Month: December 2010

Doctors Make New Inroads in Fight Against HIV; Media’s Prognosis Still Hopeless

Calvin Freiburger dishonesty, HIV, Huffington Post, Left, liberalism, media, media bias, medicine, pro-life, science, stem cells

The Huffington Post reports that a stem-cell treatment is thought to have not only treated, but actually cured a man’s HIV infection – obviously a major development.

However, HuffPo being HuffPo, they neglect to mention one tiny detail: the stem cells came from bone marrow. No destruction of human life required.

The stem-cell battle has been fading away in recent years, thanks in part to it becoming increasingly clear that human embryos aren’t needed. This story should continue that trend, but it’ll be interesting to see if any other media outlets choose instead to follow HuffPo’s lead.

New on NewsReal – What Motivates Radical Libertarians’ Blind Allegiance to Anti-Government Thugs Like Julian Assange

Calvin Freiburger conservatism, Founding Fathers, Julian Assange, libertarianism, limited government, national security, NewsReal, Ron Paul, WikiLeaks

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

The outpouring of support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have received from the usual paleo-libertarian suspects is as illuminating as it is predictable. Take, for example, Ron Paul’s latest attempt at LewRockwell.com to make excuses for the leaking of highly sensitive government data because—as always—the real villain we should be worried about is Uncle Sam:

[S]tate secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name?

In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post–World War II era has made us less secure, not more […]

The neoconservative ethos, steeped in the teaching of Leo Strauss, cannot abide an America where individuals simply pursue their own happy, peaceful, prosperous lives. It cannot abide an America where society centers around family, religion, or civic and social institutions rather than an all-powerful central state. There is always an enemy to slay, whether communist or terrorist. In the neoconservative vision, a constant state of alarm must be fostered among the people to keep them focused on something greater than themselves – namely their great protector, the state. This is why the neoconservative reaction to the WikiLeaks revelations is so predictable: “See, we told you the world was a dangerous place,” goes the story. They claim we must prosecute – or even assassinate – those responsible for publishing the leaks. And we must redouble our efforts to police the world by spying and meddling better, with no more leaks.

True to form, Paul doesn’t even try to address the evidence that WikiLeaks is a national-security threat operating against the law and beyond the First Amendment’s protection. As usual when it comes to foreign policy, the self-appointed spokesman of our forefathers is actually on the wrong side of the Founding regarding the necessity of maintaining a certain level of secrecy (see Federalist 64 and Federalist 70). And once again, the Paulite cult’s strange fixation on Leo Strauss pops up. (On that note, I have a suggestion for NRB’s Paulite readers: when you comment on this post—and I know you will—instead of regurgitating the same old complaints, how about explaining to me just what nefarious Straussian teachings we “neocons” are under the influence of?)

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New at NewsReal – Are the Assange Rape Charges a Pretext to Bust Him for WikiLeaks? Maybe – and That’s Okay

Calvin Freiburger http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Julian Assange, Justice, national security, NewsReal, sex crimes, Wendy Murphy, WikiLeaks

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

This weekend at NewsRealBlog, we had quite the brawl over the sexual-assault charges against WikiLeaks’ anarchic head honcho, Julian Assange. Today, let’s look at the arrest at a different angle: regardless of whether or not he assaulted anyone, is it right to use these charges as an excuse to punish his cyber terrorism?

Child abuse and sex crime victims’ advocate Wendy Murphy isn’t so sure. At the Daily Beast, she says the charges, if true, would be worth pursuing, but the prosecutors’ motives don’t pass the smell test:

[I]f Assange were any other guy, he would not be sitting in a British jail and there would have been no international manhunt, no matter how may times his condom broke during sex.

Because the public understands this, they also understand that the timing of Assange’s arrest on sex charges is suspicious. The charges are either a substitute for a lack of evidence in conjuction with a WikiLeaks indictment, or they’re “holding charges” meant to keep the guy penned up while the world figures out where, if anywhere, Assange might actually be prosecutable for the release of government files.

Either way, when prosecutors use the public’s money to pursue a criminal case as a pretext for some other agenda, people become cynical and mistrustful of the rule of law. During impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton for his lie about Monica Lewinsky, the public was plenty offended by Clinton’s behavior, but the impeachment proceedings were so over the top, many came to believe the process was nothing but a contrived show trial, generated by people who couldn’t have cared less about presidential lying but who hoped to seize the moment for political gain.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

Around the Web

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, class warfare, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Iran, NewsReal, nuclear weapons, Robert Stacy McCain, sex crimes, taxes, WikiLeaks

Is WikiLeaks an agent of liberty? No way, says Janet Daley.

Another powerhouse from my NRB colleague, Megan Fox: 28 Revolting Quotes That Define the Pro-Abortion Left.

The Other McCain has the scoop on a lefty academic and commentator who’s been charged with carrying on a sexual relationship with his own daughter.

Check out this priceless takedown of Andrew Sullivan’s never-ending dishonesty.

Doug Powers slaps down Bernie Sanders’ class-warfare demagoguery.

Has the Republican Party learned nothing? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way).

Investors’ Business Daily has more on the not-so-dreamy effects of ObamaCare on the medical profession.

And in Iran, Stuxnet, the world’s early Christmas gift, keeps on giving.

New on NewsReal – In Search of the Statist Social-Con Menace

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, conservatism, homosexuality, NewsReal, social conservatism, social issues, Tea Party

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My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Earlier this week, I asked Lori Heine who and where the “statist control freak” social conservatives she’s afraid of are, pointing out that what’s commonly referred to as the social conservative agenda isn’t statist at all. She responds by conceding that her fears might be overblown, but still has a few concerns:
People like Farah and Sprigg make a lot of noise, and everyone outside the audience of the mainstream conservative media hear this noise and make much of it.  Do they make too much? That is quite possible.  But besides Freiburger and a few like him, how many on the Right are stepping forward to set the record straight?
Sadly, I am aware of no conservative—social or otherwise—who tackled the Sprigg story, other than me. Perhaps some simply missed it, but I suspect many chose to ignore it in the hopes that it would just blow over. Bad move, guys. But Farah is another matter. Lori notes that Coulter slapped him down, but so did plenty of others, including NRB, Right Wing News, Red State, Big Government, and more. Besides, many on the Right have been sick of the Birther conspiracies Farah’s been peddling since well before the HomoCon scandal, so it’s not surprising that many wouldn’t bother wasting time with him in the first place.

Indeed, recall that anti-gay buffoon Ryan Sorba got soundly booed by the conservative audience of CPAC 2010, leading one lefty blogger to opine:
When conservatives are standing up for gays, and Democrats treat us like we are an embarrassment, there’s a problem.
Lori continues:
Not only the hard Left, but also much of the political middle believes that social conservatives are dangerous.  This is exactly why the Tea Party movement deemphasized social issues in the first place, and it is also why it has enjoyed so much success.
While fighting fiscal disaster might have been Priority Number One for the Tea Party, Lori makes too much out of the alleged distance between Tea Partiers and so-cons:

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Media Matters Incites a Word War with Fox News Over Term "Public Option"

Calvin Freiburger Bill Sammon, Fox News, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Johnny Dollar's Place, mainstream media, media, media bias, Media Matters, NewsReal, public option

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Language is a powerful tool. Those who define what words mean (or are at least believed to mean) can drastically influence our government and culture. According to the Left’s lexicon, killing is “choice,” racial discrimination is “affirmative action,” thought control is “sensitivity training,” and property confiscation is “economic justice.” But does the Right play similar propaganda games?

At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz seems to think so. Today he reports on a “new” Media Matters attack on Fox News.

As the health-care debate was heating up in the summer of 2009, Republican pollster Frank Luntz offered Sean Hannity some advice. 

Luntz, who counseled the GOP on how to sell the 1994 Contract With America, told the Fox News host to stop using President Obama’s preferred term for a key provision.

“If you call it a public option, the American people are split,” he explained. “If you call it the government option, the public is overwhelmingly against it.”

“A great point,” Hannity declared. “And from now on, I’m going to call it the government option, because that’s what it is.”  

On Oct. 27, the day after Senate Democrats introduced a bill with a public insurance option from which states could opt out, Bill Sammon, a Fox News vice president and Washington managing editor, sent the staff a memo. Sammon is a former Washington Times reporter. 

“Please use the term ‘government-run health insurance,’ or, when brevity is a concern, ‘government option,’ whenever possible,” the memo said.





The possibility that Sammon’s motives were partisan and that he was trying to influence Fox’s viewers against ObamaCare can’t be completely dismissed—“government option” polls the way Republicans want it to, and as Kurtz points out, Sammon is a right-leaning commentator who wrote several conservative books. Accordingly, I have scant patience for Sammon objecting, “Have I said things where I take a conservative view? Give me specifics.”

That said, there’s an obvious flip side that Kurtz and Media Matters ignore.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

WikiLeaks Scoop: Bush Was Right

Calvin Freiburger Bush, Iraq, Julian Assange, Larry Elder, Plame, Townhall, War on Terror, WikiLeaks, Wilson, WMDs, yellowcake

Those of us who were paying attention already knew this, but it’s always good to have more voices and revelations corroborating the same thing. From Larry Elder:

Wired magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman — a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution — researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here’s what he found: “By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction (emphasis added). … Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.”

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq — on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels — what even The Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”: 550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake. The New York Sun editorialized: “The uranium issue is not a trivial one, because Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam … would have been too big a risk.”

Now the mainscream media no longer deem yellowcake — the WMD Bush supposedly lied about — a WMD. It was, well, old. It was degraded. It was not what we think of when we think of WMD. Really? Square that with what former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean said in April 2004: “There were no weapons of mass destruction.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow goes even further, insisting, against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that “Saddam Hussein was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction”!

Bush, hammered by the insidious “Bush Lied, People Died” mantra, endured one of the most vicious smears against any president in history. He is owed an apology.

When Hollywood makes “The Vindication of George W. Bush,” maybe Sean Penn can play the lead. 

Still doesn’t make Julian Assange any less of a cretinous wretch. Throw the book at him.

New on NewsReal – NewsHounds’ Spitballs Couldn’t Hit the Broad Side of Sean Hannity’s Mansion

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, capitalism, class warfare, Fox News, Hannity, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, NewsHounds, NewsReal
My latest NewsRealBlog post:
Remember NewsHounds? These Fox-hating peddlers of arguments that are really, really lame even by lefty standards (the most spectacular of which was falsely accusing Johnny Dollar’s Place of supporting plagiarism using one of my own quotes) never seem to run out of spitballs to shoot at Sean Hannity. In the blog’s latest petty attack, Ellen pulls Hannity over for a TWR—Talking While Rich:

In his Great American Panel segment Friday night (12/3/10), one of many discussions in which Hannity whined about the unfair tax burden on the rich, Hannity asked, “So does the issue of class warfare… does this work, is this a winner for the Democrats?”

Frank Donatelli, GOPAC chairman, said no, but that it would “mobilize the liberal base… It just drives them crazy… They’re demanding tax increases on the most productive citizens.”


Of course, Hannity did not consider THAT class warfare.

Er, no. Talking about class warfare is not engaging in class warfare. Leftists are so pathetically desperate to paint conservatives as hypocrites that they’ll settle for anything, no matter how little sense it makes. Ellen might throw around “class warfare” to describe simply bringing up the subject of wealth in the context of one’s political opponents, but the term actually means something: pitting one economic class against another, urging one to hate and resent the other simply for having more. To demonstrate, I give you…Ellen’s own words.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

NewsReal Debate to Watch – UPDATED: "Swelled-Headed Narcissists"?

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, conservatism, debate, NewsReal, social conservatism, social issues

Yesterday I objected to my NRB colleague Lori Heine’s criticism of social conservatives as “statist control freaks.” At her blog, she has some more remarks on the subject. She mention’s she’s got a NRB rebuttal to my piece waiting in the wings, so I’ll hold off responding for now. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s Lori’s NRB reply. I’ve penned an upcoming response which entails some of the themes she touches on at her blog, so I’ll use this space to comment on something else she said yesterday:

First of all, I will again explain my take on social conservatism in general. According to my understanding, it can really only be said to mean one of two things. Either it concerns itself with politics — which is to say, with the workings of government — or it is the self-definition of swelled-headed narcissists who fancy themselves more moral, or more pious than anybody else (usually without any substantial evidence to back it up). NRB’s editors take issue with lumping all social conservatives together as big-government meddlers, and perhaps they are right. But I have not yet heard a better definition than the two that I have given.

Er, what? I’m not sure just what the first option’s supposed to be referring to, and the second – “the self-definition of swelled-headed narcissists who fancy themselves more moral, or more pious than anybody else (usually without any substantial evidence to back it up)” – is an egregiously insulting mischaracterization that’s hard to take seriously. Speaking of a definition “without any substantial evidence to back it up”…

Social conservatism actually isn’t all that hard to define. I’d argue that it’s simply the recognition that a self-governing society cannot be sustained without certain moral principles and institutions, and that while, to use Vindicating the Founders author Thomas West’s phraseology, government can’t “by itself produce the passions and convictions” America needs, it can “weigh in on the side of them” in certain ways, within the confines of the Constitution and consistent with natural liberty.

America’s Founding Fathers certainly didn’t believe that protecting natural rights and maintaining basic infrastructure were government’s only proper functions: George Washington tells us that morality, one of the “firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens,” is an “indispensable support” to political prosperity. John Adams writes that policy should “regulate” human passions, because it is “of the highest importance” that they be “arranged on the side of virtue.” Charles Rowley of George Mason University writes that for James Madison, “a republican order must have a moral content, a cluster of values, without which it would lose its meaning.” Even the Founders we consider relatively secular agree—Thomas Jefferson fears what might become of nations which fail to admit “a chapter of morality in their political code,” while Benjamin Franklin hopes the nation’s “virtues public and private grow with us, and be durable,” because “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

Also, It’s a little surprising to see myself referred to as a “doe-eyed innocent”; that’s certainly not what a lot of other people would call me…

UPDATE 2: Here’s my NRB response.

New on NewsReal – Are Social Conservatives "Statist Control Freaks"? Not So Fast

Calvin Freiburger abortion, ACLU, Christianity, conservatism, education, evolution, freedom, gay marriage, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, marriage, NewsReal, religion, social conservatism, social issues, statism
My latest NewsRealBlog post:

This weekend, NewsRealBlog’s Lori Heine objected to Ann Coulter’s recent column attempting to tie WikiLeaks enabler Bradley Manning to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Today, she responds to several critical commenters. I’m not terribly interested in revisiting DADT right now—my position is that I’ll defer to military experts on what changes should be made to the current policy, but I insist that the decision be based on military criteria alone, not political correctness or kowtowing to the whims of the radical gay Left.  Lori argues her position well, and successfully refutes several of her critics.
However, I must take issue with the way she conflates social conservatism with statism:

One form of fun of which big-government statists on the social Right never seem to tire is the purity game.  True believers must toe the line and never stray from it, even one jot or tittle.  “You are no conservative,” another commenter harrumphed at me.  Since this person evidently thinks only the big-government, control-freak statists on the social Right are the “real” conservatives, then according to his definition of course I am not.  Nor would I ever want to be.

What I am is a former Leftist progressive who has come to the conclusion that libertarian conservatism is – for a wide variety of reasons – the right direction for America to take.  The relentless and childish tug-of-war of the past few elections has convinced me that the Left and the statist Right are actually as alike as Tweedledee and Tweedledum and that they are, together, pulling the country apart.  Just as Leftists view any liberal who believes in small government and individual initiative a heretic, so do those on the Right who view anyone who does not share their fantasies about Granny Government and her all-powerful magic wand “not a real conservative.”

What I think of the “purity game” is no secret, either, but here I want to consider this talk of “big-government, control-freak statists on the social Right” who believe the government has an “all-powerful magic wand.”

Maybe I just missed them, but I’m struggling to recall a significant number of examples of this nefarious social-con variation. To be sure, there are a select handful of individuals who come to mind—for instance, Joseph Farah and Peter Sprigg—but beyond that, I don’t know how any significant, respected portion of the social conservative movement fits the bill.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.