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Hick Vote?

October 18, 2011 by 1 Comment

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) said in an interview she is “going for the hick vote.”

Warren, who has taught at Harvard Law for the past 17 years, was born in Oklahoma. According to Politico, she referred to herself as an “elite hick”. I’d be tempted to just go with elitist especially given the way she looked over her glasses and down her nose at Scott Brown for posing in the nude for Cosmo to help pay for  college.

The Massachusetts GOP quickly responded.

But Massachusetts GOP Communications Director Tim Buckley had a different position.

“Professor Warren’s insulting use of the word ‘hick’ offers a revealing prism into her elitist and arrogant worldview. Massachusetts voters deserve an explanation about just who Professor Warren was referring to when she spoke of winning the ‘hick vote.’”

Checking her campaign website, she makes no mention of her stance on the Second Amendment. However, she says she is for green energy development and making it easier for workers to organize. Somehow I don’t think her stance on the Second Amendment would be the same as Massachusetts gun bloggers JayG or Weer’d Beard.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

October 17, 2011 by

CBS News is reporting that a study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that President Obama had gotten more negative media coverage than any other 2012 presidential candidate over the past five months.

Pew found that Mr. Obama was the subject of negative assessments nearly four times as often as he was the subject of positive assessments. It found he received “positive” coverage nine percent of the time, “neutral” coverage 57 percent of the time and “negative” coverage 34 percent of the time.

Pardon me if I am skeptical of this study and of their definition of media. It claims to have drawn from over 11,500 news outlets “including local and national broadcasts, news websites and blogs.”

The study used the amount of attention a candidate received and the “tone of that coverage.” They put the tone into positive, neutral, and negative categories. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they used the following methodology.

To assess the tone of coverage, PEJ researchers then employed computer algorithmic software from Crimson Hexagon. Researchers conducted a tone analysis and then “trained” the algorithm to follow the same rules as they had themselves. PEJ also conducted inter-coder tests to ensure the computer coding was replicable and valid by comparing human coding to the results derived by the algorithm. The project also had different people build the algorithms separately to ensure that they were achieving consistent results. Each computer algorithm was then additionally tested for reliability by having multiple researchers review the content assessed and the results.

The tone analysis was conducted on two different samples. The first was of the coverage and commentary on more than 11,500 news outlets, based on their RSS feeds. While the content is text based, the material on various television news sites often closely resembled the stories that had aired on television, and in some cases were exact transcripts. The second was from hundreds of thousands of blogs. (Facebook and Twitter feeds were not included after researchers found that the political assessment offered there was typically quite brief or referred to blog or news content.)

Anytime you use a computer algorithm, it is susceptible to tampering and tweaking regardless of the so-called safeguards that the researchers supposedly employed. It goes back to that old saying about computers, if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out.

The study does acknowledge that blogs are more critical of candidates than other new media outlets. This I would believe. However, the general results from this study lump blogs in with the rest of the media. In relation to the coverage of Obama, this will tend to raise the negatives while hiding the generally uncritical reporting on Obama by the mainstream media. Digging deeper into this study, you find that blogs on both ends of the political spectrum are harsher towards Obama than the news media in general. However, the study does not include a similar breakout for the mainstream media like they do for blogs. In other words, you cannot compare the tone of coverage given by blogs with that of the mainstream media.

Reports such as these that “show” more negative coverage of Obama lets the mainstream media get away with their fawning and generally uncritical reporting on him. If the mainstream media were actually taking a negative approach towards Obama, you would see in-depth, critical stories hammering his administration over Project Gunwalker. As it is, you have Sharyl Attkisson at CBS, William LaJeunesse at Fox, and sometimes Richard Solarno at the LA Times writing about it. The New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, ABC, and the rest of the elite media would just as soon not write about Project Gunwalker. They’d rather focus on the astro-turfed Occupy Wall Street nonsense.

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Is The FBI Suppressing Evidence?

October 17, 2011 by

In a follow-up to this morning’s Face The Nation interview of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) about Operation Fast and Furious, CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson reports that the committee will be asking for more information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Issa said this morning that the family of Agent Terry was told by agents attending his funeral that there were three firearms found at the murder scene.

Documents released to the committee only mentioned two weapons linked to Operation Fast and Furious. Issa wants to know more about the third weapon and what tests from it have shown. Recordings from conversations between ATF Agent Hope McAllister and the owner of Lone Wolf Trading Company seem to indicate there was a third firearm and that it was an SKS.

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Issa On Face The Nation

October 16, 2011 by 2 Comments

If you missed seeing Rep. Darrell Issa and CBS Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson on CBS’s Face The Nation this morning, here it is courtesy of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s YouTube page.

One of the key things that Issa said was that the Committee’s subpoenas to the Department of Justice were narrowly focused. He goes on to say that in many cases they already have e-mails and memos provided to them by whistle-blowers but want the original documents from the Department of Justice and/or White House to confirm their authenticity. This goes along with what Dave Hardy wrote earlier this week about the subpoena in Of Arms and The Law.

I was happy to see that CBS featured Project Gunwalker on their Sunday news show Face The Nation. While I would have wanted more questions asked (and answered), the mere fact that it was on this program underscores its growing importance in Washington. We in the blogosphere and in the gun rights community have always recognized this but having it shown on one of the premier mainstream media programs confirms it to the general public.

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Sunday Morning Hodge-Podge

October 16, 2011 by

I normally don’t watch CBS’s Face The Nation with Bob Schieffer because he drives me nuts. Today, I will make an exception. The topic for discussion will be on Project Gunwalker.

Coming Up on Face the Nation

Topic: “Fast and Furious” gunwalker case
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., Chairman, Oversight & Government Reform Committee

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Ranking Member, Oversight & Government Reform Committee

Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News Investigative Correspondent

It airs at 10:30 am Eastern. As they say, check your local listings for times in your area.

I don’t think I can overstate the importance of this. Face The Nation along with NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, and Fox’s Fox News Sunday is the type of program where major issues are discussed with the aim of influencing policymakers. Usually the topics revolve around taxes, jobs, the economy, and war. To have them discuss Project Gunwalker is evidence that at least CBS News is recognizing that it is a critical scandal for the Obama Administration. Moreover, it also makes it harder for the rest of the mainstream media to keep burying the story.

In gun blogging news, it is time to welcome a new gun blog called Shall Not Be Questioned. It really isn’t so much a new blog as a rebranded blog. It is the old Snowflakes In Hell blog with a new name, new look, and a new feel. That said, it will still be a gun blog run by Sebastian. He has this to say about why he is making the change.

But the biggest change you’ll probably notice, unless I can’t make my idea for it work (I’m a horrible graphic artist), is a name change for the blog. With the exception of the name, and a new look and feel, it’ll be the same blog. Same posts, same archives, and same comments as always. If links worked before, they’ll still work. I am looking at implementing a few requested enhancements people asked for.

I picked the name “Snowflakes in Hell” hastily, never thinking I’d keep this up. Ever since I passed the 1000 visitors a day mark, I’ve hated it. I’ve also hated it when I introduce myself as a blogger, and I get a weird look from the uninitiated when I tell them the name. Rather than talking about the blog, I get to spend the first 10 minutes explaining the name. I’ve also, rather humorously, heard people that did not know I was Sebastian mention they found something on this site “Snowflakes in Hell,” but they didn’t understand what kind of site it was. With my name and theme, who can blame them? I want a theme and a name that draws people in. I think a more relevant name and theme will be necessary to take this blog to the next level, and continue to grow my audience, and improve my brand.

I’ve updated by my gun blog links here to reflect the changeover. Having visited Shall Not Be Questioned, I think Sebastian has done a masterful job with the new look and feel. The typeface and background give it a Colonial period look which says to me the fight for freedom has been going on for over two hundred years.

Good luck to Sebastian and Bitter with the “new” blog.

Finally, over at Sipsey Street Irregulars, Mike Vanderboegh has a post on selective White House document releases. It appears to be an effort to shift blame for gunwalking back to the Bush Administration. However, it looks like it will end up rebounding on them.

You know, the best disinformation is a lie wrapped in a kernel of truth. Recall that early on the DOJ floated the excuse that “gun walking” was all Newell’s idea. We pooh-poohed that at the time, saying that Newell did not have the authority to make this multi-jurisdictional anti-law enforcement cluster coital situation happen.

But the Obama flacks knew what they were talking about, as far as it went.

Gunwalking WAS Bill Newell’s idea, and nobody knew that better than the people he sold the idea to.

And now, thanks to the desperate and incompetent folks at the White House scandal deflection team, we have more details of the early experiences of William “Gunwalker Bill” Newell, the guy who sold the whole idea to the people in the White House — who then began to make things happen to try to make the Ninety Percent Myth come true.

Make sure to read the whole post. It ties a lot of stuff together.

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Quote Of The Day

October 14, 2011 by 1 Comment

Reuben Navarette, Jr. is a columnist and former journalist who gets it when it comes to Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker. As he notes in an opinion piece published yesterday at CNN.com, this scandal is about dead Mexicans.

Frankly, I am surprised by Holder’s use of words such as “irresponsible” and “inflammatory.” What could be more irresponsible than allowing weapons to be smuggled into a foreign country, weapons that then wind up killing the citizens of that country? And what could be more inflammatory than appearing to cover up such an operation and distancing oneself from it as staffers allegedly yell, scream and curse at reporters who are just doing their jobs?

And what was the purpose of these alleged theatrics? Was all this huffing and puffing intended to get Attkisson to back off the story? Brilliant.

As a former reporter, let me give the administration a tip: Attacking journalists is usually as effective in stamping out a story as gasoline is in putting out a fire.