The "Poor'" Take A Hit From The NY Times

The "Poor'" Take A Hit From The NY Times

Don't panic! That's not a future New York Times headline. In fact, it's the front page the day after the 2008 presidential election. And it already contained a major inaccuracy. Not only did the racial barriers not fall, but after three years, Barack Obama has been busily rebuilding those barriers which were damaged by improving race relations. One of his ploys to divide by race and class has been the issue of poverty.

So imagine my surprise when the "newspaper of record" actually ran a front page article indicating that the "poverty problem" has been grossly overstated for years. It wasn't even an article on the editorial pages written by a token conservative. It was right there in front of God and everyone of the front newspage, written by two Times welfare beat reporters. After regaling us for months with horror stories of the rich getting richer and the poor getting children, these reporters actually addressed the issue of defining poverty up.

Poverty in America is generally equal to comfortable middle class status in about 90% of the world. But in order to promote class warfare and government dependency, the liberals have continually based the description of poverty on the family income of the "poor." Those claiming that extreme poverty is on the rise because of the undertaxed rich have left out a major factor regarding the "poor." Government largess has jumped in to replace income, and government social welfare programs and safety nets have more than filled the gap in lost or never-earned income. The socialist paradise hasn't yet arrived, but these people ain't starving nor are they out in the streets with no place to live.

The reporters open with: "When the Census Bureau said in September that the number of poor Americans had soared by 10 million to rates rarely seen in four decades, commentators called the report 'shocking' and 'bleak.' Most poverty experts would add another description--'flawed.'" When poverty is described as "only" having one car, one roof over your head, air-conditioning for the summer and heating for the winter, and a balanced diet, the term becomes meaningless. And when those perks are paid for largely by the government and not included in family income, the whole "poverty problem" becomes largely a myth designed to destroy the conservative doctrine of self-reliance.

The Census study also tends to put San Francisco and Manhattan prices together with Mississippi and Arkansas incomes. Reporters Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff go on to say that after its big "revelations" of the increase in "poverty," the Census Bureau is quietly going to offer an alternative version this coming week. The reporters say that an added Census study will address a different way of counting the resources of the alleged poor and their legitimate needs. "Similar measures, quietly published in the past, suggest among other things that safety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship. As much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears."

"Virtually every effort to take a fuller view--counting more income and more expenses--shows poverty rising more slowly in the recession than the official data suggests," say DeParle and Gebeloff. While the official national measure shows a rise of nearly 10 million newly-impoverished people, the revised Census measures put it at more like 4.5 million to 4.8 million--fewer than would normally be expected during a major recession.

De Parle particularly has had a seeming epiphany somewhere along the line. When Congress pushed Bill Clinton into welfare reform, he wrote: "Poor mothers will turn to prostitution, abandoning their children, or being forced to 'camp out in the streets and beg.'" We all know that such a thing never happened, but isn't it refreshing to have a liberal admit it (sort of)?

Now let's not get to too excited and start thinking that liberal thinking has changed. In the case of this particular New York Times story, the only thing that changed was how these liberals want to calculate poverty. Fairly enough, they added government assistance to income, but that's as far as it goes. They still draw the opposite conclusion from conservatives.

Liberals still think that skewing the poverty rate by throwing government money at the poor will solve the "problem." Don't hold your breath for them to decide that generational dependency on government redistribution of wealth destroys the initiative, creativity, and work-ethic that made this nation great. In fact, if they admit it at all, they'll tell you it's a good thing.

Don't panic! That's not a future New York Times headline. In fact, it's the front page the day after the 2008 presidential election. And it already contained a major inaccuracy. Not only did the racial barriers not fall, but after three years, Barack Obama has been busily rebuilding those barriers which were damaged by improving race relations. One of his ploys to divide by race and class has been the issue of poverty.

So imagine my surprise when the "newspaper of record" actually ran a front page article indicating that the "poverty problem" has been grossly overstated for years. It wasn't even an article on the editorial pages written by a token conservative. It was right there in front of God and everyone of the front newspage, written by two Times welfare beat reporters. After regaling us for months with horror stories of the rich getting richer and the poor getting children, these reporters actually addressed the issue of defining poverty up.

Poverty in America is generally equal to comfortable middle class status in about 90% of the world. But in order to promote class warfare and government dependency, the liberals have continually based the description of poverty on the family income of the "poor." Those claiming that extreme poverty is on the rise because of the undertaxed rich have left out a major factor regarding the "poor." Government largess has jumped in to replace income, and government social welfare programs and safety nets have more than filled the gap in lost or never-earned income. The socialist paradise hasn't yet arrived, but these people ain't starving nor are they out in the streets with no place to live.

The reporters open with: "When the Census Bureau said in September that the number of poor Americans had soared by 10 million to rates rarely seen in four decades, commentators called the report 'shocking' and 'bleak.' Most poverty experts would add another description--'flawed.'" When poverty is described as "only" having one car, one roof over your head, air-conditioning for the summer and heating for the winter, and a balanced diet, the term becomes meaningless. And when those perks are paid for largely by the government and not included in family income, the whole "poverty problem" becomes largely a myth designed to destroy the conservative doctrine of self-reliance.

The Census study also tends to put San Francisco and Manhattan prices together with Mississippi and Arkansas incomes. Reporters Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff go on to say that after its big "revelations" of the increase in "poverty," the Census Bureau is quietly going to offer an alternative version this coming week. The reporters say that an added Census study will address a different way of counting the resources of the alleged poor and their legitimate needs. "Similar measures, quietly published in the past, suggest among other things that safety-net programs have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship. As much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears."

"Virtually every effort to take a fuller view--counting more income and more expenses--shows poverty rising more slowly in the recession than the official data suggests," say DeParle and Gebeloff. While the official national measure shows a rise of nearly 10 million newly-impoverished people, the revised Census measures put it at more like 4.5 million to 4.8 million--fewer than would normally be expected during a major recession.

De Parle particularly has had a seeming epiphany somewhere along the line. When Congress pushed Bill Clinton into welfare reform, he wrote: "Poor mothers will turn to prostitution, abandoning their children, or being forced to 'camp out in the streets and beg.'" We all know that such a thing never happened, but isn't it refreshing to have a liberal admit it (sort of)?

Now let's not get to too excited and start thinking that liberal thinking has changed. In the case of this particular New York Times story, the only thing that changed was how these liberals want to calculate poverty. Fairly enough, they added government assistance to income, but that's as far as it goes. They still draw the opposite conclusion from conservatives.

Liberals still think that skewing the poverty rate by throwing government money at the poor will solve the "problem." Don't hold your breath for them to decide that generational dependency on government redistribution of wealth destroys the initiative, creativity, and work-ethic that made this nation great. In fact, if they admit it at all, they'll tell you it's a good thing.

The "Poor'" Take A Hit From The NY Times

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Did Aliens Take All The Aliens?

Did Aliens Take All The Aliens?

Omigod! The entire Hispanic population of Albertville, Alabama has disappeared overnight. Streets in Hispanic neighborhoods all over the state are empty. What could have happened? In order to find out, I consulted the New York Times. I now know it wasn't space aliens who absconded with the earthly aliens after all. It was the Hispanic Rapture.

In the wake of a federal court decision upholding Alabama's tough new immigration arrest, detention and reporting statute, Times reporter Clay Waters rushed to Alabama to say good-bye to his Hispanic immigrant friends, only to discover that they had all disappeared before he could get there. Says Waters: "In certain neighborhoods the streets are uncommonly quiet, like the aftermath of some sort of rapture."

Waters reports that "the vanishing began on Wednesday night (after the court decision), the most frightened families packing up their their cars as they heard the news." And these were not insubstantial Hispanics who were vanishing. Waters goes on to say: "They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for a thousand dollars or even less. Or they just closed up and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a neighbor. Dogs were fed one last time; if no home could be found, they were simply unleashed."

(Give me a moment to stop sobbing over this tragedy, and then I will choke back the tears and continue writing)

It's a good thing God knew in advance what the court decision would be. That way, He could cause the Hispanics to vanish before the law enforcement agencies could arrive. Oh, the humanity! Where God has plopped them down, Waters can't say. "Two, five, ten years of living here, and then gone, to Tennessee, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arkansas, Mexico--who knows? Anywhere but Alabama." Now I'm not on personal speaking terms with God, but I did notice that overnight the Hispanic population of Los Angeles increased by several hundred thousand, so maybe He transported them to California.

In Albertville alone, 123 Hispanic students did not show up for school the next day. A local real estate agent reported that his Hispanic occupancy had suddenly dropped by twenty-five percent, and might drop further. Waters did not report that the number of Democratic voters throughout the state had declined in approximately the same numbers as the vanishing Hispanics. Coincidence?

Says Waters: "Near the plant that is the largest employer in town, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment, or the silence of paralyzing fear." Waters is apparently unaware that it's also hard to differentiate between purple prose and plain bulls--t.

Perhaps Waters will do a followup article in which he breathlessly describes how he found Hispanics all over town who had mysteriously not been taken up in the rapture. Why were only some of the Hispanics taken, and the others left behind to go on with their lives as usual? Perhaps it will turn out that it has something to do with how the remaining Hispanics got here in the first place. Ya think?

Omigod! The entire Hispanic population of Albertville, Alabama has disappeared overnight. Streets in Hispanic neighborhoods all over the state are empty. What could have happened? In order to find out, I consulted the New York Times. I now know it wasn't space aliens who absconded with the earthly aliens after all. It was the Hispanic Rapture.

In the wake of a federal court decision upholding Alabama's tough new immigration arrest, detention and reporting statute, Times reporter Clay Waters rushed to Alabama to say good-bye to his Hispanic immigrant friends, only to discover that they had all disappeared before he could get there. Says Waters: "In certain neighborhoods the streets are uncommonly quiet, like the aftermath of some sort of rapture."

Waters reports that "the vanishing began on Wednesday night (after the court decision), the most frightened families packing up their their cars as they heard the news." And these were not insubstantial Hispanics who were vanishing. Waters goes on to say: "They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for a thousand dollars or even less. Or they just closed up and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a neighbor. Dogs were fed one last time; if no home could be found, they were simply unleashed."

(Give me a moment to stop sobbing over this tragedy, and then I will choke back the tears and continue writing)

It's a good thing God knew in advance what the court decision would be. That way, He could cause the Hispanics to vanish before the law enforcement agencies could arrive. Oh, the humanity! Where God has plopped them down, Waters can't say. "Two, five, ten years of living here, and then gone, to Tennessee, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arkansas, Mexico--who knows? Anywhere but Alabama." Now I'm not on personal speaking terms with God, but I did notice that overnight the Hispanic population of Los Angeles increased by several hundred thousand, so maybe He transported them to California.

In Albertville alone, 123 Hispanic students did not show up for school the next day. A local real estate agent reported that his Hispanic occupancy had suddenly dropped by twenty-five percent, and might drop further. Waters did not report that the number of Democratic voters throughout the state had declined in approximately the same numbers as the vanishing Hispanics. Coincidence?

Says Waters: "Near the plant that is the largest employer in town, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment, or the silence of paralyzing fear." Waters is apparently unaware that it's also hard to differentiate between purple prose and plain bulls--t.

Perhaps Waters will do a followup article in which he breathlessly describes how he found Hispanics all over town who had mysteriously not been taken up in the rapture. Why were only some of the Hispanics taken, and the others left behind to go on with their lives as usual? Perhaps it will turn out that it has something to do with how the remaining Hispanics got here in the first place. Ya think?

Did Aliens Take All The Aliens?

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NY Times Still Hates Dick Cheney

NY Times Still Hates Dick Cheney

Back in 2008, the New York Times ran a scurrilous story linking Dick Cheney and Haliburton (KBR Division) to a brutal rape. The story was part of a series purporting to show that rapes of female employees of contractors in Iraq were routine, done with the quiet assent of the contractors. The poster girl for the accusations is one Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been gang-raped in the Green Zone in 2005.



And doesn't everyone love a victimized whistleblower? The horror of it all was repeated as gospel truth on CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR and every major urban newspaper. As she gained public exposure, the story continued to get increasingly lurid. By the time she had finished her revelations, she had been drugged, gang-raped by fellow KBR employees, held at machine-gunpoint by the KBR managers in a shipping container with no food or water because she insisted on reporting the crimes. About the only person she did not specifically accuse of participating in the rape was Dick Cheney himself, but according to Jones and the mainstream media, he was guilty by association, and probably in charge of KBR's rape program.



Our fine patriotic President, who was a temporary Illinois Senator at the time quickly demanded a full State Department investigation of Haliburton, KBR, and Dick Cheney. He wanted to know who participated, who knew what, and when, and assumed that the story was true before any of those investigations began. His fellow Senatorial moron, Al Franken (D-Minnesota) went a step farther. He demanded a Congressional investigation and proposed an "anti-rape" amendment to a pending appropriations bill for private military contractors. Just as anyone who opposes the Democrats' drunken sailor spending is an economic terrorist, Franken called the Republicans who opposed the amendment "pro-rape conservatives."



Jamie Leigh Jones became almost as much of a news item as Michael Jackson's death and Valerie Plame's outing as a low-level CIA clerk. She mugged for the cameras, and put on a bravura performance before congressional committees, culminating with her getting an advance for her book, The Jamie Leigh Story--How My Rape in Iraq and Cover-up made Me a Crusader for Justice. The media ate it up. Dick Cheney is a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Jack the Ripper. What could be better?



Fast forward to July, 2011. The Times had run out of headline space, or any space on the pages of the front sections to announce "grand jury decides Jamie Leigh Jones's story was a complete fabrication. Aside from all the Jones-damning circumstantial evidence, a rape kit done at the time showed she had had consensual sexual relations one time with one employee. There was absolutely no evidence of a rape, let alone a gang-rape. No criminal charges were filed, or ever will be filed.



Jones had claimed that the rape was so brutal that her breast implants were ruptured. Nope. The doctor on-scene and later her own plastic surgeon testified that no such injury had occurred. Both doctors were sympathetic females, and neither had any connection to Haliburton or Cheney. She claimed that she had been slipped Rohypnol by the gang. Rohypnol is a commonly-used date rape drug, often called "roofies." It remains very detectable in the bloodstream for a minimum of 72 hours. The tests by a female doctor/rape specialist done twice within 24 hours of the alleged rape showed no drugs of any kind present in her blood.



So the "troubling trend of unreported sexual assaults" turned out to be absolutely false. The whole Times series of front-page articles was built on a foundation of non-facts and no fact-checkers. And they had plenty of help from the entire spectrum of mainstream media. Undaunted, Jones's lawyers quickly shifted gears and filed a civil suit naming KBR, Haliburton and Cheney on a theory of agency law (called respondeat superior, or in ambulance-chasing lingo, "the deep pockets").



The civil complaint no longer alleges a gang-rape, or even a gang. It has devolved into a another pathetic case of a sad woman who wanted her fifteen minutes of fame, only to find out that investigators and prosecutors are not the mainstream media. They don't and can't accept lurid stories at face value (lacrosse-players being the exception to the rule). She is suing based on her own version of a sexual encounter that is just as easily refuted by the sex-partner's denials. She is perfectly happy to have her most intimate moments exposed to the public on the small chance that the jury will buy her story and connect it to big-bucks Haliburton and Cheney.



If she's smart (which I strongly suspect she is not), she'll go to Al Sharpton's attorneys so that when the consensual sexual partner sues her for defamation, she can claim "well maybe it wasn't true, but it could have been."

Back in 2008, the New York Times ran a scurrilous story linking Dick Cheney and Haliburton (KBR Division) to a brutal rape. The story was part of a series purporting to show that rapes of female employees of contractors in Iraq were routine, done with the quiet assent of the contractors. The poster girl for the accusations is one Jamie Leigh Jones, who claimed to have been gang-raped in the Green Zone in 2005.



And doesn't everyone love a victimized whistleblower? The horror of it all was repeated as gospel truth on CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR and every major urban newspaper. As she gained public exposure, the story continued to get increasingly lurid. By the time she had finished her revelations, she had been drugged, gang-raped by fellow KBR employees, held at machine-gunpoint by the KBR managers in a shipping container with no food or water because she insisted on reporting the crimes. About the only person she did not specifically accuse of participating in the rape was Dick Cheney himself, but according to Jones and the mainstream media, he was guilty by association, and probably in charge of KBR's rape program.



Our fine patriotic President, who was a temporary Illinois Senator at the time quickly demanded a full State Department investigation of Haliburton, KBR, and Dick Cheney. He wanted to know who participated, who knew what, and when, and assumed that the story was true before any of those investigations began. His fellow Senatorial moron, Al Franken (D-Minnesota) went a step farther. He demanded a Congressional investigation and proposed an "anti-rape" amendment to a pending appropriations bill for private military contractors. Just as anyone who opposes the Democrats' drunken sailor spending is an economic terrorist, Franken called the Republicans who opposed the amendment "pro-rape conservatives."



Jamie Leigh Jones became almost as much of a news item as Michael Jackson's death and Valerie Plame's outing as a low-level CIA clerk. She mugged for the cameras, and put on a bravura performance before congressional committees, culminating with her getting an advance for her book, The Jamie Leigh Story--How My Rape in Iraq and Cover-up made Me a Crusader for Justice. The media ate it up. Dick Cheney is a combination of Dr. Strangelove and Jack the Ripper. What could be better?



Fast forward to July, 2011. The Times had run out of headline space, or any space on the pages of the front sections to announce "grand jury decides Jamie Leigh Jones's story was a complete fabrication. Aside from all the Jones-damning circumstantial evidence, a rape kit done at the time showed she had had consensual sexual relations one time with one employee. There was absolutely no evidence of a rape, let alone a gang-rape. No criminal charges were filed, or ever will be filed.



Jones had claimed that the rape was so brutal that her breast implants were ruptured. Nope. The doctor on-scene and later her own plastic surgeon testified that no such injury had occurred. Both doctors were sympathetic females, and neither had any connection to Haliburton or Cheney. She claimed that she had been slipped Rohypnol by the gang. Rohypnol is a commonly-used date rape drug, often called "roofies." It remains very detectable in the bloodstream for a minimum of 72 hours. The tests by a female doctor/rape specialist done twice within 24 hours of the alleged rape showed no drugs of any kind present in her blood.



So the "troubling trend of unreported sexual assaults" turned out to be absolutely false. The whole Times series of front-page articles was built on a foundation of non-facts and no fact-checkers. And they had plenty of help from the entire spectrum of mainstream media. Undaunted, Jones's lawyers quickly shifted gears and filed a civil suit naming KBR, Haliburton and Cheney on a theory of agency law (called respondeat superior, or in ambulance-chasing lingo, "the deep pockets").



The civil complaint no longer alleges a gang-rape, or even a gang. It has devolved into a another pathetic case of a sad woman who wanted her fifteen minutes of fame, only to find out that investigators and prosecutors are not the mainstream media. They don't and can't accept lurid stories at face value (lacrosse-players being the exception to the rule). She is suing based on her own version of a sexual encounter that is just as easily refuted by the sex-partner's denials. She is perfectly happy to have her most intimate moments exposed to the public on the small chance that the jury will buy her story and connect it to big-bucks Haliburton and Cheney.



If she's smart (which I strongly suspect she is not), she'll go to Al Sharpton's attorneys so that when the consensual sexual partner sues her for defamation, she can claim "well maybe it wasn't true, but it could have been."

NY Times Still Hates Dick Cheney

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