EckerNet.Com

According to Bill O\’Reilly, opposing government confiscation of firearms is an \”extreme\” view….nevermind that it\’s the LAW and has been firmly upheld by the courts over and over.  Just ask the City of New Orleans that got their legal pee pee slapped for trying that during Katrina.

But according to Bill O\’Reilly the government is perfectly excused to confiscate firearms from citizens during emergencies.  Nevermind, that during emergencies, when public services like police and fire are breaking down and/or strained to the limit, is the time private citizens need their firearms the most!  And if it\’s such an emergency how can a government possibly have the resources to be confiscating firearms anyway.

Whatever the reason, either Bill O\’Reilly has completely flipped his lid or whomever prepped him for this show was on drugs.  Because O\’Reilly comes off as the kook here, and his guest as rationale and intelligent, and thoroughly patient with O\’Reilly\’s idiocy.

Congrats Bill, you had a great run.  Don\’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

The most recent addition to my DVR-dominated TV lineup, is Pawn Stars, of which I\’ve actually become a pretty big fan.  For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it\’s basically about a big Las Vegas pawn shop.  It centers around the varied and interesting items people bring into the shop, and the two-way process of learning/teaching about the item and it\’s significance and then the inevitable negotiations over price.

One of the things I like most about the show, is that the pawn shop employees have no qualms about admitting when they are outside their expertise and need to call in an expert. That\’s especially the case on weapons of all sorts, including guns. I only wish our mainstream media had the same humility, and that includes FoxNews.

The site Every Day, No Days Off slams FoxNews for indicating a suspect had a 37mm grenade launcher on their weapon.

Detectives later searched the room where Woodson had been staying at the Red Mill Inn in Branchburg. Forrest said they seized another Bushmaster .308-caliber semiautomatic rifle with a defaced serial number, a 37 mm Cobray grenade launcher, a second bulletproof vest, a Russian-made night vision scope, a police scanner, a map of a U.S. military installation and a map of an out-of-state civilian community, a Middle Eastern red and white colored traditional headdress and hundreds of rounds of .50-caliber and .308-caliber ammunition.

To which Every Day, No Days Off responds

BIG difference. One is a Destructive Device (40mm) and one is not (37mm).

There is no such thing as \”grenades\” for the 37mm.

Very correct, the 37mm fires things like tear gas canisters, smoke rounds and flares. Although to be fair to FoxNews, vendors frequently market them as \”grenade launchers\”, and the 37mm is the civilian non-destructive version of the true 40mm grenade launcher. But still, it\’s a rather serious mislabeling of a rather critical piece of information and FoxNews deserves to be slapped for it.

I\’m actually more annoyed by this line that Every Day, No Days Off mostly gives them a pass on.

Forrest said the .223-caliber assault rifle that Woodson was carrying had a defaced serial number and had been altered to fire .50-caliber ammunition.

From the description I\’m also assuming it was an AR-15, the infamous \”Evil Black Rifle\” (EBR). Lots of things wrong with just this one sentence.

First of all, the holy of holies….the reference to \”assault rifle\”, whose bastard cousin is the term \”assault weapon\”.  I have yet to find someone that can define \”assault weapon\” as anything that doesn\’t also include a standard hunting rifle, the type sitting in the home of most hunters anywhere. Usually the conversation comes down to the very \”objective\” description of….\”well it looks scary\”, hence the tongue-in-cheek label of \”Evil Black Rifle\” (EBR).

A careful reader will observe though, that they use the term \”assault rifle\”.  Many people use the term interchangeably with \”assault weapon\”.  But others actually do attempt to define it, with one of the core requirements being \”capable of fully-automatic fire\”.  That\’s not the case here, hence it\’s not an \”assault rifle\”.  The reason I know that\’s not the case here is because otherwise the article would have been titled:

HOLY FUCK THE BASTARD HAD A FUCKING MACHINE GUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WE\’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!

That not being the case, I think it\’s a fair assumption.

What also irritates me is the reference to a .223-caliber rifle altered to fire .50-caliber ammunition…..well then it\’s not a .223-caliber rifle now is it??

And it speaks to an ignorance of AR-15s, which are popular, in part because they are as modular as all hell. I\’m gonna go out on a limb here and bet that there are probably almost as many AR-15s built from parts by their owner, as there were built in a factory. Don\’t like something on your AR-15, you swap out that specific part for something more your style. The caliber is just one piece of that. You can find AR-15 uppers for everything between the paltry .22 to the .50 BMG, inclusive.

The firearms wasn\’t altered to fire .50, that\’s what it\’s designed to do. The only way it was \”altered\” was having the serial number defaced.

Now I\’m by no means a firearms expert, as much as I may blog about them, but it doesn\’t take much knowledge to spot the inconsistencies, subtle errors, and outright obliviousness present whenever anyone in the media starts talking about firearms. It\’s almost as if it\’s intentional but I try not to be the paranoid sort.

So instead I offer this:

Dear FoxNews, ABC, CBS, NBC, , etc,

Next time you want to bloviate about firearms, run your article by me first. I\’ll make sure you got at least the basics correct. All I ask in return is one firearm of my choice every month. Considering what you pay your talking heads it\’s a bargain. In fact you\’ll probably cost ME money as I\’ll need to spend a ton just outfitting these firearms with all the \”necessary\” accessories….like grenade launchers.

Sincerely,

Kevin Ecker

Wow, Mika Brzezinski of MSN-BC makes fun of Palin for her pick of favorite founding father, including an exaggerated \”Wow….let me process\” because apparently Palin\’s \”idiocy\” is too much for her.

So who is Mika\’s favorite founding father???  Lincoln.

Wow….let me just process that…..at least Palin picked one of the founding fathers.

Wow, people say stupid things sometimes, but sometimes someone makes a statement so inane you have to wonder if it was an ill-fated attempt at ironic humor.

Dan Rather, yeah, the disgraced former anchor who broadcast some pretty terrible things about Bush without a source, had this to say about online journalism…yeah the same people that busted him for his unsourced attacks:

“…you can put something on the internet that’s really terrible about your neighbor or about a friend or a competitor and it’s almost impossible to find out who the source is. And you can say anything about them. That part of it troubles me.”

I don\’t suppose that would be at all similiar to an anchor who can put something on TV that\’s really terrible about their president and it turns out to be impossible for him to come up with a credible source for it. In fact, it took online journalism to find out that the source is someone just made it up and Rather didn\’t bother to source it.

In other words, people in their pajamas working out of their basement is more ethical and trustworthy than a long time highly paid journalist with a professional staff and a certificate on the wall from a fancy journalism school.  THAT is the part that should probably be troubling Rather, or rather that should have been the lesson he pulled from his experience.

Congrats Rather, this is such a boneheaded statement that I\’ve decided to resurrect a gimmick award I had long ago discontinued as being too goofy, even for this goofy gimmicky blog.   But now it just cries out to be awarded and I can think of a title no more benefiting you.  I hereby grant you the Red Foreman Dumbass Award.

You\’ve certainly earned it because to be quite honest I can\’t really think of an appropriate response to your statement other than \”Wow, what a dumbass\”.  Keep it up and you may very well replace Red\’s face on the award.

Congrats bear it with all the honor it\’s worth.

RUNNER-UP : Would be this Obamateurism….in which Obama claims that he gives better gifts than he gets.  This would be the same Obama who gave a collection of DVDs to visually impaired Gordon Brown, while Gordon Brown gave him a pen holder carved from the oak timbers of the HMS Gannet, the sister ship of the HMS Resolute, from which Obama\’s desk is carved.

…especially when it\’s the media itself that has the double standard.

During the Bush Administration, we learned that his department occasionally contracted with public relations firms and ad agencies to put together pre-produced news reports about various things the government has been up to.  It\’s commonly done by both corporations and governments alike.  No effort at deception takes place on the part of the government agency, although the news agencies that take advantage of the opportunity to be lazy and rebroadcast the reports, seldomly disclose their origins.

Still at the time the liberal left literally freaked out at the very idea.  The mainstream media condemned it.  Liberal activists slobbered all over themselves in frothy madness.  Democrat politicians politicized it.  Yet all are now strangely silent when in the Age of Obama, the Obama Administration has created it\’s own news network, and at times shuts out other news networks in favor of it\’s own.

Bush openly distributes pre-produced news stories which news networks are welcome to broadcast or not according to their own preferences.  But Obama creates it\’s own news network to exclusively broadcast it\’s message and nobody has a probably with government owned press??

Amazing how much standards have changed in just a few years.  Or maybe that double standard was present the whole time?

Finally….they\’ve officially announced this summer\’s media-hyped (but easily treatable) illness, swine flu.

I was wondering when it would happen.  Just likes SARS, bird flu, etc, even though these diseases rarely endanger anyone except infants, the frail or those that live in third world conditions, it will be enough for the media to talk about it at great length for the next four months.  Body counts will ben endlessly cited….at least until enough time goes by that they start looking small.

So the media has adopted their role.  You know yours.

Ready?

Get set….

EVERYONE PANIC!!!

Except me…all this talk of pork it making me hungry for bacon.  Maybe I should make another Bacon Explosion….mmmmm.

Not because he does a good job, but because it\’s pure comedy gold when he tries.  Even his attempts to fire back at reporters turn into pitfalls of desperation.

Actually incidents like this bring me a little hope that the media isn\’t going to entirely be a rubber stamp for Obama.  Close but every once in awhile there is a ray of Hope™.

Megyn Kelly goes absolutely nuts on Obama spokesman Bill Burton and it turns into an verbal atomic wedgie.

It looks like the Fairness Doctrine is back in the news.  People are predicting that if Obama is elected, combined with a Democrat-controlled Congress, they will attempt to use the Fairness Doctrine to silence any opposition.  To be fair the Obama campaign is already well known from trying to shut down and silence anyone that criticizes them.

Signs of what the new environment will be like for the right are already evident:

• When the National Rifle Association recently released television and radio ads in Pennsylvania targeting Obama\’s history of anti-gun votes, the Obama campaign\’s general counsel fired off bullying letters to stations that ran the spots, implying that they may have violated public-interest obligations.

• When the 527 group, the American Issues Project, came out with a commercial linking Obama to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the campaign (unsuccessfully) complained to the Department of Justice that AIP had broken campaign finance laws, and managed to spook some stations away from the ad.

• When two different conservative writers looking into Obama\’s background appeared on Chicago\’s WGN-AM Radio, the campaign\’s \”action wire\” energized its activists to bombard the station with rage-filled phone calls and e-mails, making the program more difficult to conduct.

So with Obama as President and the Democrats holding a potential super majority in Congress is it possible for the Fairness Doctrine to return and silence any critics?  As with any controversial issue, there are people on both sides of the issue, and there are lots of peripheral issues on this one.

I tend to agree with Glenn Reynolds that this could also backfire on Democrats.

If they bring back the Fairness Doctrine, I think I\’ll start an organization to flood the FCC with complaints whenever there\’s media bias from any of the big networks. Then we\’ll follow up and see how they respond . . . Given the way the news has been reported this year, the Fairness Doctrine could easily backfire on the Dems.

You wouldn\’t even need an official organization.  A distributed network of people connected by something as simply as a wiki or a forum would be easily capable of overwhelming number of complaints.  And as Glenn points out, given the typical coverage it would not be difficult to find plenty of legitimate complaints.

Of course, there are others, such as Vodkapundit, that feel that exactly this sort of online organization is at risk as well.

If (when?) Obama is elected, by my estimation there’s an at least even chance that the newly-reconstructed FCC will reverse course and attempt to apply the New Fairness Doctrine to blogs.

Although I think Glenn\’s viewpoint applies here as well.  This type of standard could be applied to the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, etc.  And it wouldn\’t even require much organization to make that happen as well.

Plus I question the ability of the FCC to accomplish what Vodkapundit suggests.  The very nature of the Internet prevents it and any attempts to do so would quickly resemble the Great Firewall of China.  Sure sites like EckerNet.Com would currently be vulnerable, since my server is located in the US.  However, it would not be a huge effort to host it outside the US.  As porn, hacking and software pirating sites have demonstrated, this makes shutting them down, or even censoring them extremely difficult.

And given the increasing popularity of online news sites, aggregators, blogs, etc the public backlash is likely to be worse than the effect of the online content to begin with.

There are plenty of reasons to be nervous about an Obama Presidency, I\’m not sure this is one of them.

[Crossposted at True North]

This is reason #84598663 why I stopped listening to the MSM. I\’ll save you the headache, and only cover the highlights. But for all the gory details and citations, Wizbang has them. However, should you follow the link, I suggest you either consult a doctor or just wait for Edwards to implement his Universal \”You-Have-To-See-A-Doctor-Whether-You-Are-Sick-Or-Not\” Care.Newspaper makes two basic claims
1) Cougar attacks in Alberta have jumped
2) It\’s related to global warming

Regarding claim #1 – Cougar attacks in Alberta have jumped
Since there have been NO cougar attacks on humans in Alberto since 2005, this is based on either
A) A single non-fatal attack on a dog which is recovering at a vet clinic
B) A single attack on a boy in British Columbia

Regarding claim #2 – It\’s related to global warming
This appears to be based on a supposed global warming induced increase in the population of deer, elk and moose….and yes, they are the natural prey of cougars. Yes, what you are actually supposed to believe, as apparently the editor/writer/proof-readers did, is that since the availability of their food source has increased, cougars have chosen to abandon thousands of years of habit and instead switch to humans. Nevermind, that they haven\’t.

Now next time you are reading a story from the MSM that surprises you, I want you to remember this story. If stories like this make it through, can you really trust the editorial process? And yeah, I\’m not just painting the entire industry with a broad brush by the way.