Democrat and a scumbag...surprising huh? So what's the CC Times angle on this?
Well it's more a media angle in general than one that applies solely to this flea-bitten news aggregator masquerading as a newspaper.
Does anyone really believe that if this story featured a conservative GOP type rather than a flaming leftie ambulance chasing lawyer with a bad hairdo that it wouldn't have been plastered everywhere the fossil media treads?

Just on a lark we did a Google News search for Edwards a few hours ago and guess what?

Not a single substantive story ANYWHERE in the MSM. Right no newspaper, no networks, no cable outlets.

None.
Is this surprising?
Again, no.
Final comment:
Some have said that those on the extreme left are certifiable victims of mental illness and we believe it.

To these folks leftism is their secular religion and under no circumstances will they reject it. This was really driven home earlier today when the NY Times released its second quarter profit figures which were down a whopping 82%.
Now the mavens who run the Times must know why this is happening, they must realize that when they play this fast and loose with the truth that even casual observers take notice. So either they are insane OR they are addicts, they will cling to a failed business model of skewed news reportage to the point that their companies will go into the toilet, rather than deviate.
We callED all the sage heads at the CCTimes this afternoon, the Publisher, Editor and both Associate Editors asking for an explanation of why the Edwards story is of no concern to them. We aren't holding our breath on a reply.
You would think that given the fact that even MSM stalwarts like Andrea Mitchell [whom the left wants to eviscerate now because of her observations regarding media bias] are noting the bizarre spectacle in which nearly every American anchor is pursuing Obama in the Mideast and Europe as if he is the Second Coming that some of these clowns would at least pay lip service to the proposition that they should at least feign a modicum of fairness...but
Truly disgusting
Stay tuned, we are just warming up...

2008-07-23T17:02:00.000-07:00

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Phony Case Against Haditha Marines In Shambles, Charges Against Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani Dropped

June 17, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The concocted, politically driven case against 8 U.S. Marines charged with atrocities as a result of a November 2005 fire fight in Haditha, Iraq, suffered what is most likely a mortal blow today when charges against Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani were dropped by Judge Colonel Steven Folsom because the case had been compromised by the appearance of improper influence.

With charges now dropped against 7 of the 8 defendants, the status of the charges against the last of the charged, Sgt. Frank Wuterich seem to rest on extremely shaky turf, though that case is still scheduled to proceed as of this writing.
A political case from the outset, defense attorneys for the defendants have alleged that prosecutor General James Mattis was acting at the behest of anti-war politicians such as bin-Laden stooge John Murtha [D-PA] who at one point made public accusations that the Marines were guilty of cold-blooded murder, absent fact in a blatant attempt to influence the trial.

"It's much worse than was reported in Time magazine...There was no firefight...they [the Marines] killed innocent civilians in cold blood...they actually went into the houses and killed women and children." [and later to ABC] "I will not excuse murder and that what's happened."

The way this case was handled and dealt with by Democrat politicians and their 5th column allies, the nancy-boys in the media is seminal to understanding the two main causes of America's cultural identity crisis.

The outrageous behavior that the MSM has displayed throughout this case, the sensationalism and gleeful malice towards 8 Marines and the military in general, the gruesome images and screaming 72 point above the fold headlines is emblematic of just how traitorous these two forces have become.

In a year long media bias study conducted by PipeLineNews and available at Contra Costa Times Watch, we proved the [then Knight Ridder owned]that East San Francisco Bay Area California Newspaper the Contra Costa Times displayed the same virulent facts-be-damned anti-war stance as did the majority of the MSM.

In a June 12, 2006 piece, Don't Expect Fairness In Bay Area News Coverage Of Haditha we wrote:

"As we have demonstrated over a period of nine months [in our side project Contra Costa Times Watch] the San Francisco Bay Area's Contra Costa Times is impossibly biased towards the left [to the extent that it might as well be printed in the basement of Howard Dean's DNC] consistently siding with Democrat and international critics of the administration on both domestic and foreign policy issues including the war on terror and in that matter, diminishing - or more often than not simply not covering - the very real accomplishments being made by coalition forces.
In the case of the Haditha controversy the Times engages in showboat, conjecture-based journalism of the worst kind.
Sunday's edition carries several stories that either directly or indirectly touch on the "massacre" allegedly perpetrated by U.S. Marines in that godforsaken Iraqi town - at times a Taliban like Sunni terrorist stronghold, where videotaped beheadings, limb amputations and sundry mutilations were the order of the day well into 2005.
Anti-American zealots like band-aid warrior John Murtha [D-PA...Pennsylvania folks, not the Palestinian Authority], George Soros' bought and paid for phony "human right's" groups and the leftist media have embraced this story with a glee borne of the realization that, as Greg Mitchell the current editor of E&P Magazine, the bible of the publishing industry states:
"At this critical moment, it's time for newspapers -- many of which helped get us into this war -- to use their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands. Now, it's literally do-or-die time."

It is this animus which simply permeates - with very few exceptions - the newspaper publishing industry in the wake of the Judith Miller affair.
Since June 5th the Times has carried at least 14 stories which touch on this issue, none of which present the story from the side of the Marines involved, all are at best critical and at worst examples of a lefty media lynch mob..."

We are looking forward, not with any hope of real change or effort to display fairness, to tomorrow's coverage by the CC Times regarding that matter. For additional information regarding this matter, please refer to Questions Arise About Haditha Doctor - Wahid al-Obeidi - Central Figure In "Massacre" Case and Questions Arise About Time "Massacre" Reporter, The Terror Friendly Aparisim Ghosh

© 1999-2008 PipeLineNews.org LLC, Contra Costa Times Watch. All rights reserved.

2008-06-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

2006-07-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

CC Times Stoops To New Low - Crocodile Tear Eulogy For Miguel Terrazas

Mr. Lopez have you no shame?

The Monday story on Miguel Terrazas is an affront to journalism - a very bad PR joke - and you should be ashamed for being a party to this false display of patriotism.

The events in Iraq in general and Haditha in particular have been the subject of constant misreporting by your newspaper and because of that we find this article an offensive and transparent effort to create in the minds of your readers a false impression - that you are somehow supportive of our armed forces, something that couldn't be further from the truth.

The position of the Times on the war on terror is indistinguishable from that of the Islamists, an honest newspaper wouldn't hide behind dead Marines who gave their lives so that people like you had the right to use their deaths to paper over the Times' anti-Americanism.

Doggen Hannah's article is a disservice to the memory of these fine young men and a cruel affront to their grieving families, you - Mr. Lopez - should be ashamed for having cooked this up.

2006-06-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Don't Expect Fairness In Bay Area News Coverage Of Haditha

June 12, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As we have demonstrated over a period of nine months, the San Francisco Bay Area's Contra Costa Times is impossibly biased towards the left [to the extent that it might as well be printed in the basement of Howard Dean's DNC] consistently siding with Democrat and international critics of the administration on both domestic and foreign policy issues including the war on terror and in that matter, diminishing - or more often than not simply not covering - the very real accomplishments being made by coalition forces.

In the case of the Haditha controversy the Times engages in showboat, conjecture-based journalism of the worst kind.

Sunday's edition carries several stories that either directly or indirectly touch on the "massacre" allegedly perpetrated by U.S. Marines in that godforsaken Iraqi town - at times a Taliban like Sunni terrorist stronghold, where videotaped beheadings, limb amputations and sundry mutilations were the order of the day well into 2005.

Anti-American zealots like band-aid warrior John Murtha [D-PA...Pennsylvania folks, not the Palestinian Authority], George Soros' bought and paid for phony "human right's" groups and the leftist media have embraced this story with a glee borne of the realization that, as Greg Mitchell the current editor of E&P Magazine, the bible of the publishing industry states:

"At this critical moment, it's time for newspapers -- many of which helped get us into this war -- to use their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands. Now, it's literally do-or-die time."

It is this animus which simply permeates - with very few exceptions - the newspaper publishing industry in the wake of the Judith Miller affair.

Since June 5th the Times has carried at least 14 stories which touch on this issue, none of which present the story from the side of the Marines involved, all are at best critical and at worst examples of a lefty media lynch mob.

The same newspaper which scrupulously pursues a farcical sense multicultural "fairness" in cases involving sadistic murders, rapes and the like simply can't bring itself - under the much tarnished leadership of Chris Lopez and Dan "Jack Daniels" Hatfield - to grant the very members of the armed forces who are dying to guarantee the Times' First Amendment rights, the presumption of "innocent until proven guilty."

Today's case in point.

The Sunday edition of the Times featured prominent quotes in its Haditha misinformation dump - such as the below lead, above the fold in the "Perspective" section:

"You could tell that someone was killed by the gunfire, and then the wailing and screaming of women seconds after the Americans left the house," a statement attributed to Thaer Hadithi an alleged Iraqi "human rights activist."

For a bit of perspective, much needed to understand the subterfuge in which the Times engages; Thaer Hadithi, more properly Thaer Thabit al-Hadithi is none of the things that Time Magazine described him as when it originally published One Morning in Haditha on March 27.

Time originally claimed that the video tape which started the investigation came from a young journalism student.

"A day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch."

There was no young journalism student and the tape did not sift through George Soros' Human Rights Watch, as suspect as that association might have been.

No, the tape that initiated this latest instance of leftist history reinvention was delivered by the pudgy 43 year old Thaer Hadithi himself, who worked for Dr. Walid al-Obeidi who received and processed those killed in the Haditha firefight.

Hammurabi is a fraudulent organization, comprised of only one other person in addition to Hadithi.

Time magazine has corrected, of course after the fact and with absolutely no fanfare, the facts of the origin of the tape, to a certain extent:

"In the original version of this story, TIME reported that "a day after the incident, a Haditha journalism student videotaped the scene at the local morgue and at the homes where the killings had occurred. The video was obtained by the Hammurabi Human Rights Group, which cooperates with the internationally respected Human Rights Watch, and has been shared with TIME." In fact, Human Rights Watch has no ties or association with the Hammurabi Human Rights Group. TIME regrets the error."

One of our sources, one intimately familiar with Iraqi politics stated to us:

"...no independent organization can operate in Haditha - with ample freedom to film - without being a front. Even in 2003 and early 2004, when the rest of Iraq was calm, Haditha was a no-go area. If an independent Human Rights group tried to operate, they would be greeted with a bullet to the back of the neck. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same cameras which filmed this tape also filmed beheadings of hostages.

The purpose of this piece is not to detail the sham case which the media has made against the actions of U.S. Marines in Haditha and we have made our own contributions to detail the weakness of this case [Questions Arise About Haditha Doctor - Wahid al-Obeidi - Central Figure In "Massacre" Case & Questions Arise About Time "Massacre" Reporter, The Terror Friendly Aparisim Ghosh] however it is necessary to lay some fundamental groundwork establishing the fact that the story is extremely suspect and infused with misstatements, second party innuendo and actors - Islamist and Democrat liars - who have an axe to grind with the U.S. policy in Iraq.

With that as background it only stands to reason that reasonable and fair journalism would dictate telling the story of Haditha from the perspective of those who were actually involved, the Marines.

Such was made available to the Contra Costa Times, for its Sunday edition from at least two major sources; one in the form of a front page lead article from the Washington Post - Marine Says Rules Were Followed - Sergeant Describes Hunt for Insurgents in Haditha, Denies Coverup in which Neal A. Puckett, defense attorney for one of the defendants in the case - Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich - states:

"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," said Neal A. Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the ongoing investigations into the incident. "He's really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians."

And two, in the form of an AP synopsis of the Washington Post article Lawyer: Marine Denies Haditha Massacre

No one who has the barest inkling of how the newspaper publishing industry operates or how these decisions are made could possibly be unaware of the existence of either of these pieces, the first main stream media expositions of the Haditha story told from the perspective of one of the accused.

Thus, the CC Times has intentionally denied the Marines their day in the court of public opinion. [Late development, both the CC Times' and the Mercury news' websites finally posted the AP version of this story - probably in direct response to complaints - at approximately 2:30 PM Sunday - nearly 24 hours after the story became available at AP. The CC Times posting does not, as of this writing even appear on the website's front page but must be accessed by additional steps finding it then hidden under California news and even then it's the sixth item down under the heading - Dodgers 6, Rockies 5, Firefighters gain ground against Big Bear blaze, King Felix pitches 4-hitter against Angels, Marlins SS hurt during tumble into stands, Zito in control as A's sweep Yankees, News briefs from around California...and finally...Lawyers for Marines say military rules were followed]

As we has stated in the past, the media is skilled in skewing the news and the power to distort, misreport and simply carry fable as fact often pales in comparison to their ability to obfuscate - to refuse to cover stories inconvenient to a news organization's political agenda - such is the case with the Contra Costa Times.

For the record neither the Sunday print versions of the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Jose Mercury News carried the piece either, making the leftist stranglehold on the Bay Area complete.

2006-03-29T17:53:00.001-08:00

Rob Reiner Busted In $23M Conflict Of Interest Scheme - Using Children's Funds To Further His Personal Agenda

March 30, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Caught in a $23 million scandal, Hollywood leftist Rob Reiner was forced to resign today from the First 5 California Children and Families Commission which he chaired for seven years.

Reiner a former sit-com actor was responsible for narrowly passing a 1998 California initiative which increased cigarette taxes through which "First 5" was eventually funded.

His resignation stems from the use of those monies to promote a $23 million advertising campaign for early childhood education at a time when Reiner was also seeking to pass a new initiative which would add a 1.7-percentage-point income-tax surcharge on high income Californians to force a - [Democrat fat cat] California Teacher's Association & Union supported - universal pre-school education program on the state.

As the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters said of Reiner's conflict of interest:

"...Reiner personally sponsored the initiative that raised cigarette taxes to finance children's programs, then began pushing another measure to create a universal program of preschool education in California. The massive propaganda campaign, financed with cigarette tax revenue from the first measure, was launched last year just as Reiner began promoting the new measure that would tax high-income Californians about $2.4 billion a year to underwrite preschool...As more details of the public relations and advertising contracts totaling $230 million seep out, their nexus with the initiative drive becomes increasingly obvious. Polling apparently had found little voter support for ramping up preschool education, so the ads would be aimed at changing voters' minds."

Governor Schwarzenegger, increasingly becoming an embarrassment to the state's GOP - a difficult thing to accomplish - heaped praise on the now disgraced Reiner:

"Because of Rob's efforts, California has become a national leader in providing early childhood health and education services for our youngest children and their families."

The state legislature has asked for a complete audit of expenses associated with Reiner's stewardship - specifically advertising and consulting contracts and California's Attorney General Lockyer has referred the matter to the Sacramento County DA.

2006-03-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

Knight Ridder & Contra Costa Times Team Up To Savage Bush Press Conference

March 22, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Consigned to page A12 in Knight Ridder's - marked for fire-sale - Contra Costa Times, this tawdry piece - "Bush Won't Pull Troops Out Of Iraq" - is just another indicator of left-wing media arrogance and faux reporting.

The headline is instructive, the handiwork of - hopefully soon to be departing - Contra Costa Times editor Chris Lopez's staff. Note how the headline drips with a sense of media pique at what it must deem the President's outrageous refusal to take the Fourth Estate's advice...to run in the face of Islamist terror.

The piece, nominally authored by William Douglas but bearing the unmistakable mark of the heavy hand of KR's legend in his own mind - Joe Galloway - is long on opinion and conjecture, but almost bereft of an account of what the President actually said, containing only two abbreviated quotes by Mr. Bush in a presentation that lasted nearly an hour and which spanned over 9,500 words.

The majority of the piece is spent in an adversarial refutation of the President's answers, especially regarding his use of the battle for the Iraqi town of Tal Afar as a metaphor for what is going right in Iraq and how policy and a winning strategy is evolving.

In making the case that Tal Afar is not like other Iraqi cities and therefore can't be useful as a template, Knight Ridder falls back on the media's standard operating method of using undisclosed sources - the elocution in this case being "some military experts" - to refute the President's contention.

The piece is a hatchet job from beginning to end and further punctuates why companies like Knight Ridder and the CC Times are failures both as profit making entities and as news organizations.

2006-03-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

Knight Ridder’s Deadwood Including Contra Costa Times Poised For Fire Sale

March 14, 2006 – Contra Costa County, CA – Contra Costa Times Watch - Well it didn't take McClatchy very long to take out the garbage in the KR sale, did it?

By garbage, we specifically refer to Chris Lopez' and Dan "Jack Daniels" Hatfield's little embarrassment, the Contra Costa Times.

In a period of about 10 years various KR lackeys including these two clowns have taken a nice regional newspaper and turned it into a left-wing harangue machine, thanks guys.

CC Times publisher Jack Armstrong is apparently clueless as the rest of the CC Times’ management on the reasons for placing the paper on the blocks saying, ""the decision [to sell the Times] is not a reflection on us."

Sure Jack, sure...how stupid do you think the new ownership is and exactly who does this sale reflect on if not you and Frick and Frack, your editors?

McClatchy is wisely getting rid of the Times and another 11 newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury - can you say CIA Cocaine Maxine Waters Conspiracy, really fast? - because they are not poised for reasonable and profitable growth.

Now, as we reported here on Monday there is a possibility of the Times being purchased by the Newspaper Guild, a withered arm of the left-wing of the Democrat party.

The financier of that possible deal could be Yucaipa, also known as the folks that want to bring you Al-Gore Television.

Hell, you just can't make this kind of stuff up.

Yucaipa is one of the powers behind the dingy throne of William Jefferson Clinton, a company which has bamboozled CALPERS and the even more easily bamboozle-able CALTERS, the teacher's pension fund out of about$650M in funds that should have been conservatively invested.

We have spent the better part of a year documenting the shrill, anti-American, non-fact based, multicultural BS reporting of KR's CC Times and we are celebrating its demise – in its current guise.

This market has spoken and that is something even lefty fools like Lopez and Hatfield are being forced to swallow.

Some might think it impolite to dance on graves, in this case we are savoring every little moment.

Hey guys don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Sincerely,

The CC Times Watch Staff

2006-03-13T11:18:00.000-08:00

Knight Ridder-McClatchy Newspaper Deal Reveals Ties To Clinton-Gore Financier Yucaipa

March 13, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLinenews.org - The long anticipated sale of troubled newspaper publisher Knight Ridder was announced Sunday, with California based McClatchy Co agreeing to a deal valued at $6.5 billion.

McClatchy immediately announced it will sell off 12 of KR's low-growth potential products which include the San Jose Mercury and the [much maligned here] Contra Costa Times.

The surprise McClatchy offer breaks down to $67.25 a share, of which the San Jose Mercury reports, "$40 of that in cash and the rest in McClatchy shares. The Sacramento-based company is also assuming $2 billion in Knight Ridder debt."

It is rumored that some of the McClatchy spin-offs [which may or may not include the CC Times] - the San Jose Mercury, Philadelphia Inquirer, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Akron Beacon Journal; Grand Forks Herald; Monterey Herald; and Duluth News Tribune are being negotiated for by the Newspaper Guild which is seeking to purchase them on an ESOP [employee financed ownership plan].

Editor & Publisher is reporting that, "The Guild has lined up the Yucaipa Companies to finance a deal to help employees buy nine Knight Ridder papers..." - Source Link.

Yucaipa is a very controversial company, seen as a shadow funder of Bill Clinton and democrat political interests.

On Fox's O'Reilly Factor Clinton pollster Dick Morris said, "Bill Clinton is a senior adviser - a paid adviser - to a company called Yucaipa which recently set up a relationship with a group called the Yucaipa Investment group."

According to reporting done by David Horowitz' Front Page Magazine Bill and Hillary's Teacher Pension Perfidy

"The Yucaipa Corporate Initiatives Fund has already poured millions into Al Gore's new cable channel, Current Television. Gore's venture is headquartered in a tony neighborhood of San Francisco, which certainly doesn't seem to fit the definition of a "lower-income urban" community. Nor is it minority-owned - indeed, all the major investors are white males. (Indeed, by a who's who of major Democratic Party money people - including Joel Hyatt, former Democratic National Committee finance chairman, Rob Glaser of Realnetworks and Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems."

Yucaipa is partially financed by the California PublicEmployee Retirement Fund - CALPERS - to the tune of $500M and the California State Teachers Retirement System - CALSTRS who has committed $150M to the company.

The implications of politicized investments driving former KR newspapers already noted for their liberal shrillness are yet to be fully comprehended.

From the standpoint of independent journalism, at first blush this is a monstrous development.

2006-03-10T06:55:00.000-08:00

Field Poll Demonstrates Hispanic Immigration Radically Changing California's Attitudes On Illegals

March 10, 2006, San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The results of a recently released California Field Poll - carried in the March 9 edition of KR's CC Times - regarding attitudes about illegal immigration [Growing Differences Between Voters And Non Voters About Perceived Impact Of Illegal Immigration] are alarming.

The survey indicates that California is becoming ever more friendly to the presence of illegal Hispanic immigrants and that "friendliness" is primarily driven by the state's burgeoning Hispanic population.

Rejecting such bad news out of hand serves no useful purpose - assuming the data has been properly gathered and processed.

We do find fault with the headline and summary that Field has employed - an emphasis the media seems to have adopted - as this story reverberates throughout the Golden State's press.

We suggest that a more suitable headline might have been - "Sharp Divergence Seen Between Hispanic and non-Hispanic Attitudes On Illegal Immigration."

We say this because the real difference in opinion demonstrated in this survey is not between voters and non-voters, but rather one based upon ethnicity [Caucasian versus Hispanic attitudes] as roughly 2/3 [58%] of Caucasians see illegal immigration as harmful, while only 1 in 5 [19%] of Hispanics see it in that manner.

Wary of polls in general, especially after last weeks phony "Bush popularity falling" CBS fiasco, we wanted the Field organization to address its methodology.

In a telephone interview, Field's Director, Mark DiCamillo responded to our inquiry about the statistical validity of the poll, stating, "the sampling for the Field poll is done by random digit dial which gives in theory all household with a telephone an equal chance of being included ."

He further said that the Field methodology effectively "represents the state in all its forms...all the demographics should represent the state in that methodology."

Since California has such a large population of Hispanics [33%] we wondered how language differences might account for possible skewing of results. Addressing that concern DiCamillo said, "if we run into a household with a language barrier - like a Spanish language barrier - then we call back with a Spanish language interviewer."

Additionally Field further adjusts the raw polling data according to a model based on age, gender and ethnicity along with regional subgroups that comply with known population values.

Mr. DiCamillo was also responsive to our question regarding the number of Hispanic respondents [29%, a slight undersample in our opinion] and the number within that category which were eventually interviewed in Spanish [54%].

Finally on the aspect of Field's track previous record regarding accuracy, their results [predictive] were within their margin of error in 2004 on both the presidential and senatorial races here in California.

So it's obvious - to us anyway - that the results of this survey reveal a political/sociological problem, not a created one which resides in poor sampling algorithms.

California's demographics have changed mightily over the last half century. In 1950 the Hispanic population of California was approximately 3%, today it has grown by 1,100% to approximately 33% and between 1990 and 2000 fully 75% of the State's population growth was due to Hispanic immigration.

It is that demographic which has led to the situation where illegal immigration is becoming less and less negatively charged since the state is being inundated with Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, the overwhelming majority of whom view that question in a unique manner.

That California's attitudes on this topic are radically changing over time is merely reflective of that fact.

Since the very first act that illegal Hispanics [the estimate is at least 12 million nationwide and concentrated in states like California] take when entering the United States is to break its most basic and important tenet - that we are a nation of laws. The entire process therefore undermines the basis of what America stands for and commingles new residency with illegality.

The old media downplays or avoids altogether the law-breaking aspect. They are ideologically driven to euphemize in defense of this class of people, calling them "undocumented" or simply "migrants," in a process that entirely shields the illegals from the true nature of their status.

Noted historian Samuel P. Huntington has addressed the illegal influx from Mexico and Latin America with great insight, the following from his essay, "The Hispanic Challenge."

"The impact of Mexican immigration on the United States becomes evident when one imagines what would happen if Mexican immigration abruptly stopped...The wages of low-income U.S. citizens would improve. Debates over the use of Spanish and whether English should be made the official language of state and national governments would subside. Bilingual education and the controversies it spawns would virtually disappear, as would controversies over welfare and other benefits for immigrants. The debate over whether immigrants pose an economic burden on state and federal governments would be decisively resolved in the negative. The average education and skills of the immigrants continuing to arrive would reach their highest levels in U.S. history. The inflow of immigrants would again become highly diverse, creating increased incentives for all immigrants to learn English and absorb U.S. culture. And most important of all, the possibility of a de facto split between a predominantly Spanish-speaking United States and an English-speaking United States would disappear, and with it, a major potential threat to the country's cultural and political integrity."
In genereal, the media loves polling data - when it agrees with their existing biases - because it tends to reinforce editorial positions and can be done under the guise of news coverage.

Political journalism is a captive of multiculturalism, it is devoted to the proposition that Western culture, norms and traditions must never be found superior to those of other cultures. Newsrooms also enforce a faux type of diversity, in which a Tower of Babel society, hopelessly fractionated along ethnic lines is preferable to one modeled upon traditionalism.

To these people - the anointed as Thomas Sowell calls them - Cinco de Mayo - or wholly concocted ruses like Kwanzaa - should be allotted just as much significance as any traditional American celebration or holiday.

The media also gives great weight to polls because conclusions so reached seem unassailable, demonstrably correct since the data represented is "empirically" based.

In the extant case "the court of public opinion" easily becomes a demagogic tool to lobby for the further relaxion of legal barriers to immigration because the press generally believes that matters of public policy should be decided by the locus of public sentiment, as if the United States was an Athenian democracy and not a republic.

What we find most troubling about the this survey's probing of attitudes towards illegal immigration, is that the data clearly shows that the presence of uncontrolled numbers of immigrants - legal and illegal - has markedly affected the cultural foundation in a negative manner and that the damage done being to the traditional bedrock is accelerating.

©'1999-2006 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2006-03-04T16:59:00.001-08:00

2006-03-04T16:59:00.000-08:00

AP Forced To Print Retraction On Phony "Bush Lied On New Orlean's Levee" Story

At least AP had the decency to issue the below "clarification" of their misreporting on the "secret" video briefing of Bush before Katrina. KR should follow suit since it ran with the story in the same manner, as we pointed out, if not Mr. Lopez should take it upon himself to print a retraction in the CC Times since they helped feed this erroneous story.

“In a March 1 story, The Associated Press reported that federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees in New Orleans, citing confidential video footage of an Aug. 28 briefing among U.S. officials.

“The Army Corps of Engineers considers a breach a hole developing in a levee rather than an overrun. The story should have made clear that Bush was warned about floodwaters overrunning the levees, rather than the levees breaking.

“The day before the storm hit, Bush was told there were grave concerns that the levees could be overrun. It wasn't until the next morning, as the storm was hitting, that Michael Brown, then head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Bush had inquired about reports of breaches. Bush did not participate in that briefing.”

2006-03-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

CC Times' Editor Lopez Responds

March 2, 2006 – San Francisco, CA – Contra Costa Times Watch - We took Chris Lopez, managing editor of Knight Ridder’s San Francisco Bay Area newspaper the Contra Costa Times, to task on his weblog on Wednesday March 1.

“The CC Times carried CBS' cooked poll of Bush popularity on page 10 today.

Written by KR's William Douglas, the story uncritically accepts CBS' data, when even CBS in a pdf file accompanying the poll indicates that it oversampled Democrats.
Only 279 Republicans were sampled in the poll and well over 400 Democrats.
This is of course not surprising since CBS has been out to "get" Bush since he took office.

Some of you might remember the Dan Rather, Mary Mapes lie regarding President Bush's military service that they floated just prior to the election.
That little sortie got both of them fired.

This poll is cut of the same cloth and Mr. Lopez should be ashamed to have included this propaganda piece in today's edition.

The evidence continues to mount Mr. Lopez, come clean with your readers and fess up to the bias.

Posted by: cctimeswatch | March 01, 2006 at 10:47 AM”

[Note our expanded critique of this matter may be viewed below in our Wednesday filing. By way of clarification, Contra Costa Times Watch - www.cctimeswatch.blogspot.com - has been actively documenting media bias on the part of the Times.]

To his credit, Mr. Lopez responded as follows:

“This is a legitimate point and valid criticism of the CBS poll that Knight Ridder Washington used to base a story around. I'm generally leary of polls, and this is one reason why: the sampling, who was sampled, and how a question was asked, can shade the results. Plus, I agree with the President's thinking that he can't worry about public polling. There was a reference to Richard Nixon in the story. It reminded me of my father, who loved Richard Nixon, thought he was the best president, short of Eisenhower, this country has had, and defended Nixon to his death. My dad's thinking, and values, always influenced me. More so than any other person I've known or been around. President Bush's stock answer on not worrying about polling data is the same of any top leader, myself included. I can't worry about my popularity. I can control how I conduct myself and I control the decisions I make, and I won't make decisions soley because it'll make me popular. In fact, I make many decisions that I know will be unpopular, but I make them because I think they're the best for the cause as a whole. I can't control what people think of me, but can only attempt to put my best foot forward each and every day, treat people honestly and respectfully and let the chips fall where they may. Cliche? Sure, but it's true. It's the same thing I preach to our newsroom. Let's work honestly and intelligently, let's work hard, let's perform to the best of our abilities. We're judged every day by the newspaper we produce. The great thing is we get to create something every day, and try to improve on what we did the day before. In this business, you're only as good as the newspaper you're producing tomorrow. As for my bias, I have many. They're trivial, though. I like vanilla ice cream. I prefer Bud Light. I like my steak well-done. That type of stuff. Sorry for such a long-winded post. I have a few extra minutes on my hands today, I guess.”

CC Times Watch response:

First, thanks for responding.

The use of the CBS poll by the CC Times is part of a pattern of bias which a critical reader could have gleaned over just the last 5 or 6 days.

1. The Times has refused to cover, though many articles were available, on the torture killing of Illan Halimi in France by an Islamist gang. I discussed this with one of your editors on Friday 2./24 of last week and he gave the usual reasons "not enough room," "short deadlines," "hundreds of [wire service] stories," to go through.

He said he would try to get in the Saturday edition, of course it never appeared.

Had Mr. Halimi, as we noted in CC Times Watch below, been instead a Muslim, tortured to death by Christians or an African American hanged by Southern Caucasians, you and I both know it would have been your lead story.

Had it even been a Quran, desecrated by Guantanimo detention center guards it would have made the paper.

We know that because the CC Times participated in the circulation of the false story floated by Michael Isikoff over that very same allegation last year.

2. Then there is the matter of the phony CBS poll which the CC Times carried on page A10 yesterday and which you responded to in this forum.

That response while appreciated doesn't nearly go far enough to address the point in question.

We are not talking about your preference for vanilla ice cream or lite beer, that seems a rather cavalier response, with all due respect.

There was no retraction, no explanation, no acknowledgment of the mistaken use of what can only be characterized as CBS propaganda in Wednesday's edition and our criticism is not just over non-scientific basis used to assemble that poll - criticism of CBS - our question lies in why the CC Times used it at all?

To an outside observer the answer lies in the Times' penchant for bashing the president whenever it can, using whatever tools might be available.

3. Offering further evidence in support of the bias charge let us examine the article leading the Nation & World section today March 2, top of the fold, page A12 - "Report says Bush warned about Katrina."

In and of itself the fact that the president was warned about the possible damage that a category 4 or 5 storm could cause might bring a response of..."well duh."

But the real allegation that KR reporters Seth Borenstein and William Douglass make [this piece is entirely based on an AP story, drawing similar unsupported conclusions] here is that the president was warned about potential ”breaching” of New Orleans levees before the storm hit landfall.

Since Bush stated afterwards that he was not warned about the levees being breached the implication here is that he was not only detached from the potential threat of damage but that he lied about it afterwards.

Yet neither your reporters nor the AP staff who cranked this non-story out offer any proof, except that at one point Bush is told during these meetings that the levees might be "topped"

Again "duh."

“Topped” means that wind action might blow water over the top of the levees, something not in question and something far different than levees failing or being “breached.”

It might seem a technical point but it goes to the heart of our charges that KR and the CC Times intentionally sets these things up to present the president in the worst possible light.

Since both KR and AP reporters are in possession of video tapes of these briefings and have prepared transcripts, why haven’t these been made available so that your readers can see if your charges are substantive or even true?

Our guess is that those tapes and transcripts do not support the overall charge being made and that is why they have not been made available to a skeptical public.
We are therefore expected to accept on their face KR’s implication that Bush was not only asleep at the switch but that he lied afterward.

Mr. Lopez that is three instances in less than a week, you should attend to - and if need be exert more control over - your employees criteria for news selection, with a particular eye towards uncritically accepting articles of dubious character and then touting them with incendiary headlines.

People are out here who have knowledge of the games that are being played here and we are not going away.

We personally want to thank you for responding however, that is a reasonable prelude to dialogue.

2006-03-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

CC Times Runs With Cooked CBS Poll

On page A10 of its March 1 edition, the CC Times carried a piece by KR hack William Douglass built around CBS polling data that has been thoroughly discredited.

Douglas' story uncritically accepts that data, when even CBS in a pdf file accompanying the poll, indicates that it oversampled Democrats.

CBS admits that their polling universe contained 409 Democratic respondents versus only 272 Republican respondents.

This is of course not surprising since CBS has been out to "get" Bush since he took office.

Some of might remember that just prior to the November 2004 election Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes floated a specious "expose" regarding President Bush's Vietnam era military service that was based on forged documents, documents which both of them knew were suspect.

That little sortie got Mapes fired and Rather "reassigned."

This poll is cut of the same cloth and Mr. Lopez should be ashamed to have included this propaganda piece in today's edition.

The evidence continues to mount Mr. Lopez, come clean with your readers and fess up to the bias.

2006-02-27T08:48:00.000-08:00

Coverup Of Muslim Torture Killing Of French Jew Continues

[Editor's note: The CC Times has a clearly defined agenda which includes spiking stories not in accord with the intellectual straightjacket called multiculturalism, which - we must presume according to the dictates of the editor, Mr. Lopez - has been imposed on its newsroom, and damn the readers - every aspect of CC Times coverage is seen through that lens, read on.

We spoke to KR marionette the CC Times over the weekend. Their representative gave all the usual reasons for not running this story and hinted that it might appear in the Saturday edition.

No dice. The story simply does not exist as far as the CC Times is concerned. Please read on, what we are saying about the LA Times and the MSM in general certainly applies to Knight Ridder and its plaything, the Contra Costa Times.]

February 27, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews - The Halimi cover-up continues - in the face of 100,000 Parisian protesters on Sunday - finding the media guilty of attempting to manipulate the story.

Most U.S. newspapers buried the death of Mr. Halimi if they carried it at all. Now they are attempting to defuse it, acting as multicultural ombudsmen for the Islamists who perpetrated this outrage.

Note to the liars at the Associated Press, money was not the object of this kidnapping, the motivating force is exactly the same as what drove Hitler - AP can't handle the truth, neither can the LA Times whose Sunday piece concluded:

"Rather than a premeditated anti-Semitic murder, it seems a more complex result of dysfunction in the narrow world of thug culture: a poisonous mentality that designates Jews as enemies along with other "outsiders," according to investigators and other observers."

The only reason Mr. Halimi was selected was because he was a Jew.

The leader of the gang - "The Barbarians" - Youssouf Fofana was born in France and attended college there. He is not the stereotype that the liberal press wants you to believe, a down-and-out North African immigrant with no future stuck in a seething French Muslim ghetto and ignorant of Western ways.

Youssouf was also a well-known Islamist. Acquaintances referred to him as a "devout Muslim" who often lectured others in a manner they characterized as "preaching." Fofana subscribed to the blood-libel myths associated with anti-Semitism including the belief that all Jews are rich.

Would AP and the LA Times be expending such efforts to parse, shuffle and dissemble if the victim had been a Muslim killed by Christians or an African American lynched by a Southern gang?

When the truth is inconsistent with the predisposition of the MSM they lie - they did this with the French Muslim riots in November, they did so only a few weeks ago refusing to lay out how relatively benign cartoons about Mohammed were manipulated into tinder for Muslim fury and that is what now is happening when they tell you that the grisly torture death of Ilan Halimi was not the result of Islamist hate.

One must truly wonder over the Bizaro-world that American journalism has become when the correct analysis on Halimi comes from the likes of the French Communist newspaper, "Liberation" as translated here by Beila Rabinowitz:

"The whole nature of this affair - the combination of gangland criminality with exceptional sadism and a brute anti-Semitic instinct that equates Jews and money - gives it an extraordinary character that inspires both revulsion and dread."

The mind reels...

©1999-2006 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2006-02-24T07:28:00.000-08:00

Torture Death Of French Jew By Muslim Gang Produces Collective Yawn By MSM

[Editor's note: Mr. Lopez, why is the CC Times not running this story?]

February 24, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - If Ilan Halimi – the Jewish cell phone salesman who was tortured to death in France by Muslim thugs - was instead a Quran and soiled by a GTMO detention center guard, tens of thousands of Muslims worldwide would now be burning flags and chanting "Death to America."

Halimi's death was horrific.

Over a period of three weeks his captors stabbed him countless times, cut off his ears and fingers, used some type of corrosive liquid on him and repeatedly burned him.

The above manifest is assembled from leaks made by French officials, we may thankfully never know the full extent of the violence that Halimi endured.

On February 11 he was dumped like refuse on a street in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, France still alive but died subsequently on the way to the hospital.

Police in attendance said that 80% of his body “had been butchered."

The event has been hush-hushed by the French government and essentially covered up by the American press, with a few exceptions like the NY Sun, which is by no means part of the liberal reportorial establishment.

The New York Times placed its skimpy coverage deep within its Thursday internet edition. In order to find it, one had to go to International news, sub-heading European news and even then it was the fourth item down on the page.

The story the Times did cover was sanitized, glossing over the brutality of the crime, and its obvious anti-Semitic motivation. The piece instead suggested that the motivation for killing Halimi was ransom not religious hatred.

The New York Sun’s coverage which was extensive, claimed that a police source stated that, "This behavior was very different from what is usually expected from abductors motivated by greed."

Given the degree of tumult that the Muslim umma is these days, had the situation been reversed - with a Muslim in Halimi’s place - this would have been the story of the year and arguably the tinder for World War III.

That is not hyperbole.

In discussing this incident with a colleague who had just participated in a discussion of these events at the Nixon Center in DC, they pointed out the Muslims simply "live in a different world."

We heartily concur.

Muslims live in a world that is frozen in pre-Medieval hatred, superstition and lemming like mob violence. It is a world stripped of the thousand years of refinement that Western civilization has produced.

The Muslim religion is steeped in dark conspiracies and blood libels of the type that justify the extravagantly cruel treatment of a man simply because he is Jewish.

Our ossified mainstream press is displaying signs of a complete mental breakdown over these culture-clash issues, showing themselves afraid of even telling the story, let alone interpreting it.

©1999-2006 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2006-02-17T15:51:00.000-08:00

Where Is The Press' Curiosity Over The Saddam Tapes?

[Editor's note: Where is Chris Lopez' and Knight Ridder's curiosity on this matter?]

February 17, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - With opinions already galvanized over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, the limited airing of video tape recordings of discussions between the dictator and his henchmen has produced nothing but a yawn by the public and arguably less in the media.

If similar evidence - conclusively proving the non-existence of such programs and/or a non-threatening Saddam - had become available one might suspect that the main stream opinion maker's attitudes would be markedly different.

That question of course bears on the topic of media bias, the existence of which - at this late date - is a proven fact, undeniable and as such not the real story here.

The tapes themselves are not anomalous; they are but a small sampling of a mountain of evidence - bearing on the wmd question - that fell into American hands as a result of the ousting of Saddam.

Peter Hoekstra [R, MI] the chair of the House Intelligence Committee has examined the tapes and - having had their authenticity verified by U.S. intelligence - found them supportive of Western intelligence pre-war wmd claims.

Hoekstra, like others is baffled by the seeming indifference towards this evidentiary material by the Bush administration:

"I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated."

Hoekstra has personally debriefed George Sada a former Iraqi Air Force general who claims that the artifacts of Saddam's wmd program were airlifted to Syria in 2002 in the run-up to operation Iraqi Freedom.

"Right now, it's not my job to investigate the specific claims. We are doing this a little with Sada. But we still don't fully understand what happened in Iraq three years after the invasion, three years after we control the country. There are enough people coming to the committee, Sada is not the only one, saying, 'you really ought to look under this rock.' This gives me cause to take up the issue again."

Sada's assertions aside, the 12 hours of tapes [recorded in the mid 1990s] in question, of which only a small part has been so far aired by ABC, should be chilling enough to whet curiosity over the matter.

The tapes were leaked by Bill Tierney, an FBI translator and also a member of a member of a UN inspection team. Tierney states, "Because of my experience being in the inspections and being in the military, I knew the significance of these tapes when I heard them."

While in power Saddam used a variety of recording devices to archive important discussions with his advisors and the tapes in question are part of that record keeping effort.

Though only representative of a very small part of the huge but still untranslated evidence currently languishing in U.S. hands, the tape clearly shows Saddam's intent, in a passage he says:

"Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans a long time before Aug. 2 and told the British as well...that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction...In the future, what would prevent a booby-trapped car causing a nuclear explosion in Washington or a germ or a chemical one?"

Saddam seems then to indicate that the evidentiary trail which would serve to implicate Iraq would be cloaked, possibly by handing-off the wmd to a third party, let's speculate...al-Qaeda:

"This is coming, this story is coming...but not from Iraq."

As tempting and damning as such revelations are, officials in the deeply conflicted intelligence agencies are assuming a public attitude of being non-plussed, the spokesman from the CIA stating:

"Intelligence community analysts from the CIA, and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating, from a historical perspective the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their post-war analysis of Iraq's weapons programs nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey group report."

Charles Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group which was charged with researching Saddam's wmd programs, says the tapes indicate a consistent pattern of deception and intent to develop wmds, "What they do is support the conclusion in the report, which we made in the last couple of years, that the regime had the intention of building and rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted."

The entire content of the tapes are going to be supposedly revealed this weekend during an "Intelligence Conference" taking place this weekend in Virginia.

This event is being organized by ABC radio personality John Batchelor among others.

Controversy has shrouded the conference since its inception because one of its primary movers, John Loftus - who was one of the conduits of the tapes in question here - is [rightly] perceived as being less than reliable and given to conspiratorial speculation.

Below is a translated section of the tapes. Hussein Kamal is Saddam's late son-in-law who fled the country [defecting to Jordan, along with his brother Saddam Kamal] shortly after this conversation took place. They were both lured back - on the promise of forgiveness - to Iraq in 1997 by Saddam's son Uday whereupon they were killed in a firefight on Saddam's orders.

Saddam Hussein: Lieutenant General Hussein

Hussein Kamal: "Thank you, sir.

Sir, I would not be speaking so openly if it were not for your excellency's and Mr. Tariq's clarification and statement that we produced biological weapons.

We did not reveal all that we have. On the subject of missiles, they can bring up three issues with us now, in one year or in two years' time. They are undeclared one of them being the location. Secondly, they don't know about our work in the domain of missiles. Sir, this is my work and I know it very well. I started it a long time ago, and it is not easy. The issues are more dangerous, a lot more dangerous than what they came to know. I am explaining to your excellency, sir.

With regard to the issue of the chemical, sir, which we assume that they have not raised, and our belief that the sole problem is that of the biological weapons. No, sir. I think they have detailed information about the missiles, and if they want to bring them up, they will as I said because we did not complete. In the chemical, sir, they have a problem far bigger than the biological, bigger than the biological.

Not the type of the weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct. They don't know any of this. We did not say we used them on Iran. We did not reveal the volume of the chemical weapons that we had produced. We did not reveal the type of the chemical weapons. We did not reveal the truth about the volume of the imported materials. Therefore sir, if they want to create problems, I see that our argument now is that biological is everything. No, sir, I disagree and I have to be candid in front of your Excellency. I substantially disagree on this issue. They want it item by item. For the time being, they are not raising all of them with us and we did not declare. I will come back, sir, to the question of whether is it better for us to declare or to stay? In the nuclear, sir, in the biological, we also disagree with them. Not the 17 tons, no. We have a disagreement which is essential and known. We know it ourselves.

All this, sir, and we have some teams working; one team working in the same direction, but the other team does not know. How come they [the inspectors] don't know - if they want to? There is what leads to knowledge. There are materials we have imported from America by volume. We have imported from Europe by volume.

As for the nuclear, we say we have disclosed everything but no. We have undeclared problems in nuclear as well, and I believe that they know. There are teams working with no one knowing about some of them.

Sir, I regret that I am speaking so candidly but although everything has ended, if they find out. No, sir, they didn't know, frankly speaking not all the methods, not all the means, not all the scientists and not all the places. Yes, some of the activities have been uncovered but so that you know, sir, when they say biological is the issue, no sir, the biological is the least [important]; I am sorry to say it is the most futile of the problems. OK, the 17 tons is no problem but thousands of tons here and thousands of tons there. Where did they go? How were they manufactured? And how were they used? Sir, we really have to be frank, so that the resolution that comes is not restricted to the biological and the next day the missiles and then the nuclear the next day and then the next day and the next day.

I go back to the question of whether we should reveal everything or continue to be silent. Sir, since the meeting has taken this direction, I would say it is in our interest not to reveal. Not just out of fear of disclosing the technology we achieved, or to hide it for future work. No. The game has gone on for too long. And now it has become clear to many officials of countries that are coerced to work with America"

2006-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

Reflections On San Francisco Walk For Life

By Camille Giglio

January 24, 2006 – San Francisco, CA – Contra Costa Times Watch - The 10,000 plus attendees at the Second Annual S.F. Walk for Life, remembrance of 33 years of Roe v Wade were treated to a spectacular, bright sunny day and rousing pep talks. About 10 of us met at the Pleasant Hill BART station to go to the Rally. I walked through all 9 cars looking for pro life friends. Was I surprised to discover that about half the occupants of the train were headed for the Rally. What a wonderful way to start off the day.

Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, formerly of USF’s Ignatius Institute and now with Ave Maria University came from Florida to present the Gianna Mola Award to Mr. Jim Holman,

Jim, owner and publisher of a string of newspapers lead by the San Diego Reader and S.F. Faith, has donated much of his financial resources to supporting the Pro Life Movement and pregnancy counseling centers. Most recently he provided the major funding for the 2005 Parental Notification Initiative known as Parents Right to Know,

Though his name may not be well recognized amongst pro life people, especially in Northern California, he is feared by the pro aborts who have labeled him a very dangerous man. They understand how close the PRK initiative came to winning and that when it appears on the ballot again this Fall it may very well win. Their fear is that a win for parent’s right to be informed of their minor daughter’s abortion will go far to returning authority and the right of guidance over children back
to the parents and away from Planned Parenthood’s clutches.

Serrin Foster, head of Feminists for Life, and Carol Crossed, California Director of Democrats for Life. This group stirred up some controversy earlier last year when in declaring their pro life opposition to their Party’s Pro Abort platform, came out in favor of contraceptives for young people. They have since changed their mission
statement and eliminated that goal. Their mission does still reflect much of the Democrat Party belief in big government including free pregnancy services, maternity training, etc, but they appear to be determined to make inroads regarding the strong pro abortion stand of the Democrat Party.

Star Parker, Prior to her involvement in social activism, was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine.

The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith-based and free market alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

As a social policy consultant, Star Parker gives regular testimony before the United States Congress, and is a national expert on major television and radio shows across the country. Currently, Star is a regular commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. She has debated Jesse Jackson on BET; fought for school choice on Larry King Live; and defended welfare reform on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

And last, but not least, a very dynamic Pastor Clenard Childress, New Jersey, Director of LEARN - Life Education and Resources Network. He used the words of Martin Luther King as the basis for his spirited pro life talk, delivered to a very enthusiastic assembly.

Knowledgeable sources have said that there may have been about 50 pro abort protestors on hand. Though noisy they were rather pathetic in dress, appearance and the robotic shouting of pro abort phrases

At one point early in our Walk from Justin Herman Plaza to the Marina Green, about a 2.5 mile walk, we were temporarily halted while the police cleared our path. It seems that San Francisco’s own state Assemblyman Mark Leno and a city Councilwoman from the East Bay, had attempted to block our route with a counter demonstration.

Congratulations are in order to the organizers of the Walk, the San Francisco Police Department for their assistance in keeping the peace, representation by the religious community and to the thousands of mothers and dads armed with babies and strollers who stood for life in the arena of what the pro aborts had always thought was their home base, San Francisco.

2006-01-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Walk For Life - A Photo Essay

[Editor's note: The CC Times' coverage of the SF Walk For Life was atrocious, for those of you who want to know what really happened, please read on.]
January 22, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - The second annual Walk For Life held in San Francisco on Saturday was a huge success - despite inclement weather - with well over 10,000 in attendance. This year's effort, celebrated on the 33rd anniversary of the tragic Roe v Wade decision, was conducted with almost military precision.

Busses streamed in from Catholic parishes all over the state and the publicity-friendliness of the event's choreography was evident. Largely absent from this year's - belly of the beast show of force - were the rag-tag collection of hand made placards seen last year. In their place were ten thousand professionally printed signs, each featuring the phrase:

"Women deserve better than abortion."

Last year's march was victimized by a large contingent of anarchists, socialists, militant gays and numerous examples of San Fran's truly whacked out, who blocked the march at various key points.

Not so this year, the counter-protesters were few in number, disorganized and generally dispirited, despite what the SF Chronicle and similar old-media sources reported.

The Forces of Light

Reciting the Rosary - "The third joyful mystery the Nativity of our Lord..."

Two media savvy Franciscans, Catholic clerics were out in force.

The Forces of Darkness

San Francisco is so urbane and intellectual.

Look for the union label.

Surprisingly, most of the counter-protesters did not vote for Mr. Bush

The Socialist Worker's Newspaper hawker covered his face when I snapped this photo, he knows all of these images are going straight to Dick Cheney and the NSA.

Marx's Communist Manifesto is clearly evident

These gals are saying more than they think.

The left seems to be pro-choice on the issue of cop killers

We are not sure exactly what this gentleman's garb was all about, but he kept asking "Have you seen Buster Keaton?"

This woman really means it, her coat, glasses even her bumper stickers are certified rain forest friendly and were produced by indigenous Maori indians who are paid a living wage.

One of the head honchos [baseball cap] explaining to a dozen disinterested slackers why the counter-protest was a bust. He was explaining to this little group that "the Christians have co-opted our message and tactics, but we have the numbers."

The forces of darkness may normally have the numbers in San Francisco, but they certainly did not yesterday. These people had their tails between their legs as they left the event. They knew who won the PR contest, although from what I have read this morning, the old-media is unwilling to tell that story.

Herb was never more correct, there is no place like San Francisco.
©1999-2006 William A. Mayer, all rights reserved.

2006-01-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

John Murtha, Another Kerry Bandaid Warrior

By Marc Morano and Randy Hall

[Editor's note, speaking of that fat, lying clown Jack Murtha...it seems that his cover has been blown. Of course the main stream press saw no interest whatsoever in pursuing the rumors regarding Murtha's military record but that is par for the course. Let it be understood also that Murtha barely escaped - by lying - the Fed net in the ABSCAM case, which is also detailed in the below report by CNS News.]

January 15, 2005 - Washington, DC - PipeLineNews via CNS News - Having ascended to the national stage as one of the most vocal critics of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha has long downplayed the controversy and the bitterness surrounding the two Purple Hearts he was awarded for military service in Vietnam.

Murtha is a retired marine and was the first Vietnam combat veteran elected to Congress. Since 1967, there have been at least three different accounts of the injuries that purportedly earned Murtha his Purple Hearts. Those accounts also appear to conflict with the limited military records that are available, and Murtha has thus far refused to release his own military records.

A Cybercast News Service investigation also reveals that one of Murtha's former Democratic congressional colleagues and a fellow decorated Vietnam veteran, Don Bailey of Pennsylvania, alleges that Murtha admitted during an emotional conversation on the floor of the U.S. House in the early 1980s that he did not deserve his Purple Hearts...

2006-01-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

From National Review's Jonathan Adler - Knight Ridder (Again)

January 9, 2006 - Washington, DC - ContraCostaTimes Watch - Just a little more evidence of Kr's disregard for the truth...and how it's getting caught.

"Let me echo Ed's comments Thursday's Knight Ridder article by Stephen Henderson and Howard Mintz. The language of the article is exceedingly misleading. A review of a judge's written opinions alone — which, by definition, represent a fraction of the cases in which the judge has participated — cannot justify the statement that Alito has "almost never found a government search unconstitutional." Henderson knows this — he and I had a long phone conversation on Wednesday about the problems in his earlier analysis and his inaccurate characterizations of his findings in his C-Span interview (discussed here). It is one thing to say the Alito's tends to support the police over criminal defendants (although this too is of little probative value without examining the extent to which his approach is consistent with prevailing law), but something else entirely to say Alito has "almost never" voted a given way based upon an unrepresentative sample of his opinions. Again, I made these points to Henderson when he called me Wednesday, but it does not seem to have had much of an effect."

Of course it doesn't make much of an impact because KR is driven by ideology and only gives lip service to the concept of journalism.

That just might be one of the reason's that KR's profits are falling faster than Jack Murtha's celebrity.

2006-01-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

CC Times' War Against DeLay Continues

January 9, 2006 – Walnut Creek, CA – CC Times Watch - Really the headline in the Sunday CC Times says it all, "DeLay out as Leader for good."

One way to assess the relative degree for which a headline might be considered inflamatory is to examine how the same article is handled in other newspapers, or better yet the newspaper's affiliates.

The following are Knight Ridder's top newspapers, in terms of circulation:

Miami Herald, "Top GOP roles shift as DeLay quits post."

San Jose Mercury News, "Rep. DeLay abandons bid to keep GOP leadership."

The Philadelphia Inquirer, "DeLay won't return to leadership post."

Kansas City Star,"DeLay’s exit leaves void, opportunity."

Fort Worth Star Telegraph, "DeLay ends bid to regain GOP post."

Not one of KR's top 5 saw fit to run a headline as obviously editorial in nature as did the Times. All simply stated the obvious, that Mr. DeLay was not going to run for Majority Leader again, even when Ronnie Earl's vicious political prosecution of DeLay ends in failure.

Whomever wrote this headline needs to be called on the carpet, one can almost see the glee with which it was twisted into barely disguised editorialism.

Why not complete the farce and include an image?

Knight Ridder remains all too predictable, there is seldom if ever any clarification or framing of any issue when it comes to conservatives or the GOP, that is why this newspaper refrains from detailing the abjectly political nature of the persecution of Tom DeLay by an out of control political hack - Ronnie Earle...no mention of the bizarre use of multiple grand juries to get the DeLay indictment, the way some of the charges have already been slapped down and of course no mention of coordination between the DNC and Earle making the prosecution a certainty.

Examples of such blatant bias are daily occurences in the CC Times and the responsibility for such rests on the shoulders of the editor, Mr. Lopez, his reporters and Mr. Hatfield the editorial editor, who are fooling no one.

Item: For some reason the follwing information was missed by Mr. Lopez' leftist assault weapon.

Culture Of Corruption Update - Democrat Senators In Receipt Of Jack Abramoff Money

January 9, 2006 - Washington, DC - PipeLineNews.org - Clearly this is a GOP scandal, right Mr. Lopez, right Mr. Hatfield?

• Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) - at least - $22,500
• Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) - at least - $6,500
• Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) - at least - $1,250
• Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) - at least - $2,000
• Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) - at least - $20,250
• Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) - at least - $21,765
• Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) - at least - $7,500
• Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) - at least - $12,950
• Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) - at least - $8,000
• Senator Jon Corzine (D-NJ) - at least - $7,500
• Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) - at least - $14,792
• Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) - at least - $79,300
• Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) - at least - $14,000
• Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) - at least - $2,000
• Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) - at least - $1,250
• Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) - at least - $45,750
• Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) - at least - $9,000
• Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT) - at least - $2,000
• Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) - at least - $14,250
• Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) - at least - $3,300
• Senator John Kerry (D-MA) - at least - $98,550
• Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) - at least - $28,000
• Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) - at least - $4,000
• Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) - at least - $6,000
• Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) - at least - $29,830
• Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) Received At Least $14,891
• Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) - at least - $10,550
• Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) - at least - $78,991
• Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) - at least - $20,168
• Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) Received At Least $5,200
• Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) - at least - $7,500
• Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) - at least - $2,300
• Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) - at least - $3,500
• Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) - at least - $68,941
• Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV) - at least - $4,000
• Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) - at least - $4,500
• Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) - at least - $4,300
• Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) - at least - $29,550
• Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) - at least - $6,250
• Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) - at least - $6,250

©1999-2006 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2005-12-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

No Time For Democracy – CC Times’ News Blackout On Successful Iraqi Elections

[Editor’s note: some of the following was included in a response to communication from our friends at MoveOn.org. We wanted to incorporate it into this piece since it was so relevant to the item at hand.]

December 16, 2005 – Walnut Creek, CA – CC Times Watch - We find it particularly instructive that on the day that 11 million Iraqi's risked their lives to vote in the nation's first parliamentary elections, that the George Soros funded MoveOn.org bund saw fit to play into the KnightRidder/CC Times' anti-war bias with its imported rent-a-mob media stunt.

MoveOn’s bias and links to old-line Stalinist groups like International ANSWER are obvious, though seldom if ever mentioned in main-stream media accounts of their antics.

However, offered in evidence of KR/CC Times’ anti-war bias we look at today’s diminutive, essentially non coverage of the great news coming from Iraq.

Dominating the CC Times’ lead page are the Anderson murder case, a celebrity car crash story, another boo-hoo minorities pay higher mortgages item and a simply huge gas price article with the obligatory multicultural picture, this one of a chap named Mohammed Ali…oh and a mere 6 column inch front-page item devoted to yesterday’s election in Iraq.

As the Media Research Center has irrefutably proven No End To Defeatism on Iraq War over the last 3 months the American press’ negative coverage of the war on terror has increased, in that sense the Times and Knight Ridder are just running with the pack, though in the spirit of full disclosure, KR oft times is the lead doggie in that activity.

Brief Perspective

Three and a half years ago both Iraq and Afghanistan were ruled by brutal dictatorial regimes. Afghanistan by an Islamist caliphate whose record of Islamofascist abuses rivals that of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

Iraq operated under the yoke of Saddam, a crazed megalomaniac who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, attempted to assassinate former president George Herbert Walker Bush, supported and funded terrorism and had ongoing WMD research programs at the time of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

His intelligence agency met with 911 planner Mohammed Atta in Germany previous to the September attacks and gave shelter to al-Qaeda' number two in command, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Northern Iraq, Saddam also had extensive ties with Sudan during the time that bin-Laden ran his terror network from that country.

Immediately after the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Dept. of Energy’s nuclear team in an emergency operation removed 2 tons of low grade enriched uranium from Iraq.

What interest might Saddam have had in stockpiling such a large amount of uranium except as the basis of further research on the construction of nuclear weapons? [Of note, Iraq's nuclear power facility at Osirak was destroyed by the Israelis in June of 1981 because it was deemed at the time to have been used for nuclear weapons research by Saddam].

Of course the CC Times covered that operation and reported that news at the top of the fold on its front page, in 126 pt type.

[NOT!]

How quickly we forget…

America had a nationwide referendum on the war almost exactly a year ago it was called the 2004 presidential election. In that, the only poll that counts, the Democrat/MoveOn.org and KR/CC Times’ surrender monkeys were soundly defeated.

We are winning the war on terror, winning in Iraq and are now winning the PR battle.

The hard-left/Islamist apologist’s, the anti-American defeatists, the Bush-haters and people like CC Times Editor Mr. Chris Lopez – who seems to have a mixture of such sentiment running though his veins - attempts to drag this country down will be defeated.

2005-12-15T20:36:00.000-08:00

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Questions
By - Camille Giglio, YVRW Legislative Assistant

December 15, 2005 – Walnut Creek, CA – CC Times Watch - Today’s front page carries an article on President George Bush’s most recent speech about Iraq entitled “Bush says Iraq intelligence was wrong, war is right.”

The report is fairly up-front and positive, at least as far as the front page goes. However on page 13, over the top of the continuing report and extending across four columns of space is a photo of 27 people supposedly standing in front of Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher’s (D-CA) office protesting the war. The group, identified as representing MoveOn.org is supposedly delivering a petition to Tauscher protesting the war.

This is the use of imagery as an editorial tool.

Not content with merely covering the President’s speech the management decision was made to underline Knight Ridder/CC Times’ position against the war by running the photo.

We also learn that in KR/CC Times’ opinion that 27 people is sufficient critical mass to guarantee the presence of a staff photographer and subsequent publication of the photo.

We will remember that standard and employ it at a later time.

No explanation accompanies the photo, no identification of anyone in the photo is provided so we have no idea whether those pictured are local or – as we suspect - part of a MoveOn.org/George Soros rent-a-mob.

While one photo might be worth a thousand words, this one raises a thousand questions, all of them going to the heart of our allegation of leftwing/anti-Bush media bias on the part of the Contra Costa Times.

Why should we assume that any of these 27 people are even residents of Ms. Tauscher’s District?

We have no way of knowing anything about them. For all we know they were asked by the Congresswoman to stand in front of her office. The photo does not even show any identifying landmarks as to whether they are in fact, in front of her office or not.

We suggest that you take a few moments and call Chris Lopez, editor of the Times and register your disappointment at this clear violation of trust of the public’s right to know - 925.977.8406

Bias as a mental illness.

We also take a note from today’s CC Times’ online section called “California Healthline” which carries a report about a meeting of mental health officials. This group is advancing a hypothesis that bias can possibly be a form of mental illness. It is being offered of course as a tool, a multicultural sledgehammer to socially stigmatize people who are presumed to carry a prejudice against protected groups, homosexuals, racial groups, etc.

But, how about if we use such logic against those displaying media bias?

Maybe Mr. Lopez and the reporters who engage in such constant bias really need our pity, understanding and possibly some quality couch time with a professional.

2005-12-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Democracy Comes To Iraq, Bush Vindicated

December 15, 2005 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - This is the day the Democrats feared most, well let me rephrase that, after the results of the November 2004 U.S. Presidential election, this is the day that Democrats, the enemies of liberty, the liberal press and the left feared most.

As to the liberal press, the latest AP headline reads - "Violence continues as Iraqis begin voting."

There is a term for that - leftist bullshit.

The level of turnout in the Iraq parliamentary elections has been stunning. Approximately 80% of the nation's 15 million eligible voters braved Islamist thugs to choose democracy. The turnout was so overwhelming that polling places had to be kept open for an additional hour so that the throngs of those casting ballots could be accommodated.

They risked their lives to proclaim that they would rather live free or die.

Throughout the country over 100,000 Iraqi security forces in conjunction with the United States Coalition [the coalition of those un-bribed by the Saddam/UN oil deal] guaranteed that the polling places would be unmolested.

As we go to press here only 11 incidents were reported in the entire nation, most of them minor.

How did this happen?

How was the United States, the UK and our new allies in Europe able to in a few short years go from the dictatorial megalomaniac Saddam to an orderly democratic election?

The answer lies with George W. Bush who heeded the call to greatness which was thrust upon him on September 11, 2001.

That is the short story, and that is where we will leave it for today...

2005-12-03T08:49:00.000-08:00

News The CC Times Avoids - Bad News For Dems, Economy Surges Ahead

December 2, 2005 – Washington, DC – PipeLineNews.org - Extending a 30 month positive trend, the Dept. of Labor today reported that U.S. economy created 215,000 new jobs in November. The news prompted a rise of the dollar against the euro and a 2 1/2 year high against the yen on world financial markets.

On the positive report Alan Greenspan commented, "The US economy has delivered a solid performance thus far in 2005. And, despite the disruptions of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, economic activity appears to be expanding."

Since May 2003 a widespread business expansion has permeated the economy, creating 4.5 million net new jobs in that period.

More Americans are on payrolls than ever before and despite the Katrina effect, October's revisions [3rd quarter GDP up 4.3% from the initial 3.8% estimate] showed the largest one month increase in average hourly earnings on record.

The current jobless rate is 5%, less than the average in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

©1999-2006 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2005-11-23T07:28:00.000-08:00

Dirty News Coverage For Dirty Bomber

Knight Ridder toy the CC Times on Wednesday, November 23 engaged in something we have unfortunately become accustomed to; editorialization flimsily disguised as journalism.

In two above the fold stories under the huge banner "Feds, pressed to file charges, indict US terrorism suspect," KR's lefty reporting team of Frank Davies and Shannon McCaffrey engage is everything that is wrong with American journalism, offering mere op-eds in the guise news coverage.

Davies, long a critic of the administration and the war on terror leads his piece with, "The Justice Department's decision to indict Jose Padilla is the latest example of how the Bush administration short-circuits and legal review of the expansive powers it has claimed in the war on terror..."

This is exactly the type of in your face editorialization of the news that leads many to conclude that KR has an anti-administration, anti-war on terror agenda with which it relentlessly hammers its readership.

Davies seems to suggest that the action in the Padilla matter takes place because the Justice Department is afraid that the Supreme Court would release him, which is a ridiculous contention. As is usually the case with KR journalism of this type, both McCaffrey's and Davies' pieces are designed not to inform but to indoctrinate.

Little is offered to explain the charges and in this particular case a far-reaching Islamist conspiracy to maim and kill. The entire perspective of both pieces is adversarial, not explicative.

In another instance - in a seemingly never-ending display of KR bias - page 15 contains news of the conviction of Abu Ali, an American Muslim student, in a plot to assassinate the President of the United States.

In a typical KR manner, this story which one might think would constitute front page news, appears underneath a picture of the President with a turkey.

That juxtaposition is shameless but something we have come to expect from Chris Lopez and this sleazy excuse for a newspaper.

2005-11-08T10:22:00.000-08:00

Using Community Health as a Pretext for Social Engineering

By Camille Giglio, Director California Right To Life Committee

November 8, 2005 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Recently I participated in a panel discussion on CA Prop 73 [parental notification on minors seeking abortions] with two other pro-life people and three pro-abort women - a young woman from Planned Parenthood, a much older woman speaking for N.O.W. and a third, young, eager and aggressive woman representing an organization called Bay Area Community Health Education [BACHE].

Afterwards, I couldn’t get the title “community health" out of my mind.

What is the meaning of the term “community health," is it different than individual health?

I looked up BACHE online and discovered that they were sponsored by the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and Clergy for Responsible Choice. They apparently have no web page but can be reached at the email address - bachemtdiablo@comcast.net.

Their mission statement is:

"[to] promote teaching of comprehensive, medically accurate, age appropriate, bias free, sex education in the Public Schools."

In other words they seem to function as an extension of Planned Parenthood, but are they something more than that?

As is usually the case, they have distorted and twisted the meaning of words such as "bias free" and "medically accurate" to align with their agenda. As I was sitting there on the panel listening to them expressing themselves it occurred to me that they are so self-righteous that they feel unconstrained, uttering whatever they want, no matter how it may appear to others.

The pro-abortionists can always rely on a certain percentage of these audiences to uncritically accept their claims on faith. These folks basically want to live in denial and not have their belief structure challenged.

We on pro-life side can put forth what we feel is an overwhelmingly convincing argument and the opposition will not hear us. Bluntly, they appear to have been brainwashed and are extremely difficult to reason with.

Understanding their mindset however can be a big advantage in dealing with the Planned Parenthood mentality.

In the past I have written of the need to be alert to the word "comprehensive" as it applies to legislation, especially legislation centering on sex education in which case it translates into the full Planned Parenthood array of liberal sexual indoctrination.

Now I suggest that we add the word "community," as in "community health" to that list.

People who form into groups such as this local knock off of the ACLU - BACHE - operate on the basis of marshaling their forces to drag targeted communities into conformity with their idealized visions of social justice - never mind the US Constitution. They will form whatever partnerships - private or governmental; secular or faith based - seem necessary to further their aims.

Betraying their distrust of democracy, these groups elevate perceived group needs over those of the individual which are of little concern to them. Because these elitists know that the needs of individuals are at odds with the needs of their "communities" they seek to create the impression of unhealthy community environments - as they define them - allowing them to roll over individual interests believing them to be confused, misinformed and selfish.

Those not convinced will be silenced through humiliation and intimidation in public forums.

The "community" health paradigm holds that if a woman is poorly educated, a member of a minority racial group, without a job and is pregnant then her abortion is mandated as being in-line with community health standards. Her unborn is really viewed as the enemy - human pollution. But, it goes beyond that. These people have assigned themselves the right to direct other's social, economic and educational options in order to create their idealized healthy community.

In that regard non-profit and religious groups have formed partnerships with governmental agencies, skillfully bypassing the Brown Act which requires open meetings. They work in secret, drafting master plans which will radically change communities and the lives of the individuals within them, all to meet the leftist’s utopianism.

Last April a group California Healthy Cities, hosted a conference in Berkeley entitled "Healthy Cities and Smart Growth." Berkeley's mayor, Tom Bates [formerly a state Senator] acted as the facilitator at the event. California State Senator Tom Torlakson [D, 7th District] was one of the speakers. His mini-bio reads:

"Senator Torlakson represents the 7th Senate District, which includes most of Contra Costa County. He is Chair of the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee and Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Bay Area Infrastructure. His legislative achievements include improving the transportation system, preventing drunken driving, strongly supporting public education, promoting consumer protection and safety, improving fitness and nutrition, and protecting the environment."
Well, I guess everybody else in Sacramento can go home since Tom's utopian reach appears to be doing it all. He is a good example of the bureaucrat using partnerships, legislation and the public trust to push through his version of the vision.

According to Thomas Sowell, these social-manipulators are the epitome of the "visionaries" he writes about so eloquently in such works as "The Vision of the Anointed" and "The Quest for Cosmic Justice."

These are elitists who believe so profoundly in what they preach that truth means nothing more than a trifling interference with their quest for fulfillment.

Since 1973 many leaders in the pro-life community in Washington and in Sacramento have insisted that education is the main route to returning our country to a position of respect for life. I believe that they have tragically misjudged our opponents and misled their supporters into wasting decades of time on legislators and groups who are blinded to wisdom and compassion regarding the value of human life.

We decry moral corruption and wonder why it is happening, yet we turn around and elect the very same people who have given us all this moral corruption and human destruction.

The tools that will eventually defeat these prophets of faulty vision are contained in the Constitution - the freedom of speech and the right to vote.

Only with the will to exercise these rights we can defeat those who will not be educated to respect and accept the worth of the individual. We must vote them out of office, elect pro-life candidates in their place and de-fund those groups who use our tax dollars to work in secret to subvert the Constitution and the God-given right to life.

©2005 Camille Giglio, all rights reserved.

2005-11-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

Liar Joe Wilson Outed His Own Wife Claims Fox Analyst Vallely

November 7, 2005 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Fox News contributor Major General Paul Vallely has charged Joseph Wilson with outing his own wife during conversations over a year before Robert Novak's July 12, 2003 column which identified Plame as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Interviewed on the November 3, 2005 edition of ABC's John Batchelor show, Vallely asserted that he had met and discussed the status of Plame with Wilson in Fox News' "green room" before the two were scheduled to appear as guest commentators.

In an interview with World Net Daily, Vallely states of Wilson:

"He was a total self promoter...I don't know if it was out of insecurity, to make him feel important, but he's created so much turmoil, he needs to be investigated and put under oath."

Vallely went on to claim that according to friends of his in the CIA Wilson would often introduce his wife at cocktail parties as a CIA operative.

Wilson, through his attorney Christopher Wolf, partner at Proskauer Rose LLP has demanded that both Vallely and WND retract their statements.

2005-11-06T11:11:00.000-08:00

The Unreported European Muslim Insurrection

As if on cue, the first anniversary of the assassination of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh has been greeted in Europe with an unprecedented and explosive display of Muslim hatred.

Actually this coordinated violence qualifies as an insurrection.

It is taking place in over twenty suburbs of Paris [most affected are Clichy-sous-Bois, Aulnay-sous-Bois, Sal-d’-Oise, Seine-Marne, Yvelines and the cities of Dijon, Rouen and Marseilles] where rioting has continued unabated for over a week, in Denmark where firemen in the city of Århus have had to be accompanied by police as they attempt to deal with fires set by young Muslims and in the Netherlands where already fragile relations between native Dutch society and the country’s North African Muslim population are also on the verge of conflagration over the simple matter of a search of two suspicious [wearing long robes, and fidgeting with their back-packs] immigrant Muslim youths.

Although over 500 automobiles were torched on Thursday evening, this is not merely random violence directed at inanimate objects, on Thursday evening a disabled 56 year-old woman riding a bus in the North Paris suburb of Sevren was doused with benzene by rioters and set on fire as if the location was Fallujah and not central Europe. She has been hospitalized in grave condition.

Few casual observers stateside are aware of any of the salient facts of this uprising because the European and U.S. news organizations are in full multicultural denial and actively seeking to suppress the story.

In the San Francisco Bay Area's - Knight Ridder owned - Contra Costa Times the November 4 edition's front page carries a remarkable puff piece entitled "Muslim Melting Pot - Where otherwise separated by language, sect or nationality, followers of Islam come together in the United States."

The story is sheer propaganda and the only coverage that the CC Times gives to the Paris rioting appears on page 22 in severely amended form.

This is the kind of party-line perverse diversity that is enforced by Chris Lopez, the Times editor.

The Times' specious claims of assimilation are clearly offset by the ongoing Justice Dept. investigation into domestic terrorism which has culminated locally in the prosecution of Umer and Hamid Hayat [participation in foreign al-Qaeda training camps] and the deportation of several of their associates. This all takes place in the Pakistani enclave located in Lodi, California. Nationally the Saudi funded Wahhabis remain engaged in a campaign of psychic jihad against more moderate forms of the religion in the nation's mosques.

In the community from which the Hayat's sprang - less than an hour's drive from the CC Times offices in Walnut Creek - the "melting pot" model has been thoroughly rejected, unless you consider a village mentality more appropos to Rawalpindi where relatively few speak English and the women are sequestered from society at large [and many don't even have the knowledge to be able to dial 911] to be representative of that ideal.

In a posting by the BBC French PM Opens Dialogue With Rioters the words Muslim or Islam do not appear.

The U.S. national press is just as involved in news suppression, the Washington Post on November 4 published a two page piece on the street fighting, "Unrest In Paris Suburb Enters Second Week." The only mention of the word Muslim occurs as follows:

"Since then riots have swelled into a broader challenge against the French state and its security forces. The violence has exposed deep discontent in neighborhoods where African and Muslim immigrants and their French-born children are trapped by poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination, crime, poor education and housing."

Note to the Wash Post, these African immigrants are overwhelmingly Muslim as are their children.

The AP story [carried by Fox News] "Seventh Day Of Violence Erupts Near Paris," never really identifies the rioters as Muslim though it does identify the neighborhoods in which this activity is happening as being Muslim enclaves.

Of 30 international headlines that the New York Times listed on November 2 not one dealt with the Parisian suburban violence.

This expanding crisis must come as a shock to the average French citizen, since it has long been their official policy to coddle radical Islamists and radicals in general [in October 2003, the Paris city council under its Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe saw fit to make convicted Philadelphia cop killer Mumia Abu Jamal an honorary citizen of Paris] and they might have reasonably expected that such efforts at cross-cultural inclusiveness would not have met with such rejection.

French political thought is not homogenous though and a portion of it is moving steadily towards the nationalist right.

Despite the country being the home to the largest concentration of Muslims in Europe - 5 million - there has been a growing reaction against such a significant group who seem defiantly unwilling to assimilate. This has led to the rise of conservative anti-immigration politicians like the National Front's Jean Marie Le-Pen who outpolled the Socialist, then Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin in the first round of the 2002 elections.

As mobs indiscriminately torch automobiles and attack police stations, apologists are quickly springing into action.

"They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place." - Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque.

Despite being given prominence by the press such statements have lost much of their power to convince when contrasted against images on French television that can't be fully disguised.

As would be expected, the French left have used the occasion to pillory the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who referred to the rioters as "scum."

The Socialist and Communist parties are sounding very much like the Western press, hiding behind diversity and claiming that representations that this is Muslim led and sponsored violence - "stigmatizes the populations of whole districts."

How long Europe will remain in denial is hard to judge. Many there are locked into a spiritually devoid world view that profoundly distorts reality. This leaves them ill-equipped to deal with an aggressive minority driven by the fervor of an intolerant religion. Repeated warnings by Islam's most radical theorists putting the West on notice have largely gone unheeded in Europe.

Separated by an ocean and still in large part respectful of its Judeo-Christian heritage America has bought itself precious time, though for how long is anyone's guess.

The only certainty is that leftist political forces will continue to drag this country toward's the same fate now being played out in Europe.

©2005 CC Times Watch, all rights reserved.

2005-10-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Knight Ridder's Scandalous Coverage of the Iraqi Elections

On a day [Sunday October 16, 2005] when the success of the Bush Administration’s establishment of not one, but two democracies in the Mid East, should have been the story, a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper - the Contra Costa Times - [a Knight Ridder product, edited by Chris Lopez and based in Walnut Creek, CA] chose to devote the majority of its Iraq coverage to largely invented and negative news

True, the story "Turnout Signals Progress" [the only semi-positive Iraq story in this entire edition] was above the fold and on page one, however the body of the story was relegated to page 9.

Sharing the front page was the piece "Imbalanced Army Contributes To Civil War Threat In Iraq." It was assigned roughly the same column space [text] as the lead story. The remainder of this negative story was placed on page 8, but ahead of the obligatory "Progress" piece, indicating its relative ranking of importance in the minds of the newspaper's management.

Page 8 was devoted to negative speculation about Iraq and including the article “Violence, Sectarian Divide Tear At The Lives Of Iraq’s Soldiers.”

All of this occurs on the day that Iraqis ignored foreign led Islamist terror - defying negative U.S. media coverage - to go to the polls. This slanting of the news seems to demonstrate that local management is holding to the overall Knight Ridder ideological line, that the war on terror is a mistake. Towards that end, Editor Lopez made the decision to feature news seemingly out of step with the actual events on the ground on such a momentous day.

Even the “Progress” story had to share space and was relegated to the bottom third of page 9. Occupying the entire top half of that page was an opinion piece disguised as reporting and picked up from AP, “Sunni Arabs Finally Have A Say On Constitution At Polls.” It is significant to note that it was the Sunnis who supported Saddam and who now constitute the core of the Islamist terrorists, both inside and outside of Iraq. While the article suggests that somehow the Sunni's have been denied participation in the democratic process the fact is that they were not barred from voting in January, they simply listened to their radical Imams and refused to vote.

How is that the fault of Washington or the Iraqi majority? In large part this piece and the overall Times' coverage is simply devoted to conjuring up reasons why – even as democracy takes hold – the left believes it simply can’t work.

Correction, the leftist press does not necessarily believe that democracy CAN'T work in Iraq, the fact is that they HOPE that it doesn't work, because that would affirm the wisdom of the Bush administration's anti-terror policies.

Page 10 - the lead story, a half page is “Iraqi Women's Rights Retreat As Men Fight.” How are women’s rights decreased when they now have the right to vote, assemble and be educated, something heretofore unheard of in Iraq and in traditional Muslim society?

Under Saddam, the regime that would have been still in power today had people like Mr. Lopez [and John Kerry, the presidential candidate the Times' endorsed last November] carried the day, women had one right.

They had the right to be raped, something the left prefers over “Bush enabled” democracy.

The Sunday CC Times' continued agitation against the war on terror and the war in the Iraqi is the essence of bias. That bias starts at the top, with the editors.

We at CC Times Watch direct the CC Times' readers to observe that the editors are either unwilling, unable or both to address the newspaper's bias.

The paper refuses to publish letters to the Editor from conservatives who suggest bias while at the same time the Times’ letters to the Editor page is replete with the output of small cabal of Cindy Sheehan clones, who are allowed to make the most outlandish charges as long as they are directed against the President and the war.

What the Contra Costa Times and Knight Ridder engage in is not journalism, it's reportorial advocacy of a policy of defeat, at a time when the Western world is in the midst of enduring its most serious crisis since the darkest days of the Cold War.

If one is to judge from the CC Times news content, Mr. Lopez refuses to accept the fact that the Islamists have declared war against the West.

That attitude is what led to 911.

The Times' coverage of the war on terror and specifically the war in Iraq is transparently partisan, negative and most important - factually incorrect and imbalanced to the point of absurdity.

It’s an accepted fact in media circles that Knight Ridder’s coverage of the war has been among the most slanted of any major print news organization and the front section of the Contra Costa Times proves that nearly every single day.

Mr. Editor, instead of playing games we suggest that you hold a public meeting to address these issues.

2005-10-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

Scenes of Slaughter - the Zawahiri-Zarqawi Communiqué

October 14, 2005 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews - A strategic Islamic terror planning document has fallen into the hands of US intelligence and has now been translated.

Dating from July 9, 2005 it represents communication between two of the three [along with bin-Laden] key directors of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

News of this was most extensively covered by the cable networks, specifically Fox News, but it appears to have flatlined in most of the print media, including our own little leftist daily in San Francisco's East Bay, the Contra Costa Times.

On a day [October 12, 2005] when Dr. James Dobson's alleged collusion with the Bush administration on the Miers' nomination was the lead item - above the fold - the Times ran the Knight Ridder piece on the Zawahiri letter [the Times is a Knight Ridder product] and in deference to that item's great import, placed it on page twelve, nine back from a weepy-eyed article pleading for clemency in the case of "Tookie" Williams - former leader of the Crips gang and a convicted 4 time murderer - who has an imminent date to ride "old sparky."

The Times' coverage is significant for what it doesn't tell its readers about the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter. It provides absolutely no background and uses a limited series of excerpts from the document forcing the argument that the foreign fighters in Iraq were created by the Bush administration's liberation efforts.

Ayman al-Zawahiri is a 54 year old Egyptian physician and the former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad also known as al-Jihad [responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 and for numerous terrorist incidents in Egypt since then including the massacre of over 60 civilians in Luxor in 1997 and the attempted assassination of Egyptian president Mubarak in 1995]. Zawahiri trained with bin-Laden in Afghanistan and helped him organize al-Qaeda. He was sentenced to death in absentia because of the Luxor atrocity. His present location is unknown.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a lifelong professional terrorist, born to Palestinian parents but raised in Jordan. He has been an active jihadist since an early age operating in his native Jordan then moving on to Afghanistan and Iraq post 9-11.

Zarqawi was living in Northern Iraq and running his terror network at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a fact little-reported by the major media.

Zarqawi is the party who personally sawed off the head of Nicholas Berg in 2004. He is believed responsible for the plot which led to the assassination of American diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan in October of 2002, for which he too was sentenced to death in absentia.

Zarqawi is currently directing al-Qaeda's operations in Iraq. Though he is thought to have been seriously wounded by coalition forces earlier this year he has seemingly recovered.

Though primarily about the Zawahiri document, we must detail one critical aspect of Knight Ridder's coverage of this story.

Central to the Knight Ridder thesis is the argument that Operation Iraqi Freedom has resulted in an amplification of al-Qaeda's power - that it serves as jihad central, a recruiting ground for radical Islam.

The absurdity of this lies in the fact that both Zawahiri and Zarqawi have been active jihadists for over twenty years and many of these Iraqi jihadis are really members of the disaffected irregular army of Islamist thugs have been plying their trade in such disparate locales as Bosnia and Kosovo, nearly every "secularist" nation in the Middle East, Chechnya and across Central to South East Asia for at least that long.

In his piece, Knight Ridder reporter John Walcott specifically states:

"While the Bush administration calls Iraq "the central front in the war on terrorism," the letter indicates that al-Qaeda believes that U.S. led invasion of Iraq has created an opportunity to rally Muslims behind "the greatest battle of Islam in the era."

Nowhere in the document is it claimed that the U.S. "invasion" - Knight Ridder is unfamiliar with the work "liberation" - created this "greatest battle," in the sense of the radical players now active in Iraq having been spurred on to jihad by this administration's actions.

The Zawahiri document, fully read gives a quite different meaning to this claim. It refers to ancient battles, indicating Iraq's central and historic role in Islam's many fissures, going back 1,500 years.

"...your historic battle against the greatest of criminals and apostates in the heart of the Islamic world, the field where epic and major battles in the history of Islam were fought...People of discernment and knowledge among Muslims know the extent of danger to Islam of the Twelve'er school of Shiism. It is a religious school based on excess and falsehood whose function is to accuse the companions of Muhammad of heresy in a campaign against Islam..."

Since Mr. Walcott seems unfamiliar with Islamic history, a short note - the "epic" battle referred to by Zawahiri is the battle of Karbala, Iraq [the massacre of Imam Husayn - grandson of Mohammed - and his family October 680], the defining point in the blood feud which motivates the Sunni and Shia sects over the succession after the death of Mohammed in 632.

The document makes clear the extreme intolerance of the Islamists, who don't even consider the Shias to be Muslims, but rather "apostates," as Zawahiri observes noting "the religious nature of this conflict."

Such myopia results from editorialists pretending to be reporters, something Knight Ridder's coverage of the war on terror constantly suffers from.

to his great credit, in his October 6th address President Bush warned that it was al-Qaeda's long-term goal was to build an empire that stretched from Spain to Indonesia.

On that subject Zawahiri minces no words.

"...our intended goal in this age is the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet."

This communication indicates the parallel lines of argument employed by both the Islamists and the leftists, seeking to impose a Vietnam template of failure and disgrace. Ordinarily that might give a reporter pause for concern, though not so here.

"The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. Because of that, we must be ready starting now, before events overtake us..."

There is also delusional revisionism regarding the Taliban.

"...We don't want to repeat the mistake of the Taliban, who restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Qandahar alone. They did not have any representation for the Afghan people in their ruling regime, so the result was that the Afghan people disengaged themselves from them..."

Not to mention skinning even your Muslim opponents alive along with a litany of more bureaucratic failures.

The Islamists are zealots of the first order, however for the time being Zawahiri counsels Zarqawi that they must hide their true feelings lest these heretics not participate in jihad.

"...From the standpoint of not highlighting the doctrinal
differences which the masses do not understand, such as this one is Matridi or this one is Ashari or this one is Salafi, and from the standpoint of doing justice to the people, for there may be in the world a heresy or an inadequacy in a side which may have something to give to jihad..."

Of course the "heretics" and "blasphemers" will eventually be dealt with when their services are no longer needed.

"...Indeed, questions will circulate among mujahedeen circles and their opinion makers about the correctness of this conflict with the Shia at this time. Is it something that is unavoidable? Or, is it something can be put off until the force of the mujahed movement in Iraq gets stronger?..."

Above all, in their most elemental form the leaders of the Islamists are pragmatic, while ultimately intolerant of all but their own narrow - almost impossible to define - sect they realize the key role that short-term compromise means.

They are also most acutely aware of the role of the media, the following for some reason was not mentioned in the above noted Knight Ridder piece.

"...However, despite all of this, I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma. And that however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us. And we can kill the captives by bullet. That would achieve that which is sought after without exposing ourselves to the questions and answering to doubts. We don't need this...."

On this point Zawahiri is entirely correct, the media indeed is where this war will be fought, actual battlefield developments spun to best, or worst effect.

For their part Knight Ridder, the New York Times, CBS, CNN, Al-Jazeera and the others will continue to intentionally create and cast an atmosphere of defeatism, dread and lies around the war on terror. They do this because the majority of their reporters are partisan Bush-haters, so blinded that their natural instinct towards self-preservation have been short-circuited.

We refuse to mince words any longer over the deportment of these people. They are largely uninformed, unpatriotic ideologues, governed by a herd mentality. While this document from Zawahiri should be seen as a near Rosetta Stone - offering a vital glimpse into the mind of an enemy that has repeatedly declared war on all of Western civilization - instead it is being used as cannon fodder by a journalistic army of boobs who are too deluded to realize that should the Islamic Caliphate ever seriously touch them, that they should pray for a fate as relatively painless as that suffered by their compatriot Daniel Pearl at jihadi hands.

2005-09-12T16:30:00.000-07:00

911 – Teachers Chuck Balance, Strive To Impose Lefty Viewpoint

As seems to usually be the case in articles the CC Times picks up from Michael Kinsley’s LA Times, the garbage appearing on page A7 today is all too typical.

Hey Chris and Dan, "one side" of the 911 story involves the United States being attacked by Islamist terrorists who manage to kill nearly 3,000 Americans.

What exactly is the “other side" of the story?

That our lifestyle is unnecessarily antagonistic to the Muslim world?

This bone-head government teacher Nareg Kashishian shows “Outfoxed” a thoroughly discredited, poorly made polemic that has been condemned by liberals and conservatives alike, as part of "discussion" of 911 and justifies that as balance?

This is unbelievable.

Hey guys, every story does not have two sides.

There were not two sides in World War II.

Is it your contention that government teachers should, while covering Nazism also include Holocaust deniers to achieve “balance?”

Maybe members of the Neo-Nazi "Stormfront" organization should be brought into the classroom to lecture on how the Jews control the world, or US foreign policy [whoaa...that would be a little too close for comfort for the liberals who use the Neo-Con code word for Jews to argue the same thing].

Balance in such situations is an absurd requirement, especially coming from the main stream media.

Kids in High School, to be perfectly honest, don't have enough information to be treated like adults or even like college students. Doing so is farcical.

If we were presenting the facts on 911 we would suggest that the subjects covered would be the rise of radical Islam, starting with the Wahhabis in 18th century Arabia and progressing through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem [kids he was Muslim, not Jewish] little pact with Hitler and end with the organization of al-Qaeda, the Salafist movement which bin-Laden represents, and finally how 911 itself came to be examining the role of Mohammad Atta in the conspiracy to hijack the airliners used that day.

That would give the kids in class the truth, not some PC multicultural BS which seeks to remove judgment from an event in which that is exactly what is called for.

High School kids attend school to be taught, they are children and their opinions are of little import. Pretending they are mature citizens and then presenting “both” sides of issues which have only one, merely offers a justification for what really happens far too often in public education at all levels; liberal teachers and professors indoctrinating students in the name of “balance.”

2005-09-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

CC Times - Dancing On The Graves Of Blacks

[Editor's note: The sheer orgiastic delight with which the CC Times/Knight Ridder "news" organization is bashing President Bush should give any reasonable reader pause for concern. We find it interesting that since Chris Lopez promised, then totally failed to deliver "balanced" coverage on the war on terror, that the news content of the Contra Costa Times has turned so far left that we must seriously wonder if George Soros is now controlling the editorial direction.

Chris and Dan, you can run but you can't hide from the transparent bias that your paper displays daily. The fact is that Louisiana has been run by the Democrats, with a plantation mentality, for over 60 years. Additionally New Orleans Mayor Nagin, an African American Democrat, refused to call out the national guard until it was too late, refused to order the forced evacuation of his city because he was afraid of lawsuits and conspired with Democrat Governor Blanco in spending vital money to maintain the New Orleans' levee system on gambling interests.

Governor Blanco refused to request aid by the Fed until it was too late solely because of partisan political concerns. There's lot's of blame to go around, but we place the media and locally the Contra Costa Times' near the head of the list for sheer irresponsibility - gleefully dancing on the graves of African Americans.]

Blacks fault lack of local leadership

By Brian DeBose, the Washington Times

Some in the black community are beginning to question what happened to the black leadership during the Hurricane Katrina disaster, especially in the city of New Orleans.

While a few black leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Congressional Black Caucus, have singled out the president for blame, others say Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is black, is responsible for the dismal response to the flooding that stranded thousands in the city's poorest sections.

"Mayor Nagin has blamed everyone else except himself," said the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, founder and president of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny.

"The mayor failed in his duty to evacuate and protect the people of New Orleans. ... The truth is, black people died not because of President Bush or racism, they died because of their unhealthy dependence on the government and the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco," he said.

2005-09-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

After the Flood

[Editor's note: The CC Times' & the liberal media's response to Katrina has been a week-long shameless orgy of Bush bashing, news censorship and general lunacy, we offer the following commentary in hopes of providing some answers. If we happen to trash some of the left's sacred cows along the way, so much the better.]

Our species always looks for meaning in disastrous events. It's as if the human need to make sense of nature's random acts can - by force of will alone - create lessons not necessarily in evidence, and therefore soften the blow of conditions beyond our control.

There are however some great truths to be learned from the devastation of Katrina, though they are not very reassuring.

This event has the look of an accident scene; a grinding head-on between the social engineers and the test tube culture they were responsible for creating. In detail the video streams out; a constellation of glass shards litter skyward, then rain down - falling hard - before flood-waters of Biblical proportions consume all.

Much of what you will read about this event will be bilge, because on the surface at least, this is mostly about Black folks, and if people lie about sex, they certainly lie about the embittered relations between Black and Caucasian society.

As we attempt to come to some conclusions regarding the breakdown of society in New Orleans it might be helpful to invoke an analogy.

In mechanical engineering there is a specialty that involves materials testing and modeling. It purpose is to stress-test building and other materials to the breaking point, assaying such things as shear-strength and elasticity of various substances. This process is vital because it gives structural engineers the information that they need to construct for example, safe buildings, bridges or even levees.

New Orleans has just been subjected to this type of testing, involuntarily and by natural processes, not man-made.

It should not have been surprising to find that given sufficient power, a hurricane could overwhelm the physical infrastructure in a city like New Orleans that had been designed to provide a limited amount of protection against encroachment by water.

In similar fashion many cities wait to die, though by different means; San Francisco sitting atop the San Andreas fault, being among them.

What was unexpected is the way in which the population reacted to that disaster - a total social breakdown and massive uncontrolled looting - with militias of gun toting thugs marauding the streets and committing indiscriminate acts of violence.

In that sense New Orleans did more than simply break under testing, it turned inward on itself, assumed critical mass then detonated in response to the crisis.

This response indicates that New Orleans was an unstable society to begin with, always on the brink.

But the experimental testing of a region is only one aspect of this living laboratory; another experiment - the one which produced places like New Orleans - started far earlier and it did not just involve that city.

It involves all of America and centers on a downward spiraling deviation from traditionalism.

But how does an established society become unhinged from its past?

What force could wield sufficient power?

The only one which has the authority to tax on a national basis and through legislative, executive and judicial fiat direct the course of society - the federal government.

One looks for a watershed of causation under such circumstances. The question arises how far back to go?

Do we go back to the Lincoln administration and the Civil War, a period which firmly and permanently elevated the role of the federal government?

Or FDR's dabbling in alphabet-soup socialism, the New Deal?

Or maybe the Second World War, a time when nearly all of American enterprise fell under the domination of Washington, albeit for noble purpose?

While all of these might be considered of import we believe that the most direct cause for what we are today viewing with alarm in a small rural Southern state has its roots in Lyndon Johnson's social programs, which permanently and negatively left their mark.

Robert Rector, of the Heritage Foundation, is probably the greatest authority on Johnson's grandiose scheme - the Great Society, he writes [emphasis added]:

"When President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty more than 30 years ago, he announced that it was an investment that would repay its cost to society many times over. Since that time, the United States has invested some $7.9 trillion in programs that provide cash, food, housing, and medical and social services to poor and low-income Americans. But while the nation was pouring this flood of resources into the War on Poverty most social problems got worse, not better. A deluge of illegitimacy, crime, drug abuse, and welfare dependency besieged American communities. The war on poverty failed." - Broadening The Reform, The Heritage Foundation, 2000 - Robert Rector

As Rector so rightly observes what we call poverty in the United States today is not classical poverty, today's poor drive new cars, do not go hungry, have access to medical care, own numerous color televisions and often own their own homes which are not in disrepair.

What affects today's poor is entrapment in a culture that encourages "...behavioral poverty...that heavily reinforced illegitimacy, divorce and non-work."

Though this culture directly and primarily affects people of color, the larger society has been injured by it also, in the form of a general debasement of standards, loss of hope and an encouragement of social deviancy.

Upon examination, New Orleans was already broken before it was "tested."

In the 2003 FBI Violent Crime Summary New Orleans earns the distinction as the murder capital of the United States with a homicide rate of 25.5 per 100,0001 - the highest in any major American city.

And lest you draw the incorrect conclusion, that it's only the poorest, most deprived segment of this city which has driven the crime rate, be mindful that the U.S. Dept. of Justice has assigned a special taskforce to attempt to remedy the rampant corruption and lawlessness within the New Orleans police department.

This agency has amassed the unenviable reputation as being out of control. It has seen its officers convicted of high-profile crimes including a 1994 case involving murder-for-hire and a 1995 case in which a New Orleans police [March 4, 1995, New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank] officer was convicted of robbing a Vietnamese restaurant and then coldly executing three witnesses to the crime.

Actually, Frank failed her mental exam for the department, but retained her own "expert" psychologist whom she employed to brow beat the department into hiring her, with disastrous results.

But isn't this exactly what we have come to expect from a system which no longer has clear standards and can so easily be manipulated by pimps, in this case those invoking government sponsored bigotry?

This bigotry is all encompassing and gushes from fresh wounds created daily by judicial edict. Hence we legally deny that we are a Judeo-Christian nation, but we send little children home from school with extra credit assignments requiring them to fast...for Ramadan.

Said another way, the Johnson years institutionalized multiculturalism and perverse diversity, and the graphic pictures we see coming out of New Orleans are an outgrowth of a society which was and remains intensely and negatively mis-directed by the social legislation of that period.

Notes:

1. 2003 FBI Violent Crime Summary

©1999-2005 CC Times Watch, all rights reserved.

2005-08-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

"Residents clamor for more senior housing"

By Diane Lily

In another news cum Smart Growth propaganda piece the CC Times (8-29-05) reports on two senior aged residents of Lafayette who because of the defeat of a 2003 proposed senior housing project, are now stuck in their too large houses.

One resident is portrayed as bewailing the fact that “the city itself has done nothing” (to insure accessibility to smaller, lower priced “affordable” Lafayette homes for seniors). She states that “It is something the City Council should provide leadership on and they are
just not doing it.”

The Lafayette resident may be reciting from the right script, but her information is plain wrong. Throughout Contra Costa City and county elected officials together with community nonprofit groups, have been meeting on the QT for about 4 years planing how to redesign every city to allow it’s upcoming aging baby boomers to “age in place” or so the public pronouncements claim. In this Strategic Plan Senior Citizens are viewed as a vital community resource deserving of receiving a “consumer oriented delivery of services.”

Two years ago a Walnut Creek City Official, addressing a group of residents, laid out a plan for the future social, economic and material development of the town. In this Smart Growth plan senior citizens would be encouraged to move from their homes and into planned senior residences in nearby transit village type townhouses in order to make way for younger families who want your home.

I have this recurring nightmare in which I am being shoved out of my home by a city official while I’m protesting: “But I thought you said I could age in place?” At the same time the official is saying: “yes, but just not this place.”

Now I know how the residents of the Gaza Strip feel.

2005-08-30T09:15:00.000-07:00

Good News From Iraq Suppressed By Knight Ridder And CC Times

The main stream media i.e., the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC/ABC/CBS and in a small way Knight Ridder/CC Times [because they are bit players in this game, preferring to serve as carriers of used automobile ads rather than being a journalistic enterprise] are intentionally censoring the news coming from Iraq.

The typical main-stream reporter or reporterette in Iraq hangs in Green Zone bars cowering, afraid to venture out into the countryside which is in many areas fairly well pacified.

These people are not committed reporters, and they certainly don't care about telling the truth about what is happening in Iraq. Instead they want to "bring it all down, man" like they did in Vietnam.

The difference is US - the alternative media - who will NOT PERMIT THIS TRAVESTY TO HAPPEN AGAIN!

PERIOD.

The below information is available to any journalist worth his or her salt, unfortunately most today aren't.

Two Weeks' Worth Of Encouraging Iraqi News the MSM Avoids - 16,663 Good News Words

By Arthur Chrenkoff

August 30, 2005 - Washington, DC - PipeLineNews.org via WSJ - Maj. Joe Leahy is a civil engineer with the U.S. Army's Engineer Brigade. He has been stationed at Camp Victory, outside of Baghdad, since November 2004--enough time to get frustrated. "We all know it's a dangerous place," he says. "But the thing that I want people to understand is that they only see those one or two instances in the country that are negative. You don't really hear about the 100 things that have gone good."

He adds, "One thing we've got to understand is that it's not going to happen tomorrow, but we are doing something that's getting better every day."

Leahy's good-bad ratio may be debatable, but many servicemen and their families and friends back home, not to mention the general public, have been getting frustrated lately with the media coverage of Iraq--enough so to cause some limited, though still welcome, soul-searching among major media outlets. Whether the coverage will improve as a result remains to be seen. In the meantime, here are the past two weeks' worth of stories, some of which you might have missed...

[snip to a little later in this piece, this part detailin security successes]

Several roadside bombs discovered and disarmed by Iraqi troops throughout the country on Aug. 9 and 10; in Balad, Baqubah, Raway and Tikrit; more details here.

"Several suspected terrorists were detained and numerous weapons caches were seized in military operations west of Balad Aug. 10. . . . During raids of suspected terrorist safe houses in Salah Ad Din province, Task Force Liberty soldiers detained one individual and uncovered three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, nine RPG rounds, a mortar tripod, several rifles and two hand grenades. About 20 pounds of bulk explosives were also found at the site. In other action, after taking small-arms fire, task force soldiers returned fire, killing one insurgent and wounding another during a raid in Ad Duluiyah. The task force also detained six individuals and confiscated several rifles, a bulletproof vest, two RPGs, seven RPG rounds, multiple grenades and a 130 mm projectile."

"Iraqi and U.S. Soldiers squelched a terrorist attack on a patrol base in southwest Baghdad Aug. 11 when terrorists fired five rocket-propelled grenade rounds at the base, along with 10 minutes of rifle fire. A patrol consisting of Iraqi and U.S. Soldiers set out in the direction of the attack and captured six of the attackers and a weapons cache of two RPGs and three rifles with ammunition hidden nearby."

Muhammad Salah Sultan, also known as Abu Zubair, an aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in Mosul on Aug. 12; more here.

"Task Force Baghdad soldiers . . . thwarted attacks and captured suspects Aug. 12. Three separate combat operations in northern and southern Baghdad resulted in the capture of six terror suspects and the seizure of a car bomb before terrorists could use it."

In Abayachi and Fallujah, "Iraqi Army soldiers detained several suspected insurgents and seized weapons during operations on Aug. 13."

Task Force Baghdad soldiers prevented three car bomb attacks in a space of five hours in southern Baghdad on Aug. 13; they also captured 10 suspects and recovered two weapons caches.

"In northern Iraq, Task Force Freedom detained 21 terrorist suspects in Mosul Aug. 13-14 in several separate operations by Multi-National Forces and Iraqi Security Forces."

On Aug. 14, Iraqi and American troops in Hit disarmed a roadside bomb, located an arms cache in Mosul, and found more weapons and arrested eight suspects in Baghdad.

"Five large improvised explosive devices on major Baghdad highways were identified by Task Force Baghdad Soldiers Aug. 14 and then safely destroyed before they could hurt anyone."

In mid-August, "Iraqi Police Service officers in the New Baghdad district conducted a variety of operations, including raids involving over 450 officers. Police confiscated 30 AK-47 rifles, two hand guns and a machine gun during the raids. They also arrested 30 suspected terrorists, three of whom were targeted in the raids."

On Aug. 16, "Thi Qar province police announced that they foiled a plan to blow up the electricity station of Nasiriya in southern Iraq, which is the second biggest station in Iraq. The police found Katiosha rockets pointed at the station and they defused them seconds before they were to launch."

A weapons cache was discovered by Iraqi troops under a vehicle in Rawah. "The cache contained two light machine guns and 3,000 rounds of ammunition, nine AK-47 rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition, a NATO machine gun and 200 rounds of ammunition, four concussion grenades, one fragmentary grenade without fuses, and various other ammunition."

"Iraqi soldiers and coalition Special Forces advisers killed three terrorists in a combined raid on a kidnapping cell southeast of Fallujah on Aug. 19. . . . Soldiers found numerous weapons and bomb-making materials in the house."

"Task Force Liberty Soldiers stopped a pair of improvised explosive device attacks and detained four individuals in north-central Iraq Aug. 20. Soldiers in a combat logistics patrol near Balad Ruz observed two adults and a child digging a hole for an IED at about 6:15 p.m. The three individuals were detained and Soldiers seized the IED. The two adults were taken to a Coalition Forces base for questioning and the child was released to his family. The IED consisted of two 130mm artillery rounds and was destroyed. Later, a combat patrol near Tikrit caught two individuals digging near a previous IED blast hole at 7:30 p.m. and took the suspects in for questioning."

The arrest by the Kurdish authorities of 11 members of an Ansar al Islam terrorist cell plotting the assassination of the Kurdish leader Mas'ud Al Barzani.

All in one day's work on Aug. 21: six suspects captured and weapons confiscated in Haditha, two roadside bombs and a weapons cache found in Hawija and Mugdadiyah, three other roadside bombs defused by Iraqi forces throughout the country, three weapons caches retrieved in Samarra, three suspects captured in Rawah and another nine in the north, eight captured in Khalidiyah together with bomb making equipment, and nine other suspects arrested throughout the country by Iraqi forces....

2005-08-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

Contra Costa’s “For Every Generation” Senior Plan A Ruse By The Social Engineers?

By Diane Lily

[Editor's note: we wish to welcome Ms. Lily to CC Times Watch. The subject she is writing about is of great importance here in Contra Costa County. So far the CC Times has offered only uncritical coverage of this program. Over the next few months Ms. Lily will familiarize our readership with the issues surrounding the "For Every Generation" movement and help frame the issues involved.]

For the last year a group of over 300 local community nonprofit, government, religious groups and individual community activists have been meeting to plan for the education and nurturing of senior citizens within the county. To see the results of their work check online at www.foreverygeneration.org.

On that web site you will find under the heading of process a 40 page document setting forth the goals and objectives deemed necessary to make Contra Costa an aging-friendly community.

This coalition of community agencies and activists was initiated by the John Muir/Mt. Diablo Health Care Foundation with funding from the Y and H Soda Foundation, the California Endowment, the California Wellness Foundation and Contra Costa County.

Our county is the first in the nation to subject itself to this deep analysis of the ability to deliver expanded amounts of health and human type services to the aging baby boomer cohort born between 1946-1964. Ms Grace Caliendo, Executive Director of the John Muir/Mt. Diablo Health Care Foundation, declared that we, the citizens of Contra Costa should be proud to provide model leadership in this effort to provide an aging friendly community that will educate and guide citizens to age gracefully.

The idea for putting Contra Costa's service agencies through this process was derived from a 1999 piece of legislation by former Sen. John Vasconcellos, SB 910, signed into law by former Gov. Gray Davis. This bill mandated that a coalition of statewide housing, transportation, health care and education leaders survey the needs of this soon to be aging cohort and develop guidelines for providing and expanding services to meet the needs of this group. Vasconcellos’ bill even used the words that even though this cohort is among the best educated and financially well established age group these “citizens want and need” these services. It was then incumbent upon local communities to carry the work of this coalition to its logical conclusion by developing the resources to service the seniors.

Among the Steering Committee members of the Contra Costa For Every Generation coalition are Bob Schroder, former county Supervisor, Gloria Omania, Representative for Sen. Tom Torlakson, Cheryll LeMay, Dean of the San Ramon branch of DVC and the executive Director of Catholic Charities, Solomon Belette and Viola Lujan Executive Director of the Clinica de la Raza which provides services to the residents of the Monument Corridor. Also included is Professor Andrew Scharlach, Ph.D., Psychology, Professor of Aging in the School of Social Welfare. He was a member of the state committee as well. He stated that this was a design of the people of the county, not a compliance document.

Prof. Scharlach like several other members of this coalition understand that this exercise in planning can not just focus on the soon to be aging baby boomers but to make Contra Costa an “aging-friendly” community the county must look beyond this group to those who will come in the future - in other words, this program expands eventually to every resident in the county. These people see this as a corollary to the Smart Growth Planning of cities themselves. A couple of people also indicated that in order for all this planning to have the authority to be implemented it might well require legislation and or county ordinances.

The day may soon come when you will want to express your thoughts on this Plan to the proper authorities.

2005-08-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

The Enemy Within - Media Traitors Seek US Defeat In Iraq

First, let us clarify, we are using the term "enemy" in its fullest and most complete sense ["a person or group actively opposing or hostile to another, or to a cause" - Oxford English Dictionary], we mean enemy.

Since Vietnam and Watergate, the media has had a [rightly] heightened sense of self-importance.

That only stands to reason since they were responsible for losing the war in Vietnam and driving a president from office, if one is to judge by recent standards, absent just cause.

Greg Mitchell is the current editor of E&P Magazine, the bible of the publishing industry.

In his most recent piece, Mitchell has urged the nation's newspaper editors to action:

"At this critical moment, it's time for newspapers -- many of which helped get us into this war -- to use their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands. Now, it's literally do-or-die time"

Such traitorous [traitor - a person who is treacherous or disloyal, especially to his county - Oxford English Dictionary] hectoring comes at a critical time for Iraq and for this nation. The old media - which Mr. Mitchell represents - have taken it upon themselves to become one with the Marxist/MoveOn.org crowd, using a grief stricken mother like a condom to further their goals.

Mr. Mitchell is clearly stating what we all have known for years about the press; they do not see themselves as mere journalists, but rather have inflated themselves to believe that they are America's rightful, deserving and hereditary potentates.

They feel this way because their sense of deserving is driven by a sanctimonious belief that they are the nation’s intellectual priesthood.

These people - the media - seek one thing - defeat of the United States.

They do not believe in American national sovereignty or the traditions upon which this society is based.

They believe in a Godless, multicultural, fractionated socialist hell - and actively augur to bring it about.

Mr. Mitchell's advice comes at a propitious time as Cindy Sheehan is apparently returning to Camp Fonda, itself ringed with the slavish dregs of the journalist universe.

Over the next few weeks this nation will be festooned with the ephemera of the "BushisHitler" crowd, and of course it will be gleefully mirrored by the media of America's external enemy, al-Jazeera et al.

Since Mr. Mitchell has so unambiguously shown the media's strategy we on the right should take heed.

Either fight or watch this nation die.

Mr. Bush, take off the gloves.

2005-08-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

CC Times, Complicit In The Mind Rape Of Cindy Sheehan

August 12 - Bush remains resolute on war

An article replete with typical journalst weasel-words, "mixed signals" & "downplayed" on nonexistent plans to in the short term withdraw significant numbers of troops from Iraq - "with US casualties mounting" completely ignoring all historical precedent that the casualties from this war, though dear individually, are miniscule - along with a substantial body of uncritical comment regarding Ms. Sheehans grief driven but Move-On funded charade.

August 14 - New body armor trickles to troops.

Hey Chris & Dan - this is a brand new type of armor, it has just been developed and is only produced in 4 very small factories and it is exceedingly difficult to make correctly. The thrust of this piece is of the same cloth that draped the medias attempt to brand the President as an unfeeling megalomaniac who would send US sons and daughters into battle in un-armored HumVees.

Bottom line, it's crap.

If the Times really cared about the troops, about national security and the like they wouldn't have stuck their heads up their [fill in the blank] while Bill Clinton was conducting gay voting block friendly social engineering experiments with the military while hacking preparedness and troop strength with a meat-axe.

Additionally Dan Hatfield would not be writing editorials excoriating the FBI as having engaged in domestic political sabotage against the Civil Rights movement and legitimate social protest.

August 15 - Neighbor has had it with Crawford visitors

The majority of this piece is about Sheehan, this is fake balance and so obvious that you could drive a HumVee [armored variety, thank you] through it.

August 16 - Being there for veterans

The CC Times doesn't give a rat's ass about the troops or they would be supporting their mission. Dan and Chris - YOU CAN'T SUPPORT THE TROOPS WITHOUT SUPPORTING THEIR MISSION. Quit the malarky, you guys look foolish enough.

August 17 - War stirs in many, vigilance

One thing the war does not stir is balance among the main stream press. It's not vigilance that is being "stirred," it's anti-American, Bush-is-Hitler near traitorous behavior.

Tokyo Rose had nothing on the leftist media of today.

August 19 - Sheehan puts Bush on hold to aid mom

The ultimate indignity, the Times' headline makes it look like Sheehan has put Bush on hold as if the two were actually having a conversation [a second one actually, at the first meeting immediately after her son's heroic death, Sheehan appreciated the President's heartfelt grief]. This is merely another semantic game to slap Mr. Bush around, anything to to demean him, the war and to slander - by innuendo - the troops.

What do all of these headlines have in common?

Every single one of them represents a cue line from Move-On.org/George Soros/Fenton Communications - a different angle a day in the leftist battle against America's war on Islamic terror.

Hey guys, what ever happened to that "fair and balanced" war coverage that was supposedly brewing at Knight Ridder central?

Our guess is that the entire organization from the top down is simply filled with so many lefty pukes that swimming against the tide is impossible.

The CC Times refuses to report on the massive funding that the left is using to drive their latest wedge against the war, keeping poor Ms. Sheehan in the spotlight.

The Times is complicit in the process and that is unforgivable. The old press, i.e. the New York Times, the Washpost, Kinsley's LA Times and the lesser papers, like Knight Ridder - are using Sheehan as a battering ram against the administration.

They don't care at all that at the end of this process they will discard her like a used condom. They will have mind raped her, leaving her unhinged, bloodied and oozing leftist pus on the side of a road in Crawford.

Hope you folks are happy, what a great service you are providing Contra Costa County.

Now, for a little real balance, here's a very short piece, a little glimpse of the truth underlying the Crawford follies.

Cindy Sheehan, Live And Direct From The People Who Brought You The Alar Scare

August 15, 2005 – San Francisco, CA – PipeLineNews.org - If it were not for the gobs of left-wing cash coming from people like Ben Cohen, ex of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and assistance from the likes of Michael Moore the current media circus surrounding Cindy Sheehan would not exist.

Unfortunately – for Ms. Sheehan – her understandable grief over the heroic death of her son in Iraq has made her susceptible to being taken advantage of, manipulated by and wrapped up in this week's iteration of the “Let’s Get Bush" geek show.

The DC PR firm, Fenton Communications is running the media side of Sheehan’s Crawford Texas marshmallow roast/camp out, such as it is.

The folks at Fenton are the ones who devised the Alar scare, which gained traction as a result of a broadcast [February 1989] by the forged document experts at CBS.

"NRDC's [National Resources Defense Council] public relations firm, Fenton Communications, convinced other major news organizations to feature the story. Meryl Streep testified before Congress, and on TV talk shows, about Alar's dangers. The public panicked: school systems removed apples from their cafeterias, supermarkets took them off their shelves, and orchard owners lost millions. The maker of Alar, Uniroyal Chemical Co., was ultimately forced to take it off the market..." Columbia Journalism Review.

As evidenced by such campaigns, the Hudson Institute charges that Fenton engages in deliberately misleading campaigns based on junk science

“Fenton Communications, a Washington, DC-based public relations firm, bills itself as the nation's leading "public-interest" firm. Their practices combine junk science with a hidden agenda to scare consumers away from safe products, supposedly all in the name of protecting public health and the environment." ... including scares about Alar and apples, swordfish, leaky breast implants…If you have been scared about food or pesticides in the last 10 years, chances are Fenton Communications played a key role in provoking that fear. The scares just don't ever stop. But they all have one thing in common -- a lack of evidence and abundance of deceit. The claims involved in the scares have all been refuted in public. By the time the scares have been debunked, however, the campaigns have taken such a strong hold that the truth usually is irrelevant." – The Fear Profiteers, Hudson Institute

Fenton primarily represents lefty political groups such as MoveOn; apparently the more rabidly anti-American the better.

Fenton is inextricably bound to the Tides Foundation, in the past Fenton shared office space with EMS, a radical green information clearinghouse, which was eventually spun-off:

“…according to Julian Morris, director of the Environment Programme at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, [EMS] is “the second largest project of the Tides Center…EMS is known for assisting, if not completely organizing, the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle last December." – “The Fear Profiteers," Hudson Institute pg 11

Of Tides, Front Page Magazine has observed:

“Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity" established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open border advocates."

So with this in mind please consider that the Sheehan Crawford Crusade has been designed from its inception to deceive, misinform and alarm, we think that armed with that knowledge you should be able to evaluate what is going on down there - deep in the heart of Texas and what the leftist media is doing to Ms. Sheehan.

©1999-2005 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2005-08-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Late For Class

Nearly two weeks ago a group of Islamist mouthpiece organizations banded together to pull one of the all-time granddaddies of media chutzpah.

This agglomeration of jihadists, radical Muslim apologists and Saudi puppets decided to issue a fatwa - an Islamic religious pronouncement - condemning terrorism and then promote it through the usual media suspects with the hope of proving their bona fides as moderates.

Understandably, most of the sturm and drang over that effort took place in the immediate wake of the event. Those who have a modicum of understanding about Islam and especially about the groups involved immediately and rightly excoriating it for what it was, a staged event for the multiculture for lunch bunch.

So, with that in mind why it took this long for Mr. Hatfield, CC Times Editorialist, to weigh on the matter is hard to comprehend. Yet, even with eleven days to reflect on the matter - as we here at CC Times Watch have come to expect - Mr. Hatfield's news ear and analytical powers seem to be deader than the 50 plus souls recently murdered in London by members of the religion of peace.

Mr. Hatfield’s mini-edi "Fatwa a step forward" states:

"The Fiqh Council of North America deserves praise for issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, condemning terrorism and religious extremism."

Since we are not into redundancy, we ask you take the below link to our July 28 edition for our take on what we call the Fatuous Fatwa.

2005-08-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

Knight Ridder’s Middle East Journalism Fails On All Counts

“Gaza withdrawal could foster peace”

Dion Nissenbaum is either unfamiliar with the history of Israel, constrained by Knight Ridder editorial viewpoint or unwilling to tell the unsanitized story as to how Gaza and the West Bank came under the control of Israel.

The Six Day War of 1967 was precipitated by the Arab states, primarily Egypt acting in consort with the Soviet Union and not surprisingly U Thant’s version of the United Nations.

Since its inception in 1948 Israel has been repeatedly attacked by its Arab neighbors – in 1973 on Yom Kippur, the most sacred of Jewish holy days – both Egypt and Syria attacked Israel; the cycle of violence has been constant and one-sided – Arab on Jew.

When the Arab states finally got the message that they were incapable of defeating the Jewish state, they turned to a stealth program of violence employing terrorists primarily coordinated by Yasser Arafat, his PLO and their agents Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and a hundred other groups too numerous to mention.

The entire tone of Mr. Nissenbaum’s piece smacks of the moral relativism that has become the staple of the main-stream-media.

“both sides tiring of the conflict” – as if Israel could opt out, as the recipient of terrorist attacks if it wished.

“cycle of violence that swung between Palestinian suicide bombings and fierce Israeli counter-attacks” – call them what they are terrorist attacks aimed primarily at women and children.

Palestinian/Arab actions/aspirations are placed on the same moral plain as Israel’s nearly 60 year struggle to merely survive against attempted Arab subjugation.

As if to underline the methodology behind this now not-so-curious charade, the Sunday edition of the CC Times carries a half-page, essentially pro Hamas piece contributed by Todd Roberson and run in the Dallas Morning News, an extremely left-leaning newspaper.

“Hamas Challenge looms with planned withdrawal”

The author refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization instead referring to them as “a powerful Islamist group” and the thugs who carry out their murderous policy merely “guerillas.”

Such “delicacy” flies in the face of Hamas being directly named as a terrorist organization in Executive Order 13224, the US’ official terrorist manifest.

This is par for the course, and goes so far as to quote Hamas supporter and former PLO and Fatah senior functionary Nabil Saath saying, “Hamas is the true representative of the Palestinian people.”

Sure Mr. Saath, Hamas represents the Palestinian people in the same vein as Adolph Hitler represented the German people.

So we will wrap this up short and not-so-sweet.

Knight Ridder’s coverage of the Mid East is shallow and tilts towards the terrorist viewpoint.

© 2005 Contra Costa Times Watch, all rights reserved.

2005-07-28T15:18:00.000-07:00

News The CC Times Missed - Terror Friendly Organizations Issue Fatuous Fatwa Against Terror

July 28, 2005 – San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews - In a preemptive media broadside designed to deflect the monsoon of public criticism that will soon engulf the organization on August 1 [Editor's note - Mr. Elashi's sentencing has been delayed. Sources close to the US attorney's office in Dallas hint that his other trial - where he is being prosecuted for his role as a top functionary in the terrorist [Hamas] funding group "Holy Land Foundation", may be having an impact on the final sentencing date] when Ghassan Elashi – Texas board member of CAIR – is sentenced in Dallas on 21 Federal terrorism counts, the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR] today joined with the Fiqh Council of North America in issuing a sham ruling that in essence can be reduced to the non-controversial statement that "terrorism is not a good thing."

The brazen nature of such terror friendly groups issuing a fatwa on terrorism, is further underlined by the fact that the former chairman of Fiqh Council of North America, Taher Jaber Al Alwani is according to numerous media reports the number 5 unindicted co-conspirator in the current Sami Al Arian terror trial [taking place in Florida] and whose organizations have been raided by Federal authorities as part of the ongoing investigation into the domestic funding of terrorism.

The current director of the Fiqh Council is Muzammil Siddiqui [former director of the Islamist organization ISNA - Islamic Circle of North America]. Siddiqui has additional responsibilities within the Islamist network, serving as the US Director of the Muslim World League.

Item - FBI Raids Muslim World League Offices Friday July 22, 2005

"FBI and Homeland Security agents raided the Northern Virginia office of a Saudi-based charity that has been under scrutiny for possible terrorist ties and detained one of its employees on immigration charges, officials said yesterday.
The Muslim World League office in Falls Church had also been searched in 2002 in a dramatic series of raids of Muslim organizations in Northern Virginia." - Raid Targets Islamic Charity in Falls Church - Mary Beth Sheridan - Washington Post, July 26, 2005

More about the Fiqh Council and Alwani, a little later:

“On Thursday, July 28, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will hold a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to release a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) against terrorism and extremism. The fatwa is being issued by the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) and endorsed by major U.S. Muslim groups.
Representatives of the Fiqh Council, an association of Islamic legal scholars that interprets Muslim religious law, and leaders of several leading American Muslim organizations will take part in the news conference. (The term "fiqh" refers to Islamic jurisprudence.)" - CAIR Newsletter July 27, 2005

CAIR's participation in this farcical fatwa lends the effort the overall look and feel of bad satire, having already had three of its members convicted on federal terror related charges, and an additional individual who is an advisor to their board - strongly linked with the first [1993] World Trade Center bombing.

CAIR's terrorist connections: Ghassan Elashi, founding board member of CAIR's Texas chapter and businessman, convicted of terrorism-related charges on April 14, 2005. According to AP "Ghassan and Bayan Elashi and their company were found guilty of all 21 federal counts they faced...and are to be sentenced Aug 1...each count carries a...10-year prison sentence."
Bassem Khafagi former director of Community Relation for CAIR, plead guilty to bank and visa and has been deported to Egypt.
Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, a former communications & civil rights specialist for CAIR, according to AP, "Royer...admitted helping members of the conspiracy join the militant Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks...[he] pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting use of a firearm in a crime of violence and aiding and abetting the carrying of an explosive during commission of a felony. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison."
Siraj Wahhaj, CAIR advisory board member named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman bomb plots by US Prosecutor Mary Jo White; Rahman is serving a life sentence.

Fiqh Out

Taha Jaber Al-Alwani is the director of the Fiqh Council of North America - the organization which issued the above noted "fatwa."

Alwani is also an officer in/and/or directs the Safa Group of companies which include the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), Graduate School of Islamic & Social Sciences, Heritage Education Trust and other entities [over 100 in total].

Mr. Alwani has been under investigation for at least 10 years by the Federal government. His organizations and personal living quarters were raided in a 2003 joint-terrorism strike [Operation Greenquest] spearheaded by the US Treasury Department.

Operation Greenquest was designed to destroy the US based terrorist funding infrastructure through identification, disruption, prosecution and dismantling of the terrorist funding networks.

[For those doubting the need for and the effectiveness of the Patriot Act, these coordinated raids in various localities were made possible by that 2001 law. Because of the Patriot legislation rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure now permits warrants to be issued by a Federal magistrate judge in any district in which activities related to terrorism may have occurred, even for property outside the district.]

According to the Dept. of Treasury, these raids - "initiated 859 financial investigations involving suspected terrorist financing and referred 1,109 leads on potential terrorist financial activities…[this]…resulted in 47 arrests, 28 indictments, and the seizure of $7.3 million."

Yet we now have the central figure in that raid now issuing a fatwa on terror.

Introduced as evidence in the filing needed to get the warrant for the raid on Alwani's Virginia companies, special agent David Kane proffered to the Alexandria court a letter of support from Alwani to none other than Sami Al Arian.

Mr. Al-Arian is currently on trial in Florida for running a domestic jihad support and funding network for the terrorist groups, Palestinian Islamic Jihad [PIJ] and Hamas.

“60. I have found information indicative of a conspiracy between Safa Group individuals and Sami Al-Arian to support and fund terrorists and terrorist groups including HAMAS and PIJ. A most striking example is a letter seized during the 1995 search warrants, from a central figure in the Safa Group, Al-Alwani at IIIT to Al-Arian."

‘Honorable brother, I think we do not need to affirm that we consider you as a Group, you and brother Mazen [al-Najar] and brother Khalil [Shikaki, brother of PIJ founder Fathi Shikaki] and brother Bashir [Nafi ] and Brother Ramadan [Shallah, present head of PIJ] and Sheikh Abdel Aziz [Odeh, a founder and spiritual leader of the PIJ], a part of us and an extension of us, and us part of you and extension of you also, we never experienced any doubts about that since we knew you and we will continue like that.

61. Al-Alwani continued:

And the matter of the financial support was never the basis of our relationship, for our relation added to the brotherhood of faith and Islam is an ideological and cultural concordance with the same objectives and all of your institutions are considered by us as ours, and they receive all the attention, and I explained to you the circumstances the institutions of your brother go through, and despite which we can truthfully say that we gave your institutions or our institutions that you manage more attention than institutions we manage by ourselves, because you are in an important positions without a doubt, and you deserve from us and our likes all cooperation, God willing'" - US Dept of Justice Search Warrant, Operation Greenquest.

According to the “Manifesto of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad" which was found on Arian’s computer, PIJ rejects - "...any peaceful solution for the Palestinian cause, and the affirmation of the Jihad solution and the martyrdom style as the only choice for liberation." That document characterized the UN as - "is a supercilious tool to pass the plans of the Great Satan America."

The groups that Al Alwani was so fervently supporting in his letter to Al-Arian - Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad - were added to President Bush’s Executive Order 13224, the United States official terrorist manifest on October 12, 2001. - Executive Order 13224 assignees

Additionally, In October 1999, a confidential asset of the FBI, who has provided reliable information in the past, furnished the Washington Field Office of the FBI a copy of a fatwa signed by Al-Alwani at some point between December 1988 and November 1989, proclaiming the "truth by the powers invested in us by Allah, that Jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine."

So what is going on here?

Organizations up to their necks in terror associations engaging in a supremely insulting sleight-of-hand called takiyya [Quranic approved strategic lying] betting on the come line that the media will play their usual multicultural role and merely pass it along - wink-wink - sans analysis.

But there is so much more...

In some way I feel that PipeLineNews had a hand in planting the fatwa seed in CAIR's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper's head which today flowered in Washington DC's Press Club so grotesquely.

On the morning of Thursday July 22, 2005 at 7:45AM PST we had a long conversation with Mr. Hooper.

We discussed a number of issues which will be covered in a later piece, the following transcript is relevant and verbatim, as we promised Hooper it would be.

PipeLineNews - What would your response be to call for a fatwa against Osama bin Laden or Mr. Zarqawi?"
Hooper: "I have no problem with that."
PLN: "Are you calling for one right now?"
Hooper: "The whole concept of the fatwa has been misinterpreted by many people, in the public perception it has come to mean a death sentence but that is not what it is at all...It could be more in this country compared to an attorney general's opinion...you have a specific legal question anything from can you have this land zoned to matters of state all it says is it's a legal opinion by recognized Muslim scholars...The British Muslim community has issued a fatwa condemning terrorism, condemning extremism..."
PLN: "There are fatwas that do call for the death of people such as the one that was issued against Salmon Rushdie. The question is, since that is a part of Islam, since those types of fatwas, those types of religious pronouncements can be issued, would you call for that type of a fatwa?
Calling for the death of Osama bin Laden?"
Hooper: "You are arguing from a false premise, that fatwas are a death sentence and that is not the case, in fact the world was outraged that there was a death sentence that was against Salmon Rushdie...they should have been...now you called for a similar one...that's a bit of a contradiction."
PLN: "So you're calling for Osama Bin Laden's death?"
Hooper: "Give me a break."
PLN: "So you are not willing to call for a fatwa calling for the death of Osama bin Laden?...The question goes to the core of what CAIR stands for."
Hooper: "The penalty for murder in Islam is death..if someone is convicted of murder the death penalty could be applied, no problem with that."
PLN: "You're unwilling to answer the question Mr. Hooper, are you willing to call for the death of Osama bin Laden?"
Hooper: Click...end of conversation.

What can be gathered from this?

Hooper had an opportunity to simply state that terrorism was so egregious, so antithetical to Islam that it was appropriate to support a fatwa calling for the death of Osamma bin-Laden, that Muslims should turn him and people like Zarqawi over to authorities, but he refused, on numerous occasions.

He refused because his organization and those associated with it in today's cruel game are merely engaging in an elaborate public relations lie.

The ugly reality is that Islamists have a different conception of truth than other people do.

Radical Muslims look at the world in a unique way.

To them if the cause is justified in their twisted thinking, then any avenue to attain that goal is just.

What else would motivate two organizations - CAIR and the Fiqh Council of North America - with the types of associations just hinted at above, engage in such obvious subterfuge?

At some point today's stunt must be seen for what it is - a charade, a freak-town side show in which the geek bites off the head of the chicken while the barker standing by denies that it happened.

That is what you saw at the National Press Club today, there is no less harsh, nor more accurate way to talk about it.

2005-07-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Shamelessly Shilling For Corrupt Labor

On the July 26, 2005 lead page of the CC Times we see an article by the Chicago Trib's Jill Zuckerman, a partisan reporter who usually occupies herself with defending people like Dick "Turban" Durbin.

The article's title is "Labor split could shift Democrats," 800 plus words that discusses the ephemera surrounding the split in the AFL-CIO without ever mentioning such things as union corruption, organized crime and using forced union dues - carefully skirting obvious violations of the Beck decision - to finance liberal Democrat campaigns.

For those interested in the truth, we offer the following; why none of this appears in mainstream media and newspapers discussions of big labor politics, we will leave up to the good judgment of the reader.

Don't Call AFL-CIO Dissidents "Reformers" - Breakaway Unions Among Most Corrupt In Nation

July 26, 2005 - Washington, DC - PipeLineNews.org - Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), today commented on the boycott of the AFL-CIO convention this week by several unions, and the announcement that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Teamsters will leave the AFL-CIO.

Boehm said, "The biggest problem facing organized labor today is not a disagreement over strategy. It is declining membership. Workers do not believe union bosses represent their interests. Corruption remains a huge problem in unions like the Teamsters, Laborers, SEIU and UNITE-HERE. Ironically, it is the most corrupt unions that are among the dissidents. It would be inaccurate to call them reformers."

Boehm continued, "The reason for the split may be more mundane than expressed in the media so far. To be sure, there are differences over the future of organized labor, but the real dispute is over who gets the spoils of dues monies. Unions that leave the AFL-CIO don't have to pay their dues, including millions in back dues." Boehm pointed to the corruption problems in the dissident unions:

1. Teamsters -- The Teamsters continue under Justice Department oversight, with no end in sight. Last year, former federal prosecutor Edwin Stier, who had been hired by the Teamsters to clean up the union, resigned. Stier charged that Teamsters President James Hoffa had "backed away" and "inexplicably retreated" from anticorruption efforts. Earlier this year, a top aide to Hoffa by the name of Carlow Scalf, whom Stier had accused of protecting mob interests in the Teamsters, was suspended from the union for allegedly embezzling nearly $70,000, in the form of a fake housing allowance.

2. Laborers -- In 1994, the Justice Department alleged in a draft Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Complaint, "LIUNA union officers and employees at all levels, including the general presidency, have been chosen, subject to the approval of, and have been controlled by, various members and associates of organized crime." The Clinton administration agreed to an "internal reform" program in lieu of filing the racketeering suit. Internal reform has proven a failure.

3. UNITE-HERE -- Co-president John Wilhelm is a long-time associate, defender and successor to Ed Hanley, HERE boss from 1973-98. A 1977 Justice Department report said Hanley was named HERE president by Chicago crime boss Joey Aiuppa. During 1984 Senate testimony, Hanley took the Fifth Amendment 36 times. In 1995, a court-appointed monitor removed Hanley, accusing him of a wide range of corruption, including operating a "ghost" local in Rhinelander, Wisconsin where Hanley had a vacation home. Wilhelm was asked in 1999 whether Hanley was corrupt on NBC's Dateline. He replied "not in my view" and asserted his belief that everything Hanley did was "entirely legal."

4. SEIU -- SEIU President Andrew Stern was implicated but never charged in the 1996 Teamsters money-laundering scandal. One of the most well-publicized scandals in recent years concerned SEIU local 32B-32J in New York City. Its president, Gus Benova, was forced out in the wake of allegations of a lavish lifestyle, authoritarian rule and possible mob ties.

For further information, NLPC sponsors the Organized Labor Accountability Project, and publishes Union Corruption Update every two weeks. Information on corruption in these and other unions is archived on NLPC's website.

© 1999-2005 PipeLineNews.org, all rights reserved.

2005-07-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

Op-Ed By CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper, A "Moderate Friend Of Terror"*

On Saturday's reader's page, we find an Op-Ed from a now all too familiar source, at least in the main stream media.

Ibrahim Hooper.

Mr. Hooper is a Saudi Wahhabi mouthpiece, and spokesman for the Council on Islamic American Relations [CAIR].

Mr. Hooper is the media created, perfect caricature of the faux moderate Muslim.

Hooper seems to be upset - “while his own bigoted screed echoes those of the most vile anti-Muslim polemicists” - regarding Cal Thomas' spot on characterization of Islam. His response follows the militant Muslim line perfectly.

You see here is what the problem really is, of course we are picking on the CC Times here but nearly all major media display the same defect, even the Fox Network, not Fox News per se, but the Network bean counting geeks in LA who seem intent on piddling away early successes.

First, a very quick background on CAIR for those not familiar with the organization [and Mr. Hatfield I personally spoke with Mr. Hooper at length Friday morning, when was the last time you spoke with him and pushed him to the wall regarding his phony takiyya*].

Fact: CAIR is funded by the Saudi Royal Family

Fact: The Saudi Royal Family is the motive force behind Wahhabism. The Wahhabi sect originated in 18th century Arabia. Wahhabism is the driving force behind al-Qaeda and bin-Laden. Wahhabi interests, funded by the Saudis, now dominate nearly all the so-called moderate American Islamic organizations [CAIR, ICNA, MAS, ISNA etc.]. In addition these same immoderate radicals are the ones who have built approximately 80% of American Mosques.

Fact: Hooper is cut from this mold and his organization is an outgrowth of the Islamic Association of Palestine, the IAP is Hamas.

The current director of CAIR is a Mr. Nihad Awad. Awad is the former communications director for the IAP and CAIR in its infancy shared IAP resources.

What Mr. Hatfield and Mr. Lopez probably don’t even know is that three members of CAIR are now in jail on terrorism charges.

You guys do know that don’t you?

The first guy on this list faces 210 years in jail, on Federal terror charges. He will be sentenced in Texas on August 1. [Mr. Lopez, you will cover that won’t you?]

CAIR's terrorist connections : Ghassan Elashi, founding board member of CAIR's Texas chapter and businessman convicted of terrorism-related charges on April 14, 2005. According to AP "Ghassan and Bayan Elashi and their company were found guilty of all 21 federal counts they faced: conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist...The brothers, all born in the Middle East, were convicted the same day jurors began deliberating, after nearly two weeks of testimony, and are to be sentenced Aug. 1. Prosecutors said each count carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence."

Of course AP failed to mention Elashi's leadership role in CAIR.

Bassem Khafagi former director of Community Relation for CAIR, plead guilty to bank and visa and has been deported to Egypt. According to Fox News, "The FBI said Khafagi is a founding member of the Islamic Assembly of North America, a charity that purports to promote Islam...Federal investigators said Islamic Assembly has funneled money to activities supporting terrorism and has published material advocating suicide attacks on the United States."

Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, a former communications & civil rights specialist for CAIR, according to AP "Royer...admitted helping members of the conspiracy join the militant Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. He pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting use of a firearm in a crime of violence and aiding and abetting the carrying of an explosive during commission of a felony. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison."

Siraj Wahhaj CAIR advisory board member named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman bomb plots by US Prosecutor Mary Jo White; Rahman is serving a life sentence.

Ok, now you know the picture regarding CAIR, and trust me it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Here is what the real problem is, aside from allowing a terror-friendly schmuck like Hooper to pollute the CC Times Op Ed page.

The real problem is the pervasiveness of multiculturalism in the newsroom.

Multiculturalism is a corrosive political theory, force-fed at every major journalism school in the United States, which preaches that all cultures, all peoples and all religions are morally equivalent.

It is this theory which gives Mr. Hooper the imprimatur to spew his filth on the pages of the CC Times as if he was on the same moral plane as Mother Theresa.

That’s it for this segment, there will be more to come, much more CC Times Watch is just hitting its stride.

Oh...final item, still on a multicultural tear.

Page A11, "Muslims protest targeting by police" a piece picked up from the revisionists at AP.

This will be short and sweet.

Mr. Lopez, the country in question in the above piece is Pakistan. Pakistan has been an Islamic republic since the 1940s. The official, and really only religion, allowed is Islam.

The president of Pakistan is a Muslim, the minister of defense is a Muslim, the provincial dog-catchers are Muslim. It's a Muslim society which is in great part governed by the traditions of Sharia - Islamic - law.

Question: How can such a society be accused of anti-Muslim activity?

As usual...ball in your court, one of these days we are going to meet in debate, you had better prepare yourself.

Resources:

*Moderate Friends of Terror - a phraseaology originated by Dr. Daniel Pipes, former State Dept. diplomat and internationally reputed authority on Islam. Dr. Pipes has characterized CAIR as "Moderate Friends of Terror."

*Takiyya - religiously-sanctioned deception to protect or promote Islam, which has its roots in the Koran and experiences of Mohammad himself.

Imam Abu Hammid Ghazali says: "Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible." - Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, The Reliance of the Traveler, translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Amana publications, 1997, page 745, Al-Ghazali is a famous and well-respected Muslim theologian.

2005-07-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

Mr. Hatfield Steps In It Again

Penning another of his 400 word wonders, editorialist, Dan “Jack Daniels” Hatfield wonders aloud if America is somehow being thrust back to the 1960s, when the dreaded FBI actually had the temerity to investigate communists and anti-American revolutionaries.

“The goal was to crush public opposition to the Vietnam War and destroy an emerging civil rights movement.”

Written by a twenty-something college kid, the above would simply be laughable, coming from a supposed newsman in the middle of a very real war on terror, it’s a display of near criminal stupidity leavened with multicultural gobbledygook.

During the 1960s the anti-war movement was far more than bodies in the streets.

It was the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, domestic terrorism, a committed effort by Soviet Union [abetting an extensive Soviet domestic spy network] and the American media "coming together" [in the words of John Lennon] to undermine our will to resist a communist [that Lenin guy, Vladimir Illych] takeover of South Viet Nam, which unfortunately worked.

It was also people like John Kerry plotting with fellow radicals to assassinate pro-war American Senators, though Mr. Hatfield will never broach that subject for obvious reasons.

For some reason Mr. Hatfield and the media in general thinks that the ACLU is the shining star of American juridical thinking, avoiding the nasty truth that the organization was originally formed to defend communists and anarchists who were, during the 1920s carrying out domestic terror attacks – bomb attacks – against government officials and other – civilian – targets.

The ACLU was founded in 1920 for the sole reason of coming to the defense of those unfortunates scooped up by the Federal government in what were later called the "Palmer Raids." For those of you too young to remember - or who were attending anti-war demonstrations when the man wanted you to be in history class - Attorney General - Mitchell Palmer's - raids were set up – as Mr. Hatfield might allege - to “deny freedom of speech to a group of minor league Bolshevik bombers.”

Mitchell Palmer’s home was destroyed in one of these bombings, and imagine…Palmer was Woodrow Wilson’s AG – a Democrat, back when being one meant it was acceptable to be a patriot.

Dan [can we be less formal now?] might even argue that it was the Federal government’s restraint of the First Amendment during this period that clearly started the process that led to the Patriot Act - today's right-wing Christian Crusade against the religion of peace - Islam.

The ACLU’s difficult birthing process aside Mr. Hatfield ends his little flashback to Groove Ville with a quote from Senator Frank Church [D, ID] a pompous ass of a man and probably the person most singularly responsible for the intelligence failures of 9/11 [no I am NOT going to do your homework for you kiddies, read the 911 report], a man who sought to destroy the CIA and the FBI because that’s what good leftists do when they have access to power.

“The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers a threat to the established order.”

The fact that Mr. Hatfield is so unbelievably wrong headed is a major reason why you read what you read in the CC Times, of course Mr. Lopez, whose job it’s supposed to be to make story selection and coverage decisions will argue – with Mr. Hatfield right at his side – that he calls the shots but having such blatant leftist revisionism at the top is like the universal solvent – it thoroughly permeates the publication, as any reasonably fair minded observer can attest.

© 2005 - CC Times Watch, all rights reserved.

2005-07-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

That Great Sucking Sound

Tuesday evening's announcement of the Roberts nomination by President Bush has temporarily sucked all of the air out of the DC MS press.

As a byproduct, for one glorious day the CC Times assumed the look and shape of a reasonable approximation of a real newspaper and not a wholly owned publication of the MoveOn/Democrat machine, printed in the basement of the DNC.

Coverage of Mr. Roberts was respectful and balanced.

Narry a mention was made of Karl Rove or - thankfully - Liar Joe Wilson or his press conference guru, Senator Chuckie Schemer [D NY]

Editor Hatfield seemed to adopt the current Dem line however in his mini-edi on Roberts, long on decorum and stentorian tone which in reality translates into "keeping the powder dry" until a nanny-event can be conjured up.

Such is fine with us, we will return on the heels of the wind tomorrow to weigh in again.

Iraq Good News Multimedia

The following is an audio clip of a short interview with Gen. George Casey, done in the Bagdhad area recently. Please note his observation that Iraqi Army recruits are daily demonstrating courage and an ability to conduct themselves as professional soldiers, and that they are rising to the extreme challenge that they face.

As we noted a few days ago, good news coming from Iraq is not hard to find, what is hard to find is MS media sources willing to carry the good news and MS media "journalists" willing to personally venture out of the local press hangout bars in Iraq and start acting like reporters instead of sending Iraqi kids out to shoot video of IED bombings and simply adding copy to those images.

WMAL 630's Michael Graham interviews Gen. George Casey

2005-07-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

Bush Nominates A True Conservative, DC Circuit's John Roberts

Deftly manipulating the main-stream media with a series of head-fakes, President Bush has simultaneously quashed the rumblings in conservative circles [over the rumored nomination of Judge Edith Brown Clement] and thrown the left into a state of apoplexy with his nomination of John Roberts to sit on America's high court.

Roberts brings with him an impressive set of conservative credentials.

Mr. Roberts holds a BA [summa cum laude] from Harvard University where he also obtained his J.D. [magna cum laude] he currently sits on the D.C. Circuit of the US Court of Appeals.

Before his appointment to the DC Circuit, Roberts was a partner in the DC powerhouse law firm of Hogan & Hartson where he managed the firm's appellate practice and argued numerous cases before the SCOTUS.

Roberts also served prominently in the Reagan Administration as Associate Counsel to the President and in the GHW Bush Administration as Deputy Solicitor General.

On right-to-life issues Roberts is exactly what conservatives have been hoping for, he has stated that Roe v Wade is bad law.

Offered in evidence of his bona fides on this issue, Roberts was the author of the brief in Rust v. Sullivan which prohibited U.S. family planning programs receiving federal aid from giving any abortion-related counseling or other services. The vote on the SCOTUS on this decision was 5-1-3 with O'Connor dissenting from the majority.

Roberts supports the view that prayer in public schools is not necessarily inconsistent with the First Amendment, he supports reasonable limits on the rights of criminal defendants, is a strong proponent of private property rights and is especially conversant with the "taking clause" of the US Constitution,

He is viewed as friendly to White House thinking on environmental policy and the war on terror, the latter area was viewed as a possible negative for 4th Circuit Judge J. Michael Luttig.

A left-wing 501c3 summed up Judge John Roberts as a nominee - "one of the few judges most likely to be very controversial to left wing groups, but be seen as a quality judge by both the public and the seven Democrats who signed the filibuster deal."

2005-07-18T15:14:00.000-07:00

Multiculturalism In Excelsis Deo

Front page item of interest, "Conference lures left's faith leaders - Sold out Berkeley event seeks a spiritually based alternative to religious right" by Randy Myers.

Featuring anti-traditionalist crackpots such as "rabbi" Michael Lerner and Matthew Fox, the pro-abortion, pro gay marriage, excommunicated Catholic priest turned Episcopalian; this little get together gave lip service to the "progressive" dilemma caused in large part by the left's rejection of America's Judeo/Christian heritage.

"...the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives" and "continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats." John N. Hostettler (R-IN)

With Howard Dean's recently uttered disparaging statement that the GOP is "pretty much a white, Christian party" still reverberating around the culture, the main stream media - in the personage of the CC Times - gives serious coverage to a bunch of fakirs and liars who simply are attempting to fool people into thinking they are not what they appear to be - hard core lefties so craven that they now are consciously employing religious motifs in furtherance of continued subterfuge.

By "spirituality" what these yahoos are seeking is some belief structure which will allow them to avoid moral judgment of their personal actions, but at the same time lend them faux bona fides as "caring believers" in something/anything as long as it is consistent with the over-riding mantra that Bush is Hitler.

Bottom line they are interested in good press, and of course the Times is only happy to oblige them. Our more learned readers might observe that the left has already found its moral compass, having in large part embraced the secular religion of humanism.

Request - Spare us, Mr. Lopez from the nitwit journalism schools' cultural leveling programs and spare your reporters from having to attend such puffery in the future.

This is not about religion anymore than NAMBLA is about love.

One More

This one also from the Monday front-page profile "He takes care of business by taking care of others."

What else is there to say? "social justice" proponents interviewing "social justice" care providers, predictable and sad.

Rove Rash

Page A13, "Rove 'said too much,' Cooper says," is the CC Times headline grafted on to the Howie Kurtz WashPost piece.

Funny thing is that the WashPost titled it "Reporter: Rove Told Him of Plame's CIA Tie Bush Adviser Did Not Say She Was A Covert Operative"

Hmmmm...the original headline seems to exonerate Mr. Rove, doesn’t it?

Now why would your headline writer do that Mr. Lopez, unless it was the writer's intention to spin the story from the get go?

This affair, as we pointed out in our last entry, is a non-story. No crime has been committed here, 36 major news organizations - including the New York Times and the WashPost - filed a legal brief in March attesting to that fact:

"The 40-page brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, argues that there is "ample evidence . . . to doubt that a crime has been committed." - WashPost March 24, 2005

Joe The Liar Wilson is a Democrat operative and a political hack:

"Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both." Joe The Liar Wilson.

Yet Judith Miller is in jail.

Mr. Lopez, Karl Rove has released Cooper and Miller from any confidentiality agreement, so it seems that if Miller isn't singing, then Rove isn't the one that "outed" Plame's relationship with the CIA, certainly one of the least well kept secrets in DC in a long time.

Why in your editorial opinion, is this a story...aside from the fact that you and the media seem to want to make it a story?

2005-07-14T17:40:00.000-07:00

Rovin’ Rovin’ Rovin’

Thursday July 14, 2005

We feel it time to discuss the "Rove Affair" in some detail, since Mr. Lopez keeps sneaking it in and now Dan Hatfield, Lopez' boss has weighed in [in a lightweight manner] with a mini-editorial that seems to be lifted from Dan Froomkin's oddly similar piece in the WashPost, that may just be a coincidence since we know the left marches in lockstep and has a single track mind but the similarity is striking regardless.

Mr. Hatfield asserts "Bush vowed to fire anyone responsible for divulging classified information, however the White House seems reluctant to make good on that promise."

Yet there is a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald [called for by President Bush] and a Grand Jury, whose investigations continue, so it appears to be Hatfield’s contention that it would be proper for the chief law enforcement official in the United States to comment about a member of his own staff with regard to an ongoing investigation.

That is preposterous, Mr. Hatfield and you probably know it.

Let's tell the truth Dan, Matt Cooper is the husband of Mandy Grundwald, the Democrat's top political consultant, architect of Clinton's 1992 campaign and Hillary's Senate run. There is the mark of "gotcha" all over this caper. You do realize that don't you?

Matt Cooper was not once but TWICE told by Karl Rove and his attorney that he was free to disclose the exact and entire content of his two minute discussion with Karl Rove, a discussion that Cooper started on a totally different subject but then switched to the now controversial topic.

Earth to Mr. Hatfield, Rove has cleared Matt Cooper to sing like a canary.

Funny thing is, that the New York Times has already declared that "there was no crime committed" so it's kind of difficult to figure out what got you so darned keyed up.

As a start, you might want to familiarize yourself with what the non-disclosure law, written in 1982 is all about. It was designed to stop Phillip Agee a leftist who used to "out" covert CIA agents, in the process getting one killed.

Phillip Agee was tremendously admired by Democrats Mr. Hatfield. Agee was really just carrying on, following the path established by guys like Democrat Frank Church who tried to kill the CIA in 1975.

Suggestion: You might have wanted to read the operative section of the legislation at issue before simply jumping on anti-Rove/Bush bandwagon.

We are providing it here for your edification:

"Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual's classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined not more than $15,000 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both."

In order to rise to the level of an offense against this legislation -

1. The leaker had to know the agent was covert

2. The disclosure had to be part of a pattern

3. The leaker had to believe that the information would impair US Intel

4. The leaker had to know that the analyst's status was classified material

5. That the agent had to have been on assignment in a foreign country within the last 5 years

6. That the leaker must have acted intentionally, knowing that it was the government's intention to take "affirmative measures to conceal [the agent's] relationship."

None of the above applies to Rove, even assuming that he was the source.

There was NO CRIME committed here, none, except the crime of attempted murder of Karl Rove's character by people like the NY Times, the Washpost and lower level operatives like you Mr. Hatfield and Mr. Lopez, who simply won't leave this non-story alone.

Now...what is this really about?

It's about Joe The Liar Wilson.

Joe The Liar is a Democrat operative, he has given large amounts of money to Democrat candidates including John Kerry, Wilson was a foreign policy advisor to the Kerry campaign, Mr. Hatfield, did that escape you?

Joe Wilson was sent to Niger upon the advice of his wife, Ms. Plame a CIA WMD analyst.

Wilson lied about his trip to Niger, he stated that the Vice President sent him. Mr. Cheney denies not only sending Wilson but even knowing him.

Wilson lied before the Senate Intel Committee when he denied that his wife had anything to do with his selection for the Niger trip.

Wilson lied about the substance of the report to the CIA the crux of which was:

"the most important fact in the Joe Wilson report was that the Nigerian officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerian Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium..." - Senate Intel Hearings July 7, 2004

Pat Roberts [R-KS], the chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has a rather unfavorable take on Liar Joe:

"[Wilson] seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the intelligence community would have or should have handled the information he provided...Time and again Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president had lied to the American people...and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa....Not only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe [the British report was] true."

Mr. Hatfield read the Senate report, here is the link Prewar Intel Assessment on Iraq

Mr. Hatfield, with all due respect you simply are a poor journalist, you haven't even done the research on this subject necessary to have an opinion, let alone blabber it all over the CC Times Editorial page.

Rove's role in this non-affair was to warn Matt Cooper, husband of the Democrat's most powerful consultant, who will be running Hillary's '08 campaign, that the Wilson story was a bad one, that Wilson was - and of course Mr. Rove would never use such harsh language - A LIAR!

That's about all the time this story deserves.

Mr. Hatfield, we offer the following image taken by Joe The Liar Wilson of him and his wife Valerie Plame, the CIA analyst, in front of the White House. As you can see protection of Plame's identity as an operative meant nothing to either of them because she was a desk jockey at best.

Everyone who ever met Joe The Liar Wilson knew that his wife was a CIA analyst because he had a big mouth. The Wilsons have been involved in this for two reasons

1. To capitalize on it monetarily via Joe The Liars Book.

2. To attempt to thwart the foreign policy objectives of President Bush.

2005-07-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Wednesday July 13, 2005 - Good News From Iraq - It's Not Hard To Find

We thought that while Mr. Lopez consults his handlers at Knight Ridder central about possibly considering some semblance of fairness in the CC Times war coverage - can you say YOST? - that we would show him how easy it is for just about anyone to get accurate, reliable and positive news from Iraq, not because of any intent to present the war as anything but a tough go, but to show that every single day, large strides are being made by the brave Iraqi people towards a free society & underwritten by America and its global partners in the war on Islamic terror.

That's right Mr. Lopez - THE WAR ON ISLAMIC TERROR.

Note: contrary to the usual pretend news that the CC Times features on Iraq, people are not just standing around on streetcorners waiting to get blown up by foreign terrorists.

We pulled the following news together in about 15 minutes using English language Iraqi Newspapers and some combined Iraqi sources.

Contact Us, Join The Battle - Contra Costa Times Watch

Major Terrorist Captured By Iraqi Forces

July 14, 2005 - Baghdad, Iraq - PipeLineNews.org - Iraqi security forces yesterday captured 78 terrorists in combined operations. The dragnet including the apprehension of one of the most wanted men in Baghdad - Ammar Howaidi- who is connected to Mola-Mahd a faction thought part of the Jordanian al-Qaeda mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's terror network.

Hoadid was captured disguised in a woman's dress in a bulletproof car which contained an assortment of weapons.

In separate actions, the Iraqi 4th Special Forces Division captured 5 suspected terrorists and a huge quantity of weapons and explosives.

On the previous day U.S forces arrested a council member in Samara province - Shiekh Talal Abd Al-Kareem Mattar. Mattar is accused of having carried out a series of attacks against American forces.

Iraqi Government Slashes Taxes, Civil Servants Salaries Increase Substantially in Last Two Years

By Sameer Nasser

July 13, 2005 - Azzaman News Service - Iraq has slashed income tax to 15% from 49% and substantially increased the minimum sums individuals can earn net of tax. The progressive tax system replaces a 1982 law under which individuals had to pay 49% of income beyond certain salary brackets.

The current tax system is progressive. It starts with 3% up to a maximum of 15%.

“The figures show that there is a huge gap between the former and current income tax systems,” said head of Tax Authority Muhssen Abujuaila. Parents’ income is only taxable if together they earn more than 4.5 million dinars. Besides, there are allowances of 400,000 dinars annually for each child.

Previously, annual incomes beyond 1.6 million dinars were taxed. Under the former regime civil servants were exempt from tax because of their meaningless salaries. On average a civil servant would earn 5,000 dinars (two U.S.) dollars a month.

Salaries of civil servants have increased substantially in the past two years, with many of them earning more than one million dinars a month. Companies have seen their taxes slashed from 35% to 15%.

Major Baghdad Housing Project Nearly Completed

By Mohammed Mustafa

July 10, 2005 - Assaman News Service - A state-run construction firm has completed 70% of a major housing project in Baghdad, the Ministry of Housing and Reconstruction said. The project in Sabaa Abkar consists of 48 buildings and is expected to cost $5 million.

The project covers an area of 72,500 square meters and includes a school, car parks and paved roads in addition to a 240-square meter market place. There are two flats in each floor of the three-storey buildings. The flats are spacious to meet needs of traditionally large families in Iraq. The average area of each of the 288 flats is 115 square meters.

The project is one of several currently being implemented in Baghdad and other Iraqi provinces. The country faces an acute housing crisis which has seen property prices rise to unprecedented levels.

All housing contracts in the country, worth millions of dollars, are being executed mainly by state-run construction companies. The state-run al-Mansour Contracting Firm is building the Sabaa Abkar flats and is currently involved in major housing projects in Iraq.

A 48 Hour Listing of Recent [approx June 28-30] Important Iraqi Actions Against Terrorists

1st regiment/2nd commandoes brigade arrested 43 suspects in Al-Doura district while the 2nd regiment/1st brigade arrested 2 terrorists in Shu'la district.

-The interior ministry announced the beginning of operation lightning-1 in Babil province which is going to be a joint effort between the Army and the local police forces. The 1st wave of raids resulted in arresting 43 suspects and confiscating 10 vehicles used in terror attacks against Iraqi civilians and security forces.

-A force from the Iraqi army backed by Polish troops raided terrorists hides in the areas of Jibla and Rashad in the same province and arrested 8 terrorists and confiscated their Ak-47's.

-Police forces in Kerbala arrested 20 terrorists and confiscated 6 suspicious vehicles and disarmed 2 vehicle-born bombs.

-In Zangora area near Ramadi, Iraqi and American troops arrested a terror cell leader named 'Jbair Grayen Al-Jiblawi who's one of Zarqawi's aides in Anbar province.

-In the north, 3 members of the Ansar Al-Sunna army were captured in Mosul; one of the 3 terrorists carried a Saudi ID.

-In Tikrit, multinational forces arrested 3 roadside bombs-makers and in Kirkuk 10 suspects were arrested. The men are supposed to be responsible for some missile attacks in the city.
Explosives' ingredients and blast capsules were found during the search of the arrest scene.

-In Abu Ghraib, Al-Muthana brigade arrested 19 terrorists and found amounts of weapons and detonation devices as well as vehicles that were prepared for performing terror attacks.

-In Al-Kasra neighborhood in Baghdad, IP men and American explosives experts failed an attack with a car bomb that was parked in the heavily crowded main commercial street in the district.
A shop keeper was suspicious of a car that was left in front of his shop, the driver claimed that the car broke and that he's going to find a mechanic but the shop keeper didn't believe the story and called the police and it was found later that the car contained a large bomb that was a mix of artillery shells, TNT rods and gas containers.
By 1 am, the area was evacuated and people were told to keep a distance from the car. The explosives experts detonated the car in its place as it was impossible to move it away. No casualties happened but there was some inevitable material loss in adjacent shops.

-In Tal-afar near Mosul, Iraqi and American troops killed 15 terrorists in clashes that took place yesterday.

-Police patrols in Dibis town arrested two terrorists while they were trying to plant a roadside bomb on the main street in the town.

-One of the most important successes was arresting one of Izzat Al-Douri's relatives along with 3 of his bodyguards.

-Iraqi TV announced Khalid Sulaiman Darwis (aka Abu Al-Ghadia Al-Soori) was killed during a raid as part of Operation Spear in Anbar province.
The Syrian terrorist is one of the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

2005-07-12T20:37:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 12, 2005 - Addendum.

Chris Lopez Editor of the CC Times writes in his 7/12/05 blog:

"One thought I had last night, in thinking about Iraq and all I read about it, is that it would be worthwhile to have a segment in the newspaper that speaks to the progress being made in rebuilding Iraq. The problem, as I look into it, is to find that type of content. The funny thing is that just as I began wondering if it was possible to run Iraq Progress Report updates, I find this criticism of the reporting coming out of Iraq from another Knight Ridder journalist. I'll be discussing with the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau the possibility of getting regular updates on progress in Iraq to balance the news stories on the challenges facing U.S. and Iraq military.

The point of doing this is not to appease those critical of the mainstream press on its reporting out of Iraq, but to better reflect and balance out the steady news that reports on the challenges the U.S. is having. As a reader of the newspaper, I want better updates on the progress being made as well I want to know the problems we're facing. As one reporter who had recently returned from Iraq to me, it's difficult for journalists to navigate the country to get the progress reports because it remains very dangerous to drive the country.

I understand that. I'd still like to find a way to deliver progress updates on a regular basis in our newspaper. I suspect the challenge is journalists feeling safe enough to venture out beyond the safe zones. It's easy for me to be second guessing what I'm getting, and as a journalist who has been in the reporting field on news stories many days, I can appreciate the fact that a reporter in the field is facing many hurdles that we cannot see sitting in the States. I'll have more conversations with Knight Ridder Washington to better comprehend the conditions under which reporters are working in Iraq."

The above is a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with the CC Times and by extension the main-stream press. In a word, or five...they are full of themselves, to a degree that is Grecian in its hubris.

Do professional journalists actually think this passes for introspection? We would rather believe such statements a straight out scam rather than accept the fact that the people who make such decisions are this shallow.

If the news coming out of Iraq is universally bad, well then it is certainly the business of the press to report it, to do otherwise i.e. create "a segment in the newspaper that speaks to the progress being made in rebuilding Iraq" just to somehow balance news of a sinking ship would be intentionally slanting the news.

There is good news and bad news coming out of Iraq. The empirical fact is that compared to, let's say February 2003, the month before the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, every single index of Iraqi welfare has improved. That statement is unassailable.

It is two years after the start of this process and only now, because the CC Times is getting pilloried in public opinion that the editor is THINKING about some semblance of balance.

That is an incredible statement, as is the following:

"it's difficult for journalists to navigate the country to get the progress reports because it remains very dangerous to drive the country."

Yet US forces live in these conditions daily, sometimes dying in nasty ways to protect the First Amendment right of flabby journalists to conceal the truth.

Mr. Lopez, in WWII journalists - guys like Ernie Pyle - served right along with the troops. They lived with the troops, they ate what the dogfaces ate, and sometimes they too, died in nasty ways with the troops.

What the media wants is everything; they want to be believed, they want credibility and at the same time they want to impose their worldview on their readers without having to even seriously cover the war because they might get hot, dirty or perhaps shot at or...gulp...beheaded by an 8th century psychotic who thinks he is doing Allah's bidding.

No, that just wouldn't do.

This item might have also had an impact on Mr. Lopez' sudden change of mind regarding the CC Times abominable MoveOn friendly war coverage.

Knight Ridder associate editor - St. Paul Pioneer Press - charges chain with "slanted reporting" on Iraq, from Editor & Publisher.

Pioneer Press editorial page associate editor Mark Yost complains about the "slanted reporting" from Iraq. "I know the reporting's bad because I know people in Iraq," writes Yost, whose Knight Ridder colleague, Yasser Salihee, was shot and killed in Iraq last month. "A Marine colonel buddy just finished a stint overseeing the power grid. When's the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up."

2005-07-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 12, 2005

The CC Times continues to beat the drum for the boondoggle that is transpiring in the wake of Prop 71 - an ill-considered anti-life measure that gave billions of taxpayer guaranteed dollars to promote human stem-cell research absent any evidence that private companies' efforts up to this point were inadequate - "UCSF sets pace on stem cells".

General coverage of stem cell research of course is always going to pit right-to-lifers against the pro-abortion at any cost media. Because of that the ethical questions surrounding the researches methodology will seldom be fairly presented. As a matter of fact if this research did not strike directly at the core of the right-to-life movement, the very idea of giving so much money to private corporations and researchers would have been attacked in the usual leftist matter, as a corporate giveaway to the rich, go figure.

Of note in today's paper, we observe the Muslim equivalency push is in full swing.

As noted in yesterday's edition of CC Times Watch, America's influential leftists newspapers such as the New York Times are making every effort to impress readers with the assertion that Muslims are really victims, going back to the events in Kosovo ten years ago to prove their point.

It's a shameless process.

On page A15 we see "London blast probe focuses on King's Cross - ...bombers still unidentified."

This is a Knight Ridder piece, the CC Times' parent company.

Bombers still unidentified??

Seems that al-Qaeda Europe took credit for the event almost immediately yet the "culturally sensitive" folks at Knight Ridder just can't bear to so inform their readership. Mr. Lopez do you believe that non-Muslim radicals were responsible for the London bombing, perhaps some of Jerry Falwell’s people?

On the same page twice as much space [dispensing with the column inch calculations today] is devoted to the remembrance of Srebrenica, "Event marks slaughter of Muslims" and more allegations of mistreatment of terrorist suspects in Iraq "10 arrestees die in Iraqi custody" than the London slaughter of innocents by Muslim bombers.

Mr. Lopez what does it take to get some sort of fair play in the CC Times?

Now on to a story which the editor is so-far wisely downplaying, the concerted media/Democrat/MoveOn/George Soros attack on Karl Rove. We will not go into this story in detail unless the Times pushes it harder.

Suffice it to say that Joe Wilson is a liar and a democrat political operative of the lowest order, who has milked his phony African uranium story to little real effect.

Karl Rove has done nothing wrong and the vitriolic, rude behavior by the national press during Scott McClellan's briefing yesterday would have NEVER happened during the Clinton years.

Mr. Lopez, tread lightly on this one, the only people calling for Mr. Rove's dismissal are the losers, the Democrats, who can no longer seem to win elections.

If the New York Times wanted to clear up, really clear up who was guilty of leaking the Plame identity, they would tell their jailed reporterette to come clean.

Of course that would exhonerate Rove and then the New York Times and the rest of the increasingly irrelevant old-media would no longer be able to act like children at White House press briefings.

2005-07-11T07:20:00.000-07:00

Monday July 11, 2005

Today's CC Times front page displays another of the paper's weak spots - sensationalism.

Most of the lead page is taken up - and nearly a full interior page - is devoted to an article entitled "Dangerous or disparaged," about the supposed public crisis caused by aggressive breed dog attacks.

First let's state for the record that fatal attacks in the United States on humans by dogs, is not now, never has been nor ever will be a significant public danger.

The CDC [which the article does mention] lists 30 fatal dog attacks since 1975, an average of one a year in a nation of nearly 300 million people.

Despite that fact, the CC Times devotes nearly 160 column inches to this non-story.

To be fair, the article does present both sides of the issue, though the story is dominated by images, not text or any real in-depth analysis and thus fails as a major analytical piece.

Major point; - this should be obvious. Why devote such effort and space to a non-problem when doing so merely inflames public opinion on an issue that can be so easily manipulable, unless demagoguery is the intent in the first place? It's trash journalism.

Minor point; - seems that the only way Iraq or the war on terror can make it into the Times is if the stories selected represent bad news. Page A9 features 3 negative stories on the war in Iraq, the only news coverage in this issue; we will leave our first major analysis of the Times’ war coverage for another time.

2005-07-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

Sunday July 10, 2005

Let's concentrate on dueling stories in today's CC Times. Please turn to your A15 section.

As we get deeper in analyzing and pointing out the left-wing bias of the main stream press, using the CC Times as a tool, we want to quickly explain the measurement index called column inches, which newspaper men and women use to express the physical space taken up on a page by a story.

Most newspapers use a 6 column format. Therefore a page is 6 columns wide by 21" deep, yielding a total of 126 column inches...let us proceed.

Sunday's "Nation and World" section features two major stories, one, in left hand column position - "Srebrenica massacre haunts Bosnia" and the other, right hand border position - "Explosions separated by seconds."

The Bosnia story, - picked up from the New York Times which recounts, from a Muslim perspective, atrocities committed against them in Kosovo civil war. This story comprises 48 column inches.

The London bombing story - also picked up from the New York Times comprises 24 column inches, so immediately one must assume that the commemoration of a 10 year old, extremely skewed retelling, of a story - a Muslim friendly story - trumps the follow-up to the most deadly Islamic terrorist attack on the West since 911.

Now the editor of the CC Times could have chosen a number of stories regarding the London bombing from the Sunday edition of the New York Times, they could have chosen the Muslim unfriendly story "For a Decade, London Thrived as a Busy Crossroads of Terror” By ELAINE SCIOLINO and DON VAN NATTA Jr., but they did not.

Instead they chose a boiler plate piece which does not mention Muslim, Islam or al-Qaeda even once. With no perspective, how is one to even gauge an event? It is as if the London underground simply spontaneously detonated.

Major Point; - this is one of the ways that editors use their general news coverage, through the mechamism of story selection, to push a particular viewpoint.

The CC Times buys into the moral equivalency game, using media generated stories detailing war atrocities against Muslims to demonstrate a "sense of fairness" as contrasted against the Muslim atrocities currently being undertaken, world wide by militant Islam. This is an insidious process, one which ultimately leads to Holocaust denial. The media moguls do not want to leave its readership with the impression that Islam is not as morally ethical as Christianity - this is called multiculturalism and it is a POISONOUS philosophy.

We do not have the time to go into the intricacies of Albanian politics here or minutely examine just what happened in the Kosovo region of the Balkans from World War II onward - or even, going farther back, since the 1300s when the Islamic Ottoman Turks brutally and systematically carried out the first war of genocide against Balkan Christians as part of their push across Central Europe. But what one must understand is that Kosovar Muslims, from the period where they collaborated with Mussolini's Fascists through the time when they joined Hitler's SS to exterminate Jews, were complicit as perpetrators of the Holocaust.

In short, the Kosovar Muslims were allied with Adolph Hitler and fought along side the Fascists in World War II against the Allies - the Americans, French and the Brits.

This fact of course seldom appears in the major media of the Western press - if you have any doubts about this please consult your history books or do a simple internet search for key phrase "nazi muslim kosovo."

Additional point; - The assignment of page space [column inches] to various stories, is an editorial function. What the Times' management, led by Chris Lopez, is telling us is that Bosnian atrocities committed against Muslims 10 years ago are more important than Islamic terror being waged against the West today.

That my friends is what media bias is all about.

2005-07-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

Mission Statement:

Knight Ridder's Contra Costa Times is an example of slanted print journalism.

Over the preceding 2 years, we have contacted the Times' editors frequently via the telephone and email pointing out glaring examples of left-wing bias, to no avail.

We are tired of sending "letters to the editor" which are never published, so we created this blog in the hopes of demonstrating - to a wider audience - our contention.

Because this is a small operation, we can not promise updates every day on a consistent basis, [we also apologize, from the get-go regarding occasional typos, we do not have an army of copy editors at our disposal, we do this on the fly and for free] but we will make an effort to chronicle what we believe is some of the worst journalism, in a minor newspaper, on the West Coast.

WATSON, THE GAME IS AFOOT!

The Saturday July 9, 2005 edition of the Contra Costa Times is another example of how the left-wing media twists the news in subtle and sometimes unsubtle ways.

1. Let's look at the front page:

"Toll reaches 50 in London Attacks"; two major stories, one from Knight Ridder, the other from America's most twisted left wing newspaper - the LA Times [Michael Kinsley a newspaperman? oh sure, right]. Neither piece prominently mentions al-Qaeda, odd since below is the message they issued claiming responsibility, which the CC Times chose not to publish.

"In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, may peace be upon the cheerful one and undaunted fighter, Prophet Muhammad, God's peace be upon him.

Nation of Islam and Arab nation: Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters.

We have repeatedly warned the British Government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid.

We continue to warn the governments of Denmark and Italy and all the Crusader governments that they will be punished in the same way if they do not withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He who warns is excused.

God says: "You who believe: If ye will aid (the cause of) Allah, He will aid you, and plant your feet firmly."

Major point; Since the Islamists [in this case, a heretofore unknown European al-Qaeda splinter group] have claimed credit for the London bombing, that fact along with the fact that the terror network is 100% Islamist in composition and uses the Muslim religion and the Quran as justification for its actions, needs to be prominently displayed.

On this count the CC Times fails, miserably

2. In a similar vein news of the Lodi al-Qaeda terror cell, which one might guess should have increased importance - in the wake of the London bombings and since it is located only 50 miles away from the Contra Costa Times' central office in Walnut Creek - only appears on page A7, only 21 column inches devoted to a major terrorism story.

Funny thing though, the CC Times which could clearly have daily access to Federal court documents in Sacramento on this case, doesn't really seem very interested, the report contained in the paper has merely been picked up from the Sac Bee.

Major point; Mr. Lopez, assign a full-time reporter to this case, if you want the Fed contacts we would be happy to provide them. This is an al-Qaeda terror cell with currently 10 potential jihadis under investigation and it is operating in your backyard, yet you don't seem to care. It certainly deserves more coverage than the story you placed next to it, another So. Cal fatal [5 killed] car crash caused by illegal Mexican aliens trying to evade the law.

The Lodi story belongs on the front page.

Minor point; re the car crash, Mr. Lopez these people are not undocumented immigrants, they are illegal aliens of Mexican origin, they are breaking the most important tenet of this society; that the United States is a nation of laws - stop the multicultural PC crap and level with your readers who are getting sick of your sleight of hand use of the English language.

3. Back to the front page...Scientology Enjoys Spotlight.

Ahem, Mr. Lopez, 44 column inches devoted to a kooky Hollywood cult and you think that it belongs on the front page, with more space devoted to it than the al-Qaeda London bombing?

I call that exceedingly poor editorial judgment.

4. Additional front page headline...Jobless rate dips to 9/11 levels - non payroll surreys are even brighter, hinting at busy immigrants, start-ups.

Why only devote 8 front page column inches to such a bright and uplifting economic story? That the US is able to have completely recovered - actually it recovered long ago as far as GDP is concerned - from the al-Qaeda terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001 is remarkable, considering the nature, expense and national sacrifice that patriots are making in the war on terror. Also, why is it necessary to mention immigrants? Is there a quota of times the word "immigrant" must appear within the confines of the CC Times every day?

Major point; this is an important news story, it certainly deserves better coverage than the 11 column inches that "Labor works way into schools" - a slanted multicultural goo-goo piece extolling organized labor's indoctrination of school children, abetted by the California Federation of Teachers - is given, which also appears on the front page.

5. Final item for today...Sports page..."Sobering reminders from Iraq"

Anyway to work in the anti-war angle, huh Mr. Editor?

Major point; Time was when the sports page was devoted to...well...sports, and not used as part of a shadow campaign designed to slant coverage - this practice constitutes the use of non-editorial space, in a manner unbecoming a journalistic enterprise, especially one that has continuously made the claim that it is not biased.

Mr. Lopez, the ball is in your court.

Contra Costa Times Watch

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Hot Lanes To Hell - A CC Times Vote For Gestapo Traffic Restrictions?

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK...AND WE'RE PISSED!

You Have Seen This, Right? - Obama VP Finalist - Little Johny Edwards - Busted In LA With Mistress And Love Child

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Phony Case Against Haditha Marines In Shambles, Charges Against Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani Dropped

Contra Costa Times Watch

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!Hot Lanes To Hell - A CC Times Vote For Gestapo Traffic Restrictions?

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK...AND WE'RE PISSED!You Have Seen This, Right? - Obama VP Finalist - Little Johny Edwards - Busted In LA With Mistress And Love Child

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!Phony Case Against Haditha Marines In Shambles, Charges Against Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani Dropped

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Hot Lanes To Hell - A CC Times Vote For Gestapo Traffic Restrictions?

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK...AND WE'RE PISSED!

You Have Seen This, Right? - Obama VP Finalist - Little Johny Edwards - Busted In LA With Mistress And Love Child

CONTRA COSTA TIMES WATCH IS BACK - AND WE'RE PISSED!

Phony Case Against Haditha Marines In Shambles, Charges Against Lt. Col Jeffrey Chessani Dropped