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Santa Barbara: Midweek hotel deals for spontaneous shoppers
Los Angeles Times, CA
November 19, 2008

"The Montecito fire reportedly was 95% contained, as of Tuesday. So with the coast clear, so to speak, have a think about the midweek holiday-shopping deal ... "

Eli Roth is Making Propaganda for 'Inglorious Basterds'

www.cinematical.com
by Jessica Barnes
Nov 19th 2008

Now that we've all had a chance to see some of the video footage that has been leaking from the set of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds (footage that has since disappeared), you might have noticed that the man himself was nowhere to be found in most of the clips. But, according to The Quentin Tarantino Archives, one man who has been behind the camera lately is Mr. 'Torture Porn' himself, Eli Roth. Rumor has it Roth is directing a Nazi propaganda film to be included in the story of "...a group of prisoners-turned-soldiers whose mission is to take down a group of Nazis, and the other follows a young Jewish woman who seeks to avenge the death of her parents by this Nazi group."

The horror director first signed on to the project back in August to play Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, "a baseball bat swinging Nazi hunter". But, I guess Roth wasn't content with just being in front of the camera this time around. QT Archives reports that Roth is directing the story of "Daniel Brühl as a Nazi sniper and GIs on a suicide mission." -- presumably while Tarantino was off teaching Til Schweiger how to do a spit take.

You almost have to feel sorry for Tarantino with the amount of scrutiny surrounding his WWII epic -- think about it, when was the last time a headline about an orchestral score got this much attention? So far, Tarantino and company have managed to keep a few details from spilling with the help of the odd water cannon. So, you may be wondering: why all the mania? Well, maybe it's because Tarantino has been talking about making Basterds for so long -- or maybe it's just because for a lot fans, Grindhouse wasn't the comeback they had been hoping for. Either way you cut it, we may not like what the guy has come up with, but at least it will be like nothing else we've seen before.

Inglorious Basterds is expected to arrive in theaters in 2009.

http://www.cinematical.com/2008/11/19/eli-roth-is-making-propaganda-for-inglorious-basterds/

William Bennett's Phony Statistics

William Bennett, Gays, and the Truth
MR. VIRTUE DABBLES IN PHONY STATISTICS.
By Walter Olson
Salon
Dec. 19, 1997

"This is tough news. It's not pleasant to hear," said former Education Secretary William Bennett on ABC's This Week Nov. 9. "But it's very important, and it's part of telling the truth." The occasion for tough-but-needed truth telling: Bill Clinton's first-ever presidential speech to an organized gay-rights group, the Human Rights Campaign. Clinton had conferred respectability--wrongly--on the gay quest for approval when in fact, said Bennett, he "should tell the truth on this one": Homosexuality "takes 30 years off your life." The average life expectancy for gay men, Bennett declared, was just 43. ...

Story continues

PROPOSITION 8: Time Magazine and Alison Stateman Pour Gasoline on a Fire

" ... Fortunately, the response of outraged citizens to such journalistic malpractice is also exempt from government intervention, thus we are free to excoriate this meretricious writing for the shame it brings to Time Magazine and its author. ... "


Arson! Time Magazine and Alison Stateman Pour Gasoline on a Fire
Posted by Allan Brauer
November 17, 2008

On Saturday, November 15th, 2008, Time published an incendiary piece of “reporting” by Alison Stateman, describing negative consequences experienced by supporters of California’s Proposition 8, with the sensationalistic title, “What Happens If You’re on the Gay ‘Enemies List.’”

The deeply flawed article is a completely one-sided attempt to portray these individuals and businesses as innocent victims of a vengeful, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding gay mob, bent on the destruction of any who dare to stand between them and their goal of legalized gay marriage. This article is nothing more than journalistic arson, as it appears to have been commissioned with the goal of pouring gasoline on the fire of extant rifts between various communities – while polarizing straight people, and African-Americans in particular, against the gay community.

That any high-school journalism student could piece together a more thoughtful and balanced discussion of the initiative’s fallout by performing simple web searches only makes Time’s choice to publish this offal more unforgivable. Perhaps her insufficiency as a reporter can be attributed to Ms. Stateman's role as managing editor of PR Tactics, the in-house magazine of the Public Relations Society of America.

Stateman begins by channeling Bill O’Reilly’s desperate effort to fan the flames of anger between the African-American and LGBT communities. She cites the suspect and unscientifically sampled CNN exit poll proclaiming that 70% of African-Americans voted in favor of the gay marriage ban, then makes unsourced claims of racist actions by opponents of Proposition 8, as follows:

"According to eyewitness reports published on the Internet, racial epithets have been used against African-Americans at protests in California, directed even at blacks who are fighting to repeal Proposition 8."

Setting aside the reality that one can find “eyewitness reports published on the Internet” that insist the US Government detonated the World Trade Center, and that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be President, it is clear that there was a great deal of overreaction to that statistic; and unfortunately some people who were crushed by Prop 8’s passage made inappropriate comments about the black community.

However, the article treats this single measure of African-American opposition to gay marriage equality as an unassailable gold standard, even as several intelligent analysts like Nate Silver have long noted the dangers of interpreting data that is itself a small subset of an already small sample. What’s more important is that it was the mainstream media’s relentless hyping of this CNN poll result that contributed to the climate of scapegoating and fueled such racist remarks. You know, just as Time is attempting to provoke anti-gay sentiment with this article.

The article also fails to note that a diverse set of civil rights advocacy groups, including the NAACP, have signed on to a legal challenge to Proposition 8, on the grounds that permitting an electoral majority to remove rights from a suspect minority class sets a chilling precedent that could redound negatively to other minority groups.

Next, the article invokes visions of the McCarthy era by talking in sinister tones about how “gay activists” are publishing blacklists of pro-Prop 8 donors to the web and calling for boycotts. Never mind that the source from which these nefarious “gay activists” are getting their dirt is California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s office, as all financial contributions to political candidates and initiatives are public record. In fact, why not click this link and do some evil blacklist-making yourself? And never mind that groups such as the American Family Association have for years made boycotts of “pro-gay” companies like McDonalds, PepsiCo and Disney their stock in trade.

And while the practices of blacklisting and boycotting are something about which reasonable people can disagree, the article neglects to acknowledge that ProtectMarriage.com, the principal fundraising and advocacy group supporting Prop 8, sent letters signed by its board and counsel threatening entities that contributed to the No on 8 campaign with exposure as enemies of traditional marriage unless they made matching contributions to the Yes campaign. Note that Stateman also cites as a victim Bolthouse Farms, which, under pressure for its donation in favor of Prop 8, made comparable donations to organizations supporting marriage equality, again while failing to note that this was the precise goal of ProtectMarriage’s letter to No on 8 donors. After all, if your goal is to paint one side in a struggle as the villain, you can’t muddy the waters by pointing out that the side you are portraying as a victim engaged in the same behavior.

Next, arsonist Stateman moves to the story of Scott Eckern, artistic director of Sacramento’s California Musical Theatre, and his resignation after his contribution in favor of the referendum came to light. She gives short shrift to this particular saga, but two interesting points about it would have conflicted with the thesis of her story. First, one of the principal architects of the campaign to call out Eckern for his regrettable choice to finance Prop 8 was the presumably heterosexual actress, wife and mother Susan Egan, who wrote a widely circulated letter on the matter. Second, in speaking with individuals who actually work for CMT (you know, practicing that thing called journalism?), I learned that while gay staff members were hurt and heartsick over Eckern’s contributions, none with whom I spoke characterized him as a homophobe or bigot in the conduct of his life; and though it is an inconvenient truth to Stateman, some of the most aggressive calls for Eckern’s resignation came from straight employees of the organization.

Further, the article neglects to offer even one example of a person who has experienced a loss of employment due to their opposition to Prop 8. For that, one need turn no farther than Fresno, where Catholic priest Father Geoffrey Farrow was removed from his post after he came out to his parish as a gay man and urged them to vote no on 8.

Last, Stateman reports that supporters of Prop 8 have found it necessary to take down web lists of donors and supporters to protect them from the attack of evil blacklisting gays, again neglecting to mention that all such information remains available via simple search of the CA Secretary of State’s website. She unquestioningly quotes the "victim's spokesman" Frank Schubert, campaign manager for Yes on Proposition 8.

"No matter what you think of Proposition 8, we ought to respect people's right to participate in the political process. It strikes me as quite ironic that a group of people who demand tolerance and who claim to be for civil rights are so willing to be intolerant and trample on other people's civil rights."

Stateman fails to do her reporter’s duty to point out that, notwithstanding Schubert’s protestations to the contrary, no civil rights have been trampled on by any action of Prop 8 opponents. Prop 8 opponents are private citizens and not an arm of the government, and it is the government’s repression of speech which is prohibited by law. Just as Prop 8 proponents are free to advocate for their cause and make non-libelous statements about their opponents, so are Prop 8 opponents free to call attention factually to others' actions, and to advocate that people might exercise their freedom of association and choose not to patronize such businesses.

And likewise, the First Amendment’s protection of the press ensures that Time Magazine and Alison Stateman can publish factually correct, but grotesquely imbalanced, treatises whose goal is to foment anger and rage against a widely-hated minority group, and experience no governmental action in return.

Fortunately, the response of outraged citizens to such journalistic malpractice is also exempt from government intervention, thus we are free to excoriate this meretricious writing for the shame it brings to Time Magazine and its author. Thus we can call for Time to throw a bucket of cold water on the fire it has stoked and apologize to its readers for printing this shoddy reporting, and begin publishing well-written articles by thoughtful individuals who have no agenda to promote but the truth.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/allan-brauer/2008/11/arson-time-magazine-and-alison-stateman-pour-gasoline-fire

Who was Laurance Spelman Rockefeller?

by Alex Constantine

Laurance, vetted by the U.S. Naval Reserve, rose to the rank of lieutenant commander during WW II, assigned to the Bureau of Aeronautics as liaison between the Navy and aircraft production plants - despite huge financial investments in Hitler's Holocaust machine by family-owned businesses, as documented by George Seldes and Charles Higham - who dreamed of transforming the postwar world with advancements in communications, nuclear power, aviation and computers. The defense industry fostered experimentation with new technologies and they intrigued Laurance Rockefeller, especially those with the potential to significantly transform everyday life.

When Hitler's Germany rolled out the armaments to flatten Europe, young Rockefeller launched into an intense study of military aviation. He joined the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, was a director of Eastern Airlines and a trustee of Air Affairs, a quarterly international journal. Laurance and his brother Winthrop mustered the Air Youth of America, an aviation training program.

Laurance may have been less visible than his brothers, but he was equally steeped in the sordid world of covert intelligence and disinformation. In the 1950s, he served on a panel that released a report penned by Henry Kissinger, International Security - The Military Aspect, calling for successive escalations in defense spending of $3 billion per year to 1965. In 1973 he was named a director of Reader's Digest, a fount of CIA cold war black propaganda. (To indulge in a moment of guilt by association, Melvin Laird, a Digest officer, went on to become a director of SAIC.) Rockefeller is a trustee of M.I.T., a director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (a major NPR sponsor), Olin Mathieson, etc., etc.

Renato Vesco traced immediate postwar development of the Nazi saucers to the UK. Vesco, the Italian Werner von Braun, plodded through a detailed investigation of the technology transfer in Intercept, but Don't Shoot, published in 1967. British defense officials, he discovered, hoped to barter advancements in saucer propulsion and design to the United States in exchange for classified nuclear research data. A priority was placed on making the saucers faster, leading to experimentation with a number of rocket propulsion systems. Wind tunnel tests demonstrated the disks could easily slip through the sound barrier when the friction layer was drawn through a multitude of pinholes punched in the hull. Normally, the layer of air that builds along an aircraft's surface slows it down. The air pulling on the craft, otherwise known as the buoyant layer, was eliminated in the saucer design with suction along the entire surface of the vehicle, in place of the conventional jet design. The pinholes sucked away the buoyant layer and pumped the air through a thruster, like an ordinary jet.

When the war ended Laurance was off to Europe, according to Alvin Moscow's sanitized Rockefeller biography, "to examine the latest British experiments with jet propulsion for military aircraft. He looked into the technology of the German Rockets used in the blitz of London." The author doesn't mention a visit to the British Air Force saucer section, but if developments were shared with anyone, it was Laurance Rockefeller, the most influential military aerospace scion in the country.

Laurance and his namesake progeny have been lavish godfathers to UFOlogy organizations that attribute saucer overflights and abductions to the "alien" invasion. A panoply of aircraft defense firms swelled with an infusion of funds from Laurance Rockefeller. The most imposing is McDonnell-Douglas, founded in 1930 by a prodigy of aircraft design, James S. McDonnell of St. Louis. McDonnell shares with Laurance Rockefeller the taint of war profiteering. Periodic postwar investigations of his aircraft company by the General Accounting Office have exposed a deep, chronically overfunded well of fraud. In 1967 the company merged with Douglas Aircraft, the primary subcontractor of Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T.

Howver cerebral, James McDonnell had one foot firmly planted in the occult.

He was a principal donor to the famed J.B. Rhine psychic research center at Duke University, a forerunner of Psi-Tech, and supported psychic experimentation at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Rhine and his wife Louisa joined the faculty of Duke University in 1927 to explore the paranormal with Dr. William McDougall, chairman of the psychology department. In a few years, according to Parapsychological Institute literature, "Dr. Rhine was conducting the groundbreaking research that demonstrated under rigorous, scientific conditions that certain persons could acquire information without the use of the known senses. He introduced the term extrasensory perception (ESP) to describe this ability and adopted the word parapsychology to distinguish his experimental approach from other methods of psychical research."

Among the key early supporters of the Rhine ESP center was Medtronics, a medical technology firm in Minneapolis. The connection is chilling in the context of forced human experimentation. Bear in mind the horrors of the surgical table described by abductees, circled by "alien" doctors, when paging through the Medtronics (another NPR sponsor) catalog: "The company's neurological business produces implantable systems for spinal cord stimulation and drug delivery.... The Itrel II spinal cord stimulation system is the most advanced and flexible implantable neurostimulation device on the market today."

Another financial supporter of the Rhine center was insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, whose name was the very first on Richard Nixon's list of presidential campaign contributors.

Iowa: Sports Editor Faces Child Pornography Charge

By Staff
East Iowa Herald
www.eiherald.co
Nov 13, 2008

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - A Brooklyn man has been charged with distribution of child pornography for allegedly sending child porn images to a minor.

Authorities say 24-year-old Kyle Michael Kirby assumed an identity in September and attempted to distribute a sexually explicit photo of a teenage girl to a teenage boy. The U.S. attorney’s office says Kirby met the boy on the Internet social networking site Facebook.

Kirby made an initial appearance in court on Monday and a detention hearing was held the following day. He was placed on home detention with electronic monitoring.

A trial date has not been set.

Kirby was the sports editor for the Brooklyn Chronicle and the Montezuma Republican newspapers, both owned by the Marengo Publishing Company and the Des Moines Register. Kirby joined MPC in January of 2006. He was suspended from his position shortly after law enforcement officials from Poweshiek and Linn counties executed a search warrant at the Brooklyn Chronicle office. Two computers were confiscated as a result of the warrant. According to the complaint, search warrants were also executed at Kirby’s Brooklyn home and at his parents home in Colesburg.

The case is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa. The Grand Jury indictment states:

“In or about mid-September, 2008, in the Northern District of Iowa, and elsewhere, defendant Kyle Michael Kirby knowingly transported and shipped and attempted to transport and ship, in interstate and foreign commerce, visual depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”

The criminal complaint alleges that Kirby created the online identity, Josh F., which he used to contact minors. Kirby allegedly posed as a female through that identity soliciting photos from a 14 and a 15-year-old boy.

Additionally, Kirby is alleged to have sent the 14-year-old boy a nude photo of an underaged girl that he had obtained online earlier.

According to MPC Publisher Dan DeBettignies, Kirby is currently suspended without pay from his position at the Chronicle and Republican.

Under the terms of his release pending trial, Kirby is prohibited from using a computer or accessing the Internet. If convicted, he could face five to 20 years in prison and lifetime supervision upon release.

http://www.eiherald.com/artman2/publish/news/Chronicle_sports_editor_faces_child_pornography_charge08446.shtml

‘Ordinary voter’ in New York Times recount story has strong GOP ties

By CHRIS STELLER
minnesotaindependent.com
11/14/08

A man presented as an “ordinary voter” in a New York Times article today about the impending recount in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race has strong ties to the Republican Party and conservative causes that the article does not reveal.

In the article, “Minnesota Senate Rivals Dig In for Recount Battle,” reporter Christina Capecchi (who also writes for MinnPost), identifies Noah Rouen only as a 34-year-old who “swore off political talk on a pheasant hunt last weekend.” When he and his buddies heard of the now-legendary (and debunked) 32-ballots-in-a-car-trunk story, Capecchi writes, “They could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory.”

One reason Rouen might be given to such theories about votes favoring Democrat Al Franken is that Democrats accused him of participating in a conspiracy to distribute false campaign materials against Franken last summer. In a complaint — later dismissed — to the state Office of Administrative Hearing, DFL Party chair Brian Melendez named Rouen along with two other individuals and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace as being behind a television ad that made charges against Franken related to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

The complaint says Rouen was a delegate to this year’s Republican National Convention (RNC) and for two years a staff member for former U.S. Sen. Rod Grams (R-Minn.). Rouen’s biography at the Web site of his current employer — a St. Paul-based media relations firm called Public Affairs Company, where he is vice president — describes his service to Grams as a staffer and press secretary. Public Affairs Co. re-branded itself as GOP Convention Strategies in a marketing push timed to the RNC.

In an interview with the Minnesota Independent, Rouen said that he worked for Grams’ campaign as well from 1999 to 2000. He said while that level of partisan activity is in his past — he called work for the “Vote Yes Minnesota” referendum campaign his most partisan activity this year — he “makes no bones” about being a Republican or having voted for Coleman.

Rouen said he gave Capecchi, who found him via a Facebook group called “Looking for Coleman Ballots,” his whole background during a 30-minute interview two days ago. He said he was surprised to be identified only as a pheasant hunter in the Times article, and in fact was somewhat surprised to be included at all, given how the ballots-in-the-trunk story has since “evolved.” (On Minnesota Public Radio today, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie reiterated that the story was false, calling for those who started the rumor to speak up.)

Capecchi did not return phone messages and e-mails from the Minnesota Independent.

Rouen’s political background isn’t hard to trace. In 2002, he ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives in District 60A but was defeated by DFLer Margaret Anderson Kelliher, now speaker of the house. That year he also served as spokesman for the Rod Grams Minnesota Victory Club, a political action committee formed to aid candidates in local races. A frequent writer of letters on newspaper opinion pages, Rouen had a letter, which ridiculed Democratic vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), published in the Oct. 31 edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Rouen is featured at the end of the second half of the Times article, which contains a series of quotes from political officials and commentators that are introduced by this sentence:

As the recount nears, brickbats from the candidates, their surrogates and ordinary voters are coming fast and furious.

After quotes from mainly conservative sources — itself a point of complaint by Media Matters (referenced by MnIndy on Friday) — Capecchi concludes her article with this:

Noah Rouen, 34, and his buddies swore off political talk on a pheasant hunt last weekend, but when they heard that 32 absentee ballots favoring Mr. Franken were not counted until days later, having been locked in a Minneapolis elections office, they could not help but hatch a conspiracy theory.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Rouen logged onto Facebook and updated his status: “Noah is looking for Coleman ballots in his car.”

http://minnesotaindependent.com/17591/ordinary-voter-in-new-york-times-recount-story-has-strong-gop-ties

ALSO SEE: "National Republican Party Creates Conspiracy Site, Claims 'Stolen Election' in MN's U.S. Senate Race - NRSC Publishes Unapologetic, Shameless, Evidence-Free Conspiracy Theories After Democrats Opened Door for Them to do so"