Coverage of the Empire State Building Murder

In the Empire State Building incident last week, two people were killed and nine were wounded.  The two people killed were the murderer and his intended target, and the nine wounded were innocent bystanders.  As the facts of the events were sorted, it turns out that the murderer only shot his intended target, and that the nine innocent bystanders were shot by police who took down the murderer.  Now I am not angry at how the events played out.  I am not angry at the police for how they handled the situation either.  The man did have a gun after all, and police do need to defend themselves.  It's unfortunate that nine people were injured solely by police defending themselves, but I am positive that the officers didn't intentionally shoot those that were wounded.

No, what really angers me is the media coverage of the event.  I was online when the stories were being posted.  Some labeled it as a shooting, and some were posting it as 'terror' probably trying to grab their audience's attention. Not surprising.  However, many media outlets were quick to label the event as a mass shooting.  After Aurora, CO and the shooting at the Sikh temple, the mainstream media was ready to jump on this, and so were many gullible gun-control advocates.

And here is the problem: it wasn't a mass shooting.  There was only one victim of the shooter in this case, and as stated above, the rest of the wounded were victims of police fired rounds intended to take down the murderer.  According to a witness, the BBC posted that the murderer was shooting indiscriminately at people, which is absolutely false. Some media outlets even published that the nine bystanders were injured in a 'gun battle'.  In actuality, there was no gun battle as the murderer was taken down pretty quickly by police.

Whatever happened to the phrase 'just the facts' because apparently our media doesn't believe in this any longer? And when are we going to hold our media outlets accountable for their atrocious journalistic standards?

The World in a Different View

I read an article bashing Ron Paul's foreign policy views.  I ended up posting a comment to that article and thought that I should post it here as well.  Here's what I wrote:

There is so much wrong with this article that I don't even know where to begin.

1. On Osama Bin Laden, he may have not even been a factor if we didn't support him in the first place.  But as it is, Paul was for going after Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but with a mark of reprisal, and not by invasion and nation building.

2. The United States would not be in NATO or the UN. I would wonder what either of these organizations have to contribute to the US.  If anything both organizations just serve to compromise or circumvent US sovereignty. When our defense department looks towards the UN and NATO for indication to go to war instead of our own Congress, then you know our sovereignty is compromised.

3. Federal foreign aid to disaster areas would not have happened sure, but the caveat would be that it is FEDERAL.  There is nothing to stop the american people themselves in donating and giving aid, and if we had more of our own money that government takes from us, then I am sure we would be happy to donate and give aid ourselves.

4. Iraq... The US supported, funded and armed Saddam Hussein.

5. Yugoslavia, I can't say too much here as I am not familiar with that history, but I will point out Rwanda because the US did nothing in that country while it was being ethnically cleansed.  I wonder why...

6. Libya... we did more than so called 'protect' innocent civilians although that is what the American public was sold on.  It went from protecting to overthrowing the government. I remember the original intent was to just institute a no fly-zone in civilian populated areas, but quickly evolved into bombing Ghaddfi's headquarters. Now also throw in the fact that Islamic militants such as Al-Qaeda were part of the side that we were protecting...

7. Syria... Islamic militants are also at work here, but more so this is a civil war. Let's be honest here, what you are advocating is not the protection of citizens, but the victory of the rebels in overthrowing the current regime. This is the painfully obvious goal here, not the protection of the Syrian citizens.

8. Didn't a report just come out stating that Iran is not close to developing a nuclear weapon nor have they even decided to pursue one?

In closing, it seems that in recognizing all of these examples, you try view them in a way to advance your own political view.  Such myopic views of these situations is what is the real problem here. The attention span of our media seems to be limited to the 1 minute clips that they present, which is just enough to grab an audiences attention, but we never get the whole story. We can't rely on today's media any longer to do their job because they can be flat out lazy instead of diligent. This means that the public, who needs information to make informed decisions, must be diligent themselves to seek that information.

Here's an interesting article on CNN about a journalist facing wiretapping charges. Apparently there is a viral video out there of a police officer slamming the head of a handcuffed kid into a cafeteria table. The journalist may potentially get 21 years in prison if found guilty, and this case is a good test for jury nullification in New Hampshire.  While the story itself is interesting, what I want to point out is the reaction and comments to the case made by readers of the story.  Here are two of those responses.

What I would like to point out is that there is such a thing as bad laws.  The law is not perfect, and if we do see bad laws, we need to challenge them and not accept them as 'just the way it is.' If we were to reduce our thinking to accepting the laws as is, then nothing would ever change, and we would be drowning in bad laws. A question that I would ask to those two people above - What would you have said fifty years ago in the age of Jim Crow laws of the South? Would you tell those African Americans, oh too bad you just have to follow the law?

Link to the article

Harry Reid and Audit The Fed

Harry Reid does not have time to fit the bill (H.R. 459) to audit the Fed into the Senate schedule for a vote, but has time to talk to/about Mitt Romney's tax returns. This is the situation even though Reid has supposedly been fighting to audit the Federal Reserve for the past two and a half decades. What gives?