Last week, when we produced our “Pinchurian Candidate” video, we noted that New York Timesmen such as Frank Rich, had developed quite an idiosyncratic use of language; dubbing conservative Republicans in upstate New York “Stalinists” for wanting to replace a candidate who had run afoul of an incredible cross-section of the media, including the Weekly Standard, the Daily Kos and AP, with someone less tainted. Even though the Times itself had no problem with as odious a figure as Stalin while he was alive, or with more contemporary (one hesitates to dub them “modern”) totalitarian regimes such as Cuba, China, and North Vietnam.
And on Sunday, we noted that Times had decided to “Hide The Decline”, circle the wagons, and not discuss the specifics of the breaking global “warming” scandal because…
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
…Even though the Gray Lady had no problem publishing the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s, and a variety of secrets from the GWOT in recent years.
“Regardless, Glenn Reynolds is correct when he says, “every promise has an expiration date.”
Say what? Didn’t you mean to say, Glenn Reynolds is taking a false cheap shot at Obama, today like every day?
What kind of idiot didn’t notice that Obama campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan?
Did the same idiots not notice that Obama has already DOUBLED the number of troops in Afghanistan since taking office?
If you don’t know what in blazes you are talking about, then by all means, STFU, Glenn Reynolds.
Sometimes when we receive a comment or email that contains a personal attack, or unwarranted vulgarity, we run the IP address of the commenter to see where the comment might be coming from.
Imagine our surprise when the IP address for the above comment (IP: 170.149.100.10) resolved to the New York Times!
OrgName: The New York Times
OrgID: NYT-1
Address: 229 West 43rd Street
City: New York
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 10036
Country: US
RTechHandle: ZT84-ARIN
RTechName: The New York Times
RTechPhone: +1-212-556-1234
RTechEmail: hostmaster@nytimes.com
Our question… is this an intern or a staff member who is trolling blogs, sticking up for Progressive ideologues and telling Glenn Reynolds to “STFU?”
At a way to keep it real classy NYT!
As I said at the end of the “Pinchurian Candidate” video, Daniel Okrent, the Times’ first ombudsman, noted in 2004 that the Times was a liberal paper. Fair enough; but it’s the style of liberalism — a much more punitive strain than FDR, JFK, or LBJ would have presented, at least in public, that one questions, even though it’s very much in vogue at the moment, at both ends of the Northeast Corridor.
Update: If anything, the comments that Dan Riehl reports getting from the same IP address at his blog are even more refined and genteel.
Police arrested 18 SEIU Purple Shirts yesterday in San Francisco after their protest of city layoffs and budget cuts caused a traffic jam and massive headaches for other residents trying to commute to and from, you know, work:
Police arrested 18 members of the Service Employees International Union on Monday night after they blocked rush hour traffic on Market Street about a block from Civic Center Plaza to protest job cuts in the face of San Francisco’s budget deficit.
Protesters, trying to prevent 500 city workers from being laid off, reassigned or given smaller paychecks, had notified police ahead of time of their plans. Nobody was injured in the demonstration, police said. The demonstrators were cited and released with an order to appear later in court.
The SEIU also bragged about another disruptive caper in San Francisco on its blog last week:
“What does it take to get the mayor’s attention in this town?” was the question on their purple lips Thursday night (it was cold) after several dozen SEIU 1021 members and staff occupied Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, while hundreds more cheered them on inside and outside City Hall. It was a two-pronged tactic of escalating the San Francisco campaign through civil disobedience on top of public rallies…
…How the caper went down: Like a scheme from Ocean’s 11, SEIU 1021 had a 14-foot puppet and a crowd of hundreds to draw public attention–while inside the halls of power, a joint member-staff task force prepared to occupy the mayor’s office at any cost.
After changing into purple nursing scrubs in a conference room near the supervisors’ second floor offices, members seized advantage of an opened door to charge through the hallway past Newsom’s budget director’s office and into the wood-paneled lobby of Da Mayor’s office itself. That’s where they stayed for more than two hours, chanting and discussing and demanding to see the mayor, who never showed. Outside, hundreds of SEIU 1021 members and supporters rallied outside, holding signs reading “I Am a Woman” and dancing to Bob Marley’s anthemic “Get Up, Stand Up!”
After negotiating their release from the mayor’s office (they were locked in), members were greeted with wild cheers by most of the outside supporters.
What the SEIU won’t brag about is its own increasing isolation from other workers as a result of its militancy.
How interconnected is SEIU and President Obama? Last month, a clip from January 2008 began circulating of Obama as a newly-minted presidential candidate, as transcribed by Chelsea Schilling of World Net Daily:
During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:
“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”
Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. [More on that from Sammy Benoit at Pajamas -- Ed] “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”
He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
And more and more of the nation has the purple bruises to show from it.
VIDEONETDAILY Obama: ‘We’re going to paint nation purple with SEIU’ Explains how he ‘built political power on south side of Chicago’
During his campaign, President Obama boasted of his track record of working with the Illinois-based Service Employees International Union, helping it “build more and more power” – and he promised to “paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
In the following recently surfaced video from January 2008 posted by Breitbart, Obama told a group of SEIU workers that all presidential, gubernatorial and congressional candidates claim they are pro-union when they are looking for endorsements:
“They’ll all say, ‘We love SEIU,’” he said. “But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut? Do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way but also helping you organize to build more and more power?”
Obama referenced his background as a community organizer and his ties to SEIU Local 880, a union for homecare workers and home childcare providers in Illinois that first mobilized through Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
“I’ve been working with SEIU before I was elected to anything,” he said. “When I was a community organizer, SEIU local 880 and myself, we organized people to make sure that home-care workers had the basic right to organize. We organized voting registration drives. That’s how we built political power on the south side of Chicago.”
He continued, “And now the time has come for us to do it all across this country. We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”
The White House not only deliberately misled Congress on Walpin’s firing, they also withheld these new documents until after Grassley and Issa made their initial report on the investigation on Friday. As Byron York notes, that takes the traditional Friday-night document dump to a whole new level. It also completely refutes any claim on transparency and openness from this administration.
The new information shows that Obama fired Walpin for political purposes, not for cause. The White House also broke the law, at least initially, by not giving Congress the proper notification before terminating Walpin (they adhered to the regulation after being called on this violation by postponing Walpin’s termination date). The firing appears to have been motivated to protect an Obama ally (Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson) from having allegations of using federal funds to pay off employees and avoid sexual harassment charges exposed. The White House essentially smeared Walpin with completely unsubstantiated allegations of senility to undermine his credibility, once Walpin went public. One might think that the national media would take an interest in this, but as York also notes, their interest has never been very intense at all.
Inspectors general exist to check abuses of power and corruption, regardless of the party in power. An attack on them, especially one so nakedly political and potentially corrupt as Walpin’s firing, is an attack on accountability and citizen government. This case should be headlining major media outlets — and if the current president was a Republican, it no doubt would be.
Hey, they have more important stories to cover, as Kyle Smith writes in the New York Post:
Liberals in the media make heinous personal attacks, dress up quibbles and debating as “fact-checking” and compare her to such noxious harridans as Evita Peron and Madonna. Newsweek went with a cover photo of a picture of her in running shorts to degrade her to the level of a spokesmodel and Stephen Colbert broke character to call her book “a steaming pile of s – - -.” They called her a “deeply disturbed person” (Andrew Sullivan) “unhinged” (ibid), a “delusional fantasist” (ibid; Andrew’s been a busy lad) and even — this is really low — “the leader of the Republican party.”
To all of these liberal attacks I say: well played, my friends. Take a bow.
Hate-drunk Democrats are possibly not even aware of what a savvy political move they are carrying out.
By attacking the former governor of a state smaller by population than Westchester County, a woman whose chances of being the next president are about the same as Nancy Pelosi’s, Democrats aren’t wasting their time at all. They are distracting conservatives and changing the subject.
Conservatives should be, but aren’t, completely focused on one idea. It’s liberalism, stupid.
Last week, Obama looked exceptionally weak, naive and disingenuous, even for him: He got a knee in the face when he bowed to China; he admitted his promise to close Gitmo by January was the bloviation conservatives have always said it was; his attorney general invited terrorists to bring their Cirque du Jihad to New York so they can put the US national security apparatus on trial (and added that Obama wasn’t even part of the decision); the claims about stimulus-provided jobs turned out to involve lots of fictitious work in nonexistent congressional districts; a second Democratic senator threatened to help filibuster the health bill; and Afghanistan and Iran grew more dire as each hour brought the president inching ever closer to thinking about meeting to discuss the possibility of suggesting the next half-hearted response.
So what preoccupied the nation? Bill Belichick’s 4th and two call. And the book tour of an unemployed former governor of a very small state.
Today marks the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Back in 2007, I interviewed James Piereson about his then-new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, which looked at the enormous cognitive dissonance that descended upon the left in its wake.
And it may be permanent: Piereson has a new article comparing the left’s inability to process who shot JFK with the motivations of Nadal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter at the Weekly Standard. Click here to read it.
As the TechPresident blog noted recently, Obama’s admitting that he’s never used Twitter is a reminder that his campaigned lied when it demonized John McCain for being out of touch with the Internet. (Despite the YouTube and blog-savvy nature of the McCain camp doing much to keep his campaign competitive during the summer of 2008.)
In China, a student asked President Obama, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” You and I might have said, “Yes.” President Obama began, “Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” He went on, “I should be honest. As president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely, because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time.” Yet “in the United States, information is free.” And “I have a lot of critics . . . who can say all kinds of things about me.” And “I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”
You could argue that this is a clever, nuanced answer — not too brash. But isn’t the answer weirdly me-centric, Obama-centric? And doesn’t he argue from pragmatism — “It makes me a better leader”? How about principle: the principle of free speech, freedom of expression?
I really think a simple “yes” might have been better.
One more thing: Obama said, “There are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely.” Did he mean that, or was that just a matter of rhetoric?
Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!
On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:
Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
At Power Line, John Hinderaker writes, “We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets”:
The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees’ International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn’t toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.
Most recently it’s International ANSWER, a hard-core Communist group supported by shadowy funding sources that have never been made public, but appear to consist of a handful of rich people. ANSWER, notwithstanding its unabashedly Communist ideology, now feels comfortable enough to assault non-communist demonstrators who show up in the streets. In this case, the non-communists were protesting illegal immigration, seeking to uphold the nation’s laws, when they were set upon by ANSWER’s thugs:
Update: Welcome those stopping by from Instapundit — and however you’ve arrived here, don’t miss the incredible comment #6 below from “Carl Gordon”, which is that rarest of combinations: it’s both the Best. Comment. Ever. and Most-Hackneyed. Writing. Ever. all at the same time.
Headline via Paul McCartney and John Lennon, the flaming statue of Obama on cover of Time magazine by way of the an enthusiastic Chinese sculptor. I’m sure the mullahs in Iran are ordering copies of this satue, and plenty of lighter fluid for their offices:
The Chinese have learned English from his speeches and celebrated the way he rolls up his sleeves . [Only Nixon could to China, only Obama could go to Van Heusen--Ed] Now President Barack Obama is finally coming, and he’s being greeted with “Oba Mao” T-shirts and a statue of him that bursts into flames.
Oba Mao?! I’m sure Obama will pick a few of those for Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. More from the AP:
Sunday’s arrival of a U.S. president admired for his charisma is already a source of profit and brief fame for some Chinese.
Strangest is the burning Obama, tucked away in a Beijing warehouse. Artist Liu Bolin hopes Obama can take time from his visit to drop by.
“He’s so hot right now, so I wanted to translate that through my work,” said Liu, who was inspired by the idea of the first black U.S. president.
The bronze Obama bust is modeled on Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” cover and is speckled with holes for gas that ignites every couple of minutes.
It’s a positive work, Liu said.
“Yes, setting something on fire can have negative connotations, but this piece represents energy and life that Obama has given to the world,” said the 38-year-old, who made a similar piece for former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
“We’re eager to see what he can do for China and U.S. relations.”
I spoke too soon. What could wrong in Manhattan? Well, guess who’s stopping by Fun City for a trial: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:
U.S. prosecutors plan criminal trials for five men accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and military tribunals for five others held at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, self-described mastermind of the attacks, and four others will be tried in New York federal court. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday he expects to order prosecutors to seek the death penalty in the five cases.
Five other detainees held at the prison, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried in revamped military commissions, the Justice Department announced.
The prisoners won’t be transferred for weeks because of a law requiring at least 45 days notice to Congress before prisoner transfer from Guantanamo. Once brought to the U.S., the detainees will be held at the federal prison in New York.
Yet another reason why, as we begin to look back at the incredible clusterfarg that’s been 2009, the first year of the real life version of The West Wing has been even more improbable than its Hollywood counterpart, the Baseball Crank writes:
It’s impossible, really, to caricature this White House; even Josiah Bartlett didn’t run through this many liberal stereotypes in his first season. Obama needs new writers. Blow up the World Trade Center and kill 3,000 Americans? Jail! Don’t buy health insurance? Jail! Win the Nobel Prize for doing jack squat. Travel to Copenhagen to beg and grovel unsuccessfully for the Olympics, and pledge to go visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but blow off traveling to Berlin to commemorate the victory of freedom over Communism (then give a tepid speech on the subject that refuses to acknowledge Ronald Reagan). Commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland by unilaterally abandoning missile defense installations in Poland. Insult and disdain one faithful ally after another – Britain, India, Israel, Poland, Colombia, you name it – and cozy up to our enemies, with nothing to show for it – nothing to show for anything he’s done in foreign affairs. All but ignore democratic protests in Iran while supporting an illegal effort by Honduras’ president to stay on beyond the end of his term. Suddenly complain about corruption and electoral fraud in Afghanistan, while seeking the favor of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad and Vladimir Putin – heck, Obama endorsed half a dozen people in Chicago more corrupt than Hamid Karzai. On and on and on we go, with President Apology constantly straining to run down his country’s record and talk up the propagandized view of history of its enemies. He’s taken more time to “evaluate” General McChrystal’s recommendations about Afghan policy than it took George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan and capture Kabul after September 11. It would be funny if it wasn’t tragically stupid and bound to get people killed. There is no mistake of our past that Obama is unwilling to remake.
If there’s an upside to all this, after months of watching KSM up close, even liberal New Yorkers may be ready to give Dick Cheney a medal.
Ed Morrissey rhetorically asks, “What do we get from having the 9/11 plotters tried in criminal court in New York City?”
Well, we get to have the city painted as a big, bright target for terrorist action during the entirety of the trial. Thanks to press coverage, which should be an order of magnitude more obsessive than the OJ Simpson trial in LA fourteen years ago, jihadists will come out of the woodwork to make a big international splash, or more likely a boom. We also give KSM and his cohorts a big, juicy media platform for their bile. That was one of their motivations for conducting the attack in the first place, and we finally get to deliver it to them.
Read the whole thing.
Update: “Ask yourself this question: suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?”
In 2007, Bernadine Dohrn, Obama associate and former member of the Weather Underground terrorist group described living in America as being trapped in “the belly of the beast”:
We who are, as we used to say, in the belly of the beast … It again means not that we are the only purveyor of violence in the world, but that we have an extraordinary, special responsibility, not necessarily the most enviable one, of how to act here, inside the heart of the monster.
Which, while ordinarily disgusting language to describe America, seems oddly appropriate for this Obama-related story:
Despite all the evidence we have published that exposes ACORN as both corrupt and criminal, no other mainstream media organization has shown any signs of investigating ACORN despite countless angles and document trails. So I knew I had to go down to the protest on Bundy Drive to ask ACORN protesters a few questions.
With very little time I got in the car with Big Government Associate Editor Alex Marlow to meet Gary H. down at the protest. When we arrived, the protesters were fifty or so strong, monitored by a few police units standing to the side. Given that the police made me feel safe, I walked straight toward the chanting protesters while accepting an ACORN full-color single page handout entitled, “ACORN MEMBERS — MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THEIR COMMUNITIES,” which sung the praises of the organization.
As I walked toward the group I noticed a news camera was filming them, so I stood next to the camera, not only to memorialize what I was saying, but also as a further attempt to grant myself security, given that I was greatly outnumbered.
I told the group that my website, BigGovernment.com, was the website that had launched the ACORN story and that I was here to answer any questions they had about our investigation. Instead of engaging me, they backed away, pointed at their ACORN buttons, screamed and chanted. One ACORN leader, a towering African American gentleman, told the group: “‘We don’t want to hear what he has to say.” And began leading them in a group chant:
“Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them: We are ACORN, mighty, might ACORN!
They also chanted, multiple times, words from the old Unidad Popular Marxist song that accompanied Salvador Allende’s successful 1970 presidential campaign in Chile: “The people united, will never be defeated” – a rallying cry for radical leftists all over the world.
I tried to draw their attention and talk as loud as I could, and asked a series of questions, “What do you think about Dale Rathke embezzling millions from your organization?” “How much are you getting paid?” “Are you aware that ACORN has been caught paying less than the minimum wage for protesters fighting for a minimum wage increase?”
And I also told them many times, “You are being used.”
As Andrew writes, “One thing was certain from this confrontation. They were not prepared for it.”
Huh. There seems to be a lot of that going on amongst the left this year. Or as Sue Esty, the assistant director of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Maryland was quoted as saying in September, in reference to the right having learned Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals playbook, “It’s kind of scary! They have learned all of the tricks.”
Update: Earlier today we linked to Moe Lane’s post about Missouri’s Democrat Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and her incredible ability to say absolutely nothing about her desire for PelosiCare in a three minute soundbite. Found via Glenn Reynolds, Dana Loesch notes what else she isn’t saying much about: “More on Carnahans’ Ties to ACORN”, adding, “This also makes sense as to why so many ACORN workers were present at Russ Carnahan’s summer rally for fauxcare.”
Gerald Walpin, the AmeriCorps inspector general fired by the White House in July during his probe of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, has been cleared of a complaint by the acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento that he had acted improperly.
Now, he says, he wants his job back.
“It takes away any basis belatedly set forth by the White House as a reason for my termination,” Walpin said this morning in an interview from his home in New York. “So I am certainly looking forward to a final determination by the court and to be reinstated.”
On October 15th, local ACORN spokesman David Lagstein was the special guest of the East County Democrat Club in El Cajon, CA. Lagstein is ACORN’s chief organizer in the San Diego area. The meeting was held at Coco’s Restaurant, a very public venue. Because of ACORN’s close ties to the Democrat party, Mr. Lagstein clearly felt he was among friends. These two clips suggest the investigation of ACORN announced by California Attorney General Jerry Brown already has a pre-determined outcome.
* * *
Lagstein notes that the Attorney General is a “political animal.” He states that he has been in communication with Brown’s office and assures the crowd that “the fault WILL be found with the people that did the video — not ACORN.”
If that’s true, then the fix is in and Brown’s investigation is just a scam on the public. But, targeting the filmmakers will also put Brown’s office in an especially difficult position. Just today, we learn that one of Jerry Brown’s chief aides secretly recorded phone conversations with at least 5 reporters. We’ll see if Brown believes the law applies to his staff as well as the young filmmakers.
Click over to Big Government to hear the audio of Lagstein’s visit.
Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”
What emerges from this week’s presidential observations is a troubling image of a highly partisan, often disingenuous President—who, for some strange reason, is far more eager to castigate political enemies than he is a terrorist who inflicted mayhem against our own American soldiers.
It’s increasingly obvious that, to borrow from Denny Green’s famous riff, the president really is who we thought he was: a pugilistic far left freshman senator who won the political lottery — in other words, Dick Durbin before the arteries completely hardened. That he’s governing as such no longer should come as a surprise to anyone.
No word yet motive, but the fact that at least three gunmen are involved already has Shuster and Miklaszewski mentioning similarities to the Fort Dix Six plot on MSNBC. Seven dead, 12 wounded so far. Supposedly two of the gunmen are still at large and one has fired shots at the SWAT team on the scene.
At least seven people are dead and 12 wounded in a shooting at Fort Hood in Texas, the base’s public affairs office told NBC News on Thursday.
The official would not give his name nor additional details. It was unknown whether victims are soldiers or civilians. One gunman was reportedly in custody and another was on the loose, NBC News said. A third shooter may be involved, according to NBC News affiliate KCEN, which said the person had opened fire on the SWAT team at the base.
KCEN reported that a policeman was among those shot.
KCEN in Waco reported that the second suspect may be holed up in a building on the post.
An Army spokesman at the Pentagon says the shootings began about 1:30 p.m. Thursday at a personnel and medical processing center at Fort Hood, the AP said.
The spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Banks, says two shooters were apparently involved. There is no word yet on who they were, nor on identities of the dead, according to the AP.
Banks says the second incident took place at a theater on the sprawling base, the AP said.
He says it is too soon to tell whether there is any link to battle stress or repeated deployments. The Army is suffering a record high suicide rate and other signs of stress from fighting two wars, the AP said.
Greg Schannep, an aide to U.S. Rep. John Carter, told Statesman.com he was on the Army post to attend a graduation service. He said that as he neared the entrance of a building where the service was being held, a soldier with blood on his uniform ran past him and said a man was shooting.
Schannep said the shootings appeared to have occurred in a complex near a theater where the service was scheduled. He was with the injured soldier, who he said appeared to have been struck in the shoulder but did not have life-threatening injuries.
At 2:18 p.m., all workers at Fort Hood received this email alert from the post headquarters:
“Fort Hood is locked down. Units are advised to do 100 percent accountability. This is not a drill.”
Todd Martin, assistant for communications at the Killeen school district, said the district has seven elementary schools and two middle schools on the post itself.
“Those have been locked down since this began,” Martin said. The other schools in the district outside the post have not been locked down, he said.
The district serves Killeen, Fort Hood, Harker Heights and Nolanville.
The elementary campuses, which typically releases between 2:45 and 3:15 p.m. had a two-hour early release day scheduled for today, so some students already had gone home. District administrators did not know how many of the students from the elementary schools were still on campus.
It is unclear how long the schools will remain on lockdown or when students will be able to go home.
I’m here working at Casey Library on post, and we’re on lock down as there was a shooting rampage (that’s what people are calling it) at the SRP site at the former Sports USA down the street from us. Apparently 7 are dead and 15 injured. They’re still trying to catch all the perpetrators. Pray for the victims and their families, please. Story here.
The aforementioned Statesman has already setup a Twitter feed for breaking news. Follow them at twitter.com/FtHoodShootings.
Update: Allahpundit has added numerous updates to his post at Hot Air:
Update: One of the shooters is alive and in custody. We should have a motive soon.
Update: MSNBC TV says two shooters are in custody now.
Update: CNN now says the death toll is nine.
Update: MSNBC’s story has been updated to say that four SWAT members were wounded in the shootout with the gunmen.
Update: Am hearing via Twitter that Fort Hood’s public affairs office says the earlier reports of a third shooter were wrong and were based on a second eyewitness report of the second shooter. Which means everyone’s in custody now.
Update: Heavy suspicions of a fragging grow heavier still. From Chuck Todd’s Twitter account: “More from NBC’s Pete Williams: US official says early reports are the man in custody is in the military, late 30s, with officer rank.”
Update: Press conference being held now. 12 dead, 31 wounded. No idea of motive yet but it sounds like both shooters are military. Or rather, were: One of the shooters is dead.
Update: Okay, wait, I misunderstood: According to MSNBC, there were three shooters. One is dead, two more are in custody. Has there ever been a case of “battle stress” that involved a conspiracy by multiple people?
Update: From Chuck Todd’s Twitter feed: “The main #fthood suspect was a U.S. Army Major.”
Update: From WOAI, a San Antonio NBC affiliate: “AP: The U.S. Army says 12 people have been killed and 31 wounded.”
Update: From Jake Tapper of ABC: “Attn Texas tweeps: Scott & White Memorial Hospital says due to the recent events in #FtHood, it is in URGENT need of ALL blood types.”
Update: ABC News Radio is reporting “Ft Hood suspect name is MAJOR Malik Nadal Hasan.”
Update: This ABC article also lists suspect’s name; further details:
Twelve people have been killed and 31 wounded in a shooting spree at a Texas military base by what officials believe was possibly carried out by an Army officer.
Gunman kills at least 7 and wounds 12 at Fort Hood.
The suspected gunman was identified as Major Malik Nadal Hasan. He was killed and two other suspects have been apprehended, Lt. Robert W. Cone said.
The gunman used two handguns, Cone said. He wasn’t sure if the shooter reloaded the weapons during the attack.
The general called the attack “a terrible tragedy, stunning.” He said the community was “absolutely devastated.”
The extent of the injuries of victims “varies significantly,” according to Cone.
President Obama called the Fort Hood shootings a “horrific outburst of violence.”
“It if difficult enough to lose” soldiers overseas, but said it is “horrifying that they should lose their lives at an Army base in the U.S.,” he said.
The president said “my prayers are with the wounded and the families of the fallen.”
Cone said the motive for the attack, which took place just after 1:30 p.m. CT, is unclear.
Fort Hood, located just 60 miles north from Austin, is the largest U.S. military installation in the world, and has suffered the greatest number of caualities of all American bases in the war on Iraq.
Update: According to the Anchoress, “CBS says Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Hasan was licensed psychiatrist from Maryland.”
Meanwhile, Hot Airadds, “Kay Bailey Hutchison apparently has info that Hasan was upset about being deployed to Iraq. Which, without further specifics as to why, doesn’t tell us much given the possible motives in play here.”
Update: ABC notes that “shooter was shot by civilian law enforcement.”
Update: There’s a page at Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress that notes:
Nidal Hasan, M.D., M.P.H.
Fellow, Disaster and Preventive Psychiatry
Department of Psychiatry
F.Edward Hebert School of Medicine
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
Biography pending.
That’s also the photo of the alleged suspect that Matt Drudge is running with.
Update: Here’s that Army Times report, which was being swamped by a Drudge-lanche earlier:
An Army psychiatrist was identified Thursday as one of the gunmen in a shooting rampage on Fort Hood, Texas, that left at least 12 people dead and up to 31 wounded.
One soldier, a suspect, was killed and two soldiers were taken into custody, according to base spokesman Lt. Gen. Bob Cone, who added that the three suspects were soldiers.
A Pentagon source identified the shooter as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan; the source said Hasan was a psychiatrist recently reassigned from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to work with soldiers at Darnall Army Medical Center on Fort Hood. He was killed at the scene.
The Fort Hood Web site posted an alert that said, “Effective immediately, Fort Hood is closed.” The Web site said units at the base have been ordered to account for all personnel.
The site said, “This is not a drill. It is an emergency situation.”
Fort Hood was “asking for EMTs because it’s a mass casualty event,” said Hilary Shine, spokeswoman for the City of Killeen, where Fort Hood is located. “They are having issues getting on and off post because they’ve locked it down. Right now there are a lot of questions and confusion.”
Fort Hood is set up like its own city with its own fire, police and medical facilities, Shine said. It has not asked for Killeen police to assist, but the police are on call if needed, she said.
Fort Hood is halfway between Austin and Waco, Texas.
FBI agents are traveling to Fort Hood to assess the crime and work with the Army Criminal Investigation Division, which is the lead agency, said Supervisory Special Agent Jason Pack, a spokesman for the FBI.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he told President Barack Obama about the shootings and the staff is trying to get details.
“I told him what we knew,” Gibbs said, adding that he awaited an update himself.
Update: The Galveston County Daily News has some further details of the attack. Note item at end of the passage excerpted below:
Tom Hunt, himself a former Army sergeant who was stationed at Fort Hood, said his son called about an hour after the shooting to tell him he was safe.
John Hunt, 27, serving with the 510th Combat Engineers, was with his platoon at the base’s Soldier Readiness Center where soldiers who are about to be deployed undergo medical screening. He was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in January.
But because John had broken his foot several weeks ago, he was sent outside and told to get some extra paperwork that would clear him for deployment. John was waiting in the parking lot of the center when the shooting started, his father said.
“Everybody started running and shouting, and he saw the wounded come out,” Tom Hunt said. “He didn’t hear the shooting, but he said it was ‘a bloody mess.’”
Hunt said his son told him he loaded up many of the wounded and drove them to the hospital. The wounded relayed what they saw inside when the shooting happened.
“They were telling him that one guy was shouting something in Arabic while he was shooting,” Tom Hunt said. “He couldn’t say much more than that.”
Update: Shepard Smith of Fox News interviews a former colleague of Hasan at the psych ward at Fort Hood who claims Hasan made statements along the lines of “Maybe the Muslims could stand up and fight against the aggressor”, as the person who uploaded the clip to YouTube notes:
Federal law enforcement officials say the suspected Fort Hood,Texas, shooter had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats.The officials say the postings appeared to have been made by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who was killed during the shooting incident that left least 11 others dead and 31 wounded. The officials say they are still trying to confirm that he was the author. They say an official investigation was not opened.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
One of the Web postings that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades.
Meanwhile, Allahpundit at Hot Air links to another video of Shepard Smith on Fox News:
Update: The two suspects detained earlier were released, but according to Rep. John Carter, another one has just hauled in.
Update: Here’s another Shep interview that people are buzzing out, this one with Hasan’s cousin. The cousin says Hasan decided after 9/11 that he didn’t want to deploy overseas, that he heard horrific stories from returning soldiers, and that he was harassed by other soldiers.
Update: “Wretchard”, our fellow PJ Express blogger at the Belmont Club asks, “When is religion indistinguishable from politics? When is politics indistinguishable from religion?”
Update: Huh: A Las Vegas CBS affiliate is reporting “Suspect not dead in Fort Hood shooting”; apparently news via press conference by Lt. General Cone. Mary Katharine Ham quotes Cone as saying:
“There was a confusion at the hospital” about Hasan’s death. CID officer with him since apprehension.
Ace adds, “Now they are saying it’s a single shooter, Hasan, and he is in the hospital”, adding, “The officer who shot him was thought to be dead but she’s alive and out of surgery.”
An Army psychiatrist opened fire Thursday at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 12 people and wounding 31 others, military officials said.
The gunman, identified as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was wounded multiple times at the scene but was captured alive and was in stable condition, Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, commanding general of the Army’s III Corps, said at a press conference late Thursday.
Eleven of the victims died at the scene, military officials said. A 12th died later at a hospital, NBC station KCEN-TV of Waco reported. Cone said that most of those shots were military but two were civilians.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in the Fort Hood shootings, has not been killed and is in stable condition at a hospital, Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said at a press conference at Fort Hood.
He is in custody at an undisclosed hospital, Cone said.
Three soldiers taken into custody after the shootings were released, he said. Investigators believe Hasan acted alone.
“Evidence does not suggest this was a terrorist event,” Cone said.
The death toll from the attack remains 12 after another victim died, Cone said.
Update: Patterico notes that the MSM is working overtime to pound this story into a prescribed narrative — when it’s not airbrushing out inconvenientdetails about the alleged suspect, of course.
Assume you’re an eager beaver reporter who’s as anti-war as the next fellow in the newsroom. How do you frame a story about a murderous lunatic who’s never been deployed overseas to serve your agenda? Why, this way of course: “Fort Hood has felt strain of repeated deployments”.
Hasan attended the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring and was “very devout,” according to Faizul Khan, a former imam at the center. Khan said Hasan attended prayers at least once a day, seven days a week, often in his Army fatigues.Khan also said Hasan applied to an annual matrimonial seminar that matches Muslims looking for spouses. “I don’t think he ever had a match, because he had too many conditions,” Khan said.
“We never got into details of worldly affairs or politics,” the former imam said of his conversations with Hasan. “Mostly religious questions. But there was nothing extremist in his questions. He never showed any frustration. . . . He never showed any . . . wish for vengeance on anybody.”
A co-worker at Walter Reed said Hasan would not allow his photo to be taken with female co-workers, which became an issue during Christmas season when employees often took group photos. Co-workers would find a solo photo of Hasan and post it on the bulletin board without his permission.
Lee told Fox News that Hasan “was hoping that President Obama would pull troops out. . . . When things weren’t going that way, he became more agitated, more frustrated with the conflicts over there . . . he made his views well known about how he felt about the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
And when he talked about fighting “the aggressor,” his fellow soldiers “should stand up and help the armed forces in Iraq and in Afghanistan,” Lee said.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told reporters after a briefing on the shootings that Hasan was born in Virginia to parents who immigrated from Jordan. The congressman said that Hasan “took a lot of advanced training in shooting.”
On Twitter, Michael Patrick Leahy of the TCOT Reportnotes, “Fox News reports Major Hasan handed out Koran to neighbors this morning. Brother says he was always Muslim.”
A source tells NPR’s Joseph Shapiro that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues, according to the source, who worked with him at the time.
Update: Tim Blair has a quote from Waco ABC affiliate KXXV which dovetails with what Michael Patrick Leahy mentioned on Twitter a few updates ago:
“News Channel 25’s Henry Rosoff is reporting Nidal Malik Hasan’s neighbors who say Hasan was giving away all of his furniture and copies of the Qu’ ran Thursday morning. They also say he was supposed to deploy to Afghanistan in the coming days.”
Update (11:29 PM PST): I believe this mammoth post has run its course for the night. Barring any major developments during the rest of the evening, watch for additional updates on this topic to appear elsewhere on the blog proper.
One of Jesse Walker’s most interesting observations in his already-classic October piece on “The Paranoid Center” is that, in a direct inversion of Richard Hofstadter’s theory, the establishmentarians who try to scare us about the terribly dangerous fringe end up aping the tactics and even language of the people they so loathe. New York Times columnist Frank Rich, whose commentary about the political right this year has been among the very stupidest in a remarkably dull-witted season, manages to go one step further: In an op-ed on New York’s Dictrict 23 congressional election, Rich embodies Walker’s observation at the exact same time as quoting Hofstadter’s. Check it out:
[T]he electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.
The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode.
How do you even get to a place like that?
For those of you keeping metaphorical score at home: Stalin’s Great Purge (just to name his most famous one) included roughly 1,000 executions a day, over two years. The alleged Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin purge, meanwhile, has resulted…brace yourself…in a moderate Republican suspending her campaign for Congress to make way for a conservative independent. Yeah, totally the same.
Heh.™ Meanwhile, CNN, which in the 1980s could arguably have been said to have represented the center, continues its ideological drift leftward: note the photo accompanying the article on today’s elections and how it dovetails with their previous narrative regarding the Tea Party movement, and check out this conversation between CNN’s Roland Martin and Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express:
Martin went on to claim during the second segment that the Tea Party movement and their fellow travelers sought to make the GOP “fringe” right. Williams immediately replied to the charge: “Roland, since when is believing in the Constitution a fringe?” The two engaged in a back-and-forth for most of the second segment.
MARTIN: We’re seeing right now moderate and conservative Democrats playing a huge role in the changing of the health care bill in Congress. The point there is this here. You have folks like Mark who also- talk about the left being radicalized- you have people who want to radicalize the right. The point is this here. You can’t have people who are not from the fringes of both parties represent a party. So, conservative and moderate Democrats play a crucial role.
WILLIAMS: Roland, since when is believing in the Constitution a fringe?
MARTIN: Mark, Mark, Mark- you are not going to have a strong Republican Party nationally-
WILLIAMS: How does that make me a fringe? I believe in the Constitution. I don’t believe in socialism.
MARTIN: Mark, Mark, Mark- let me finish.
WILLIAMS: That makes me a fringe?
MARTIN: Mark, let me finish-
WILLIAMS: I’ll wear that label proudly.
MARTIN: Mark, let me finish. I believe in the Constitution as well. But the point is this here. You cannot have a truly national party if you are pushing people out that you simply disagree with.
COOPER: Mark, what about that idea of the big tent for the Republican Party? I mean, years ago, there used to be a lot of talk about wanting the Republican Party to be a big tent. Does that- from your vantage point, is that a negative thing, because it- you believes it waters down-
WILLIAMS: No, not at all, not at all. America is a huge tent. But this vile ideology of collectivism, the ideology of Marx and Lenin over that of Thomas Jefferson-
“Tara O’Toole is a name most Americans have never heard before, but on Capitol Hill, she’s causing a lot of problems for Jack Murtha and Harry Reid”, regarding her nomination for “a senior post at the Department of Homeland Security, specifically the Under Secretary for the Science and Technology Directorate”, Michael Goldfarb notes, including this:
Oh, and one more thing: this highly regarded nominee happened to have been a member of a group that “described itself as Marxist.” So if O’Toole doesn’t get confirmed, she at least has all the qualifications for a czar position.
Read the whole thing — or as Goldfarb’s title implies, watch it soon on a segment of Glenn Beck.
The case began when the two women approached anti-abortion advocate Johnny Wallace, 69. Wallace had been standing in front of City Hall with a billboard sign espousing his views on abortion.
Witnesses told police that the two women approached Wallace and began to try to take and destroy the sign he was holding. Wallace had to physically restrain the women. Minor injuries were reported.
Oh, and remember the wall-to-wall coverage the media gave the possible political motivations of the shooter who fired at Lou Dobbs’ house? And, the imminent destruction of this great country by his ilk? Yeah, I don’t either.
“Now everybody’s fine, but CNN’s Lou Dobbs recently had to call the police because someone fired shots at his home. Yeah. Dobbs said he didn’t see or hear the shooter, but described him as Hispanic.” –Conan O’Brien
As Jim Geraghty recently wrote, “Norm Coleman can explain how winning a race on election night doesn’t always mean you get to take the oath of office.”
Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.
These days, when not praising totalitarian Cuba and China, Friedman has taken to calling President Obama’s efforts to radically reshape the U.S. economy “nation-building” — a word whose traditional meaning that certainly fell into disfavor in the offices of the Gray Lady for most of the naughts:
I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.
Obama has had at least one self-admitted Communist on his payroll in the form of Van Jones, as well as the Mao-quoting Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. But perhaps one reason why Friedman puts scare quotes around the word “socialist” in the above passage is that Friedman is too enamored of the real thing, and Obama, even with his radical efforts, doesn’t go anywhere nearly far enough, fast enough to satisfy the Timesman in his heart of hearts.
Related: The great Anthony Daniels (who frequently writes as Theodore Dalrymple) on “The Costs Of Abstraction”:
My little collection has led me to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was valued by contemporary intellectuals not for the omelette, but for the broken eggs. They thought that if nothing great could be built without sacrifice, then so great a sacrifice must be building something great. The Soviets had the courage of their abstractions, which are often so much more important to intellectuals than living, breathing human beings.
OrgName: The New York Times
