Mark your calenders

Remember: Saturday Morning, Attila on the Radio with Robert Stacy McCain by Little Miss Attila on March 30, 2011

We’ll be on Da Techguy‘s radio show in Massachusetts, which can apparently be heard over the actual airwaves throughout much of New England (and is consequently a great advertising bargain for Northeast-based businesses), this Saturday morning.

The ever quotable Steve Sailer

Heinlein in Hindsight: The Moses of Nerds

Andy Warhol is still famous for saying 43 years ago that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. It’s more likely that in the future everyone will be famous to 15 people.

When baseball was America's game

Baseball: The game that helped America become America

A brewing scandal

Project Gunrunner: Obama’s Stimulus-Funded Border Nightmare

Project Gunrunner: How Did the ATF Get Gun Dealers to Agree to Sell Guns to Criminals?

Should the ATF Have Prevented the Sale of the Gun that Killed ICE Agent Jaime Zapata?

How Big Was Operation Gunrunner? And Did One of the Gunrunner Guns Kill an ICE Agent?

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain

MSNBC: Not the place for breaking news

Viewers Want News On Weekends, But Will MSNBC Ever Give Up On Lockup?



Sure enough, the prison documentary series Lockup ran on MSNBC Saturday and again Sunday night as cable news rivals CNN and Fox News swarmed to cover the American missiles raining down on Libya. MSNBC has long faced criticism for choosing taped programming over live news coverage on weekends. Back in 2009, Scott Collins wrote about the network’s failure to cover breaking news in Iran in a Los Angeles Times story headlined “At MSNBC, Weekends Aren’t Newsworthy.” Collins quoted an MSNBC spokesman saying episodes of Lockup “generate higher viewership for us on weekends.”

Can we now agree that the Rosenberg's were guilty?

It's kind of funny. We are supposed to recoil in horror from the conspiracy theorists who think Pres. Obama is a Muslim or that he was born in Kenya. Yet, for sixty years, leading lights in journalism and the academy spun ever more convoluted and inane theories to justify, explain, and defend traitors like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss. Yet, year after year, the evidence of their guilt grows stronger.

Should we demand that Victor Navasky, Athan Theorharis, The Nation, et al. publicly repudiate their former positions? If they do not, should all thinking people publicly denounce them and their wacky conspiracy theories and their attempts to defend the indefensible?

The Sobell Confession

[Morton] Sobell’s recent second confession finally clears up some of the few remaining points of contention about the Rosenberg case—what exactly Sobell contributed, whether he and his comrades gave the Soviets valuable information, and whether it is appropriate to dismiss their actions as youthful indiscretions in aid of a wartime ally. By confirming that he was one of the group who photographed material filched by Perl, Sobell demolished the lie that the Rosenberg ring stole only inconsequential data and engaged in mere “industrial espionage.” He also revealed that, while there is no evidence he engaged in atomic espionage—with which he is associated in the public mind because of his coconspirators—he was guilty of giving the Soviet Union secret data that advanced the capabilities of the Soviet military machine. He has thus put the last nail in the coffin of the arguments of the Rosenbergs’ apologists, who continue to insist that the couple were framed and executed by the U.S. government for their political ideas.

The New York Times ran the story on page A19. I guess this revelation just did not fit the narrative. Ahh, for the glory days when the "news" on the commie spy beat was all about FBI misdeeds and new scholarly tomes proving the innocence of poor premature anti-fascists.

Jason Whitlock doesn't care who he ticks off

This question is right on point:

Let me get this right. When black men call each other “Uncle Toms” and “bitches” for no good reason and the financial benefit of ESPN, it’s admirable candor? When Don Imus calls black women “nappy-headed hos” for no good reason and the financial benefit of a radio station, it’s a crime against humanity and a fireable offense?

Good point

Deadspin points to a telling conflict of interest at ESPN in the matter of Jalen Rose v. Grant Hill:

ESPN, Jalen Rose, And The Manufactured "Uncle Tom" Controversy

This is where ESPN's tricky dual roles as journalism outfit and producer of sports entertainment collide, and the results aren't always pretty. ESPN, not to mention Jalen Rose, only stood to benefit from a controversy over Rose's remarks. Among other things, it allowed the network to promote the doc without explicitly promoting it. It was news now, not just another piece of entertainment programming.

One, two, many George Baileys

Something Greater Than Yourself

But if the self-serving, banal fame of the Snookies and the Kardashians, whose names are distressingly to the forefront of our awareness for no discernable reason, matters, it may be in measures more cautionary than lasting. Their influence cannot—should not—have a deeper influence on the world than the example of one ordinary, not-famous man flipping his 400th pancake while reassuring a young scout who has spilled maple syrup all over himself, or one ordinary, not-famous 15 year-old handing a pair of cheap sunglasses to a shy kid who wants to belong.

RTWT

Scandalize his name

Funny, i haven't heard this part of the story from the tabloid TV shows.

Is Mel Gibson guilty of domestic violence? Before you say yes, check the facts

Good riddance

Judith Coplon Socolov, one of those Americans who happily spied for Stalin, died earlier this month.

Judith Coplon, Haunted by Espionage Case, Dies at 89

Like Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg's, she went to her grave denying her treachery.


The Times's story is a fair presentation of the basic facts. They give her daughter a lot of space to justify her actions which amounts to the current party line:

“If you feel that what you’re doing answers to a higher ideal, it’s not treason.”

Ronald Radosh and Daniel Flynn have useful correctives to this sort of balderdash:

Another American Spy for the Soviets Dies … and the Left Regards Her as a Hero


Spies Like Us

The FBI's pursuit of Coplon is told by the FBI man who was at the heart of the investigation. It's a great read and illustrates the problems that prosecutors face when dealing with spies and terrorists.

Stale buzz: Tina Brown and Newsweek

Maybe it's time to rename it 'Lastweek'

News you might have missed

Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos Party at Home of Convicted Pedophile, Pimp

Playing the McCarthyism card (badly)

UPDATED

Now days, "McCarthyism" has been drained of meaning. It gets tossed around by people who have no idea what the Senator did. They simply "know" that he was bad and did bad things.

This puts plenty of fish in the barrel for those who know history. Neo-neocon gives us a lesson in how it is done:

Peter King McCarthy

UPDATE:

Neo links to this Ron Radosh article which is well worth a look:

A New View of the McCarthy Era Could Shake up the Academy

I especially liked this:

This conventional narrative of the left has been told over and over for so many years that it has all but become the established truth to most Americans. It was exemplified in a best-selling book of the late 1970's, David Caute’s The Great Fear, and from the most quoted one from the recent past, Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. My favorite title is one written by the late Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition 1945-1960: A Profile of the “McCarthy Era.” In his book, Belfrage told the story of how he, an independent journalist who founded the fellow-traveling weekly The National Guardian, was hounded by the authorities and finally deported home to Britain. American concerns about Soviet espionage, he argued, were simply paranoia.
The problem with Belfrage’s account was that once the Venona files began to be released in 1995–the once top secret Soviet decrypts of communications between Moscow Center and its US agents—they revealed that Belfrage was a paid KGB operative, just as the anti-Communist liberal Sidney Hook had openly charged decades ago, and as turned KGB spy Elizabeth Bentley had privately informed the FBI in 1945. The Venona cables revealed that Belfrage had given the KGB an OSS report received by British intelligence concerning the anti-Communist Yugoslav resistance in the 1940's as well as documents about the British government’s position during the war on opening a second front in Europe. It showed that Belfrage had offered the Soviets to establish secret contact with them if he was stationed in London.

The last thirty years have been full of revelations like that.

One of my favorites is earnest liberal (his family owned The New Republic) Michael Straight who wrote a book on the Army- McCarthy hearings (Trial by Television). Naturally, he was appalled by the senator from Wisconsin. But then, he had something of a rooting interest: his brother-in-law (Gustavo Duran) was one of the names that McCarthy named.

Decades after McCarthy's self-destruction, we found out that Straight was a member of the Cambridge spy-ring (Kim Philby, et. al.) Not only that, but another brother-in-law was one of Stalin's minions in Spain during the civil war there.


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