Free Republic

Barack Obama says his grandmother is a typical white person, which in his words, means that if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, she gets scared. He then explains that is the nature of race in our society. Virginian Pilot Editors: To Paraphrase Obama = "Typical White Liberals"Barack Obama was asked about his use of his white grandmother as an example of white racism. He replied "The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on...

Believe it or not, George McGovern is now the right wing of the Democrat party. He is even to the right of the Virginian Pilot and the Virginia legislature. In today's Wall Street Journal he makes an impassioned plea for freedom ... The Right has been accused of wanting to peer into your bedroom to see who you are sleeping with. They have been roundly defeated on this issue. The Left has invaded our bathrooms with toilet laws, our workplaces and schools with speech police, our means of transportation with mileage standards, our right to defend ourselves from mass murderers...

Televangelist Pat Robertson is considering buying The Virginian-Pilot, a newspaper he has criticized for its coverage of his activities. Norfolk-based Landmark Communications Inc. announced last week that it was evaluating whether to sell its assets, including The Weather Channel and the Pilot, its flagship newspaper. Robertson said in a statement to the paper Thursday that he is considering a potential bid. He said owning the newspaper would help provide internships for journalism students at Regent University, a school he founded in Virginia Beach. Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, has said the newspaper has characterized him unfairly.

A friend of mine died recently. He wasn’t that old. He had been hospitalized for months but the doctors gave his family hope that he would recover. And then one day I got a call from his wife; he had died suddenly. It was not totally unexpected, but it was still a shock. So when I saw the headline in the Virginian Pilot that Landmark Communications, the Virginian Pilot’s parent company, had hired two investment firms to see if they could sell the company, it was not a total surprise. Like the death of my friend, the timing of the...

The following letter was printed in the Virginian Pilot by a reader sympathetic to their editorial position. Listening to and reading the hateful vitriol against undocumented immigrants, a person unfamiliar with U.S. history might conclude that we find ourselves innocent of any wrongdoing in this regard. No mention is made about how we took this land by force from the indigenous population, took half of Mexico in a war we precipitated, used slaves to build our economy and sucked the life's blood (resources, labor, environment and right to self-determination) out of Latin America and elsewhere via free trade, economic restructuring...

It appears that the news that things are going well in Iraq has finally reached the editorial writers at the Virginian Pilot. Donald Luzatto has mounted his high horse and is busy denouncing anyone who has noted that the Democrats and the editors of the Virginian Pilot have been calling on the US to admit defeat in Iraq and pull out. In fact he is quite vociferous about it, characterizing Cal Thomas and Charles Krauthammer, the latter a Pulitzer Prize winner, as creators of straw men, unfairly characterizing Democrats as advocates of defeat in Iraq. His foam flecked diatribe is...

The Virginian Pilot printed a vile anti-Christian smear via a column by the despicable Tim Rutten, a syndicated columnist. The column, which appeared in the print edition but not in the online edition, can be found here. Tim Rutten has been exposed any number of times as a slime artist and a mountebank, and something of a specialist in sliming Ann Coulter. But I wish to address this particularly vile column specifically. It is, of course, open season on Christians in the MSM. The Virginian Pilot is no exception. The Pilot, like it’s counterparts in the “Drive By Media” has...

It doesn't take long to find errors of fact and distortions in The Virginian Pilot. Just read any of the "filler" between the ads that this bird cage liner calls "news stories." For example, this front page story House vote would let U.S. prosecute security contractors runs over a picture of what appears to be some kind of an armed gang, shirts hanging out, sandals and sneakers on their feet, and an assortment of ancient weapons most of which appear to be of Soviet make. This may be a picture of the armed gang guarding the NY Times building in...

The passengers in the short bus who are taken to the Virginian Pilot offices each day had this to say about the faux outrage ginned up by their henchmen in the Leftist blogosphere. Rush Limbaugh is king of the court of American blowhards - his persona so blissfully cocksure that it is both politically absurd, and discernibly not human. It is comically unpossible [sic]for a man of such enormous appetites, hypocrisies, and failings to actually swallow his own moralizing, though Limbaugh does a passably good imitation of man believing his own bluster. After that compliment, the Pilot's cracked crew -...

A quick summary: An article by Margaret Edds headlines: “Voters can’t stop gay pride, progress.” Translation: The people of Virginia should not be allowed to define the meaning of marriage. These are the sort of things that should be left to the wisdom of editorial writers and Liberal judges. Message to the people: SHUT UP! An article by Mark Pinsky headlined: “Meet the new “kinder, gentler” evangelicals.” Pensky is the religion writer for the Orlando (FL) Sentinel and author of “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Enough said. The main article is about the US hitting...

While reading an article about the current controversy caused by a handful of retired military brass demanding the head of Don Rumsfeld, I noticed that the Virginian Pilot had a box with headlines listing the news from Iraq. From the Virginian Pilot’s perspective this is what is happening in Iraq that we need to know: Recent Stories "Marines suffer 2 dead, 22 wounded in Iraq' "Daily look at U.S. military deaths in Iraq" "2 Marines killed, 22 hurt in western Iraq" "U.S. building massive embassy in Baghdad" "Spending lags for training of Iraqi police" "6 Iraqi policemen killed by insurgents"...

Glenn Reynolds in TCS Daily talks about the reason for the decline of newspapers. It’s worthwhile reading the whole thing. While Glenn lists a number of reasons for the decline in readership, let me get personal. There are two reasons that I no longer read the Virginian Pilot: First, the stories it carries are already old by the time they reach my box in the morning. To get a comprehensive overview of the important events of yesterday and today, I turn on my computer and go to a few web sites that provide that service: Drudge, Instapundit, and Free Republic...

The Virginian Pilot must have received several letters and e-mails about it’s failure to publish the famous 12 cartoons of Mohammad. And they have come out with an explanation via it’s “ Public Editor” a certain Marvin Lake. Before Marvin begins his explanation he launches into a complaint that he has been the recipient of an e-mail campaign on this issue. My response to Marvin is, get used to it. E-mails are easy to forward and their volume is an indication that people are interested in the subject. I should add that receiving an e-mail is not nearly as attention-getting...

Credentials of Va. Journalists Pulled NORFOLK, Va. — The military this week revoked the press credentials of a Norfolk newspaper writer and photographer who were reporting from Kuwait, saying they had violated ground rules by photographing battle-damaged military vehicles. Denis Finley, editor of The Virginian-Pilot, wrote a letter Friday protesting the Army's confiscation of the badges that allowed reporter Lou Hansen and photographer Hyunsoo Leo Kim to interview and photograph service members. "Yes, they signed an agreement, but the Navy brought them to the site and allowed them to take pictures," Finley said in an article the paper published Friday....

The Virginian Pilot, predictably, takes Bill Bennett to task for his statement regarding black crime and abortion. For those who have not heard, here is Bennett's comment in context: In the course of his Morning in America radio show on Wednesday, Bennett engaged a caller who sought to view the complexities of Social Security solvency through the narrow lens of abortion, an explosive but only tangentially relevant issue. Specifically, the caller contended that if there had not been so many abortions since 1973, there would be millions more living people paying into the Social Security System, and perhaps the system...

The Genteel Faces of Racism By acknowledging the ongoing need for affirmative action on public college campuses, the U.S. Supreme Court wisely elevated pragmatic realism above blind idealism. Thus began the June 24th editorial of the Virginian Pilot. This is the bizarre way that modern day Liberals view the promise of the 14th Amendment, the promise that the government and its institutions would not discriminate on the basis of race: blind idealism. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his dissent reminds us how he, and another proud black man, Frederick Douglass, view the sort of genteel racism currently fashionable among the editorialists...