I still want to apply Occam’s Razor to the NYT UFO story.

But Hot Air has pointed out something from said story that I hadn’t caught:

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.

My only excuse is that I was rolling my eyes at that ESP guy who was making a bad analogy using Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo would have had the back off of that hypothetical garage door opener within thirty seconds just to see what the heck was making the blinking red light, and he’d probably assume that the plastic was some kind of resin. Not that Da Vinci would be able to work out electromagnetic theory from a door opener, sure — but he’d concentrate on the important stuff first.

But I digress.

Continue reading I still want to apply Occam’s Razor to the NYT UFO story.

UFO Story from 2004 hits New York Times.

Straight-up, too.  Two Navy FA-18 pilots doing routine training off of the coast of San Diego* back in 2004 got interrupted:

“Well, we’ve got a real-world vector for you,” the radio operator said, according to Commander [David] Fravor. For two weeks, the operator said, the [USS] Princeton had been tracking mysterious aircraft. The objects appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering. Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up.

Continue reading UFO Story from 2004 hits New York Times.

The New York Times vs. The New York Times on Presidential Prerogatives.

This story via the New York Times is… this is one of those times when you have to take the long view, perhaps. “The White House will try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, citing longstanding precedent invoked by presidents of both parties to keep presidential communications confidential, officials said Friday.”  See, the problem here is that the White House has a point: Presidents from both parties have indeed long taken the position (I think, fairly) that they should be able to get unvarnished opinions from their advisers without having to worry about whether it’d be used for partisan purposes.  After all, as the New York Times goes on to note:

President Bush has said that Karl Rove, his closest adviser, and Harriet Miers, his former White House counsel, among others, do not have to comply with Congressional subpoenas because “the president relies upon his staff to give him candid advice.”

This may well end up in a constitutional showdown. If it does, there is no question about which side should prevail. Congress has a right, and an obligation, to examine all of the evidence, which increasingly suggests that the Bush administration fired eight or more federal prosecutors either because they were investigating Republicans, or refusing to bring baseless charges against Democrats. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Watergate tapes case, and other legal and historical precedents, make it clear that executive privilege should not keep Congress from getting the testimony it needs.

…Oops.  Sorry, that was what the New York Times argued in an ‘editorial’ in 2007.  My bad.  This is what the NYT says now: Continue reading The New York Times vs. The New York Times on Presidential Prerogatives.

New York Times confirms The Daily Beast’s ISIS/intelligence scoop.

BOOM goes the dynamite: “A group of intelligence analysts have provided investigators with documents they say show that senior military officers manipulated the conclusions of reports on the war against the Islamic State, according to several government officials, as lawmakers from both parties voiced growing anger that they may have received a distorted picture about the military campaign’s progress.” Government inspectors specifically looking at CENTCOM (United States Central Command), which of course was the subject of a potentially devastating Daily Beast report from last week that alleged that precisely this was going on. Naturally, the New York Times doesn’t want to admit that the original problem arose largely because this administration hates being told things that it doesn’t like to hear, but at least the Times is taking the situation seriously, right? Continue reading New York Times confirms The Daily Beast’s ISIS/intelligence scoop.

Politico, Amazon – and I guess the NYT, really – all help out Ted Cruz’s new book sales.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I have not read Ted Cruz’s A Time for Truth.  I generally do not buy partisan political books on my own, and I’m not on enough distribution lists to be routinely sent copies of the latest ones.  But this is looking worse and worse for the New York Times:

The New York Times’ refusal to put Ted Cruz’s memoir on its bestseller list is once again being called into question — this time by Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country.

On Sunday, an Amazon spokesperson told the On Media blog that the company’s sales data showed no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity for the Texas senator’s memoir, casting further doubt on the Times’ claim that the book — “A Time For Truth” — had been omitted from its list because sales had been driven by “strategic bulk purchases.”

Continue reading Politico, Amazon – and I guess the NYT, really – all help out Ted Cruz’s new book sales.

The New York Times goes insane in its ‘edit’ of the Ellen Pao Reddit resignation story.

(H/T: Instapundit) If you’ve ever wondered why the New York Times doesn’t have the same reputation that it used to, well, this is why.

https://twitter.com/KevinWGlass/status/619902870805213184/photo/1

Continue reading The New York Times goes insane in its ‘edit’ of the Ellen Pao Reddit resignation story.

Tweet of the Day, I Wonder Whether Marco Rubio Is Self-Leaking This Stuff, Too edition.

Because stories like this won’t hurt him.

I mean, wow. Marco Rubio took some of the money that he got from a book deal and bought himself a boat. Does anybody in the New York Times actually talk to anybody outside of their cozy little epistemic closure bubble? …I mean, aside from people at Politico, of course.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, New York Times: $14 million net loss for the last operating quarter, I believe? Since we’re keeping track, and everything.

The NYT manages the appearance of impropriety coming AND going.

I’m impressed: this takes skill.

A charity administered by the New York Times received a $100,000 check from the Clinton Family Foundation on July 24, 2008, months after the paper endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, according to a New York Times spokesperson.

However, the check was a “replacement check” for one that had been sent in 2007 that the Times never received, the spokesperson said.

Continue reading The NYT manages the appearance of impropriety coming AND going.

Politico acts as bodyguard for New York Times against the Washington Free Beacon. AGAIN.

Quick background: the Washington Free Beacon reported that the New York Times took one hundred thousand in donations from the Clintons in the same year that the NYT’s owner overruled the editoral board to endorse… surprise surprise, Hillary Clinton. Now, let us be correct, here: nobody has come out and said that this was a bribe. Or a quid pro quo. Or even an ‘understanding.’  The Washington Free Beacon is merely asking questions and noting where the money is going, which is something that journalists are supposedly expected to do. Continue reading Politico acts as bodyguard for New York Times against the Washington Free Beacon. AGAIN.

Turns out donors really do notice which party doesn’t cater to anti-Semites.

(H/T Hot Air Headlines) Want to see a little panic?  The New York Times will indulge you.  Well, maybe not indulge you… or, at least, it’s not really happy about the situation. The paper is a little freaked out by the whole thing, in fact:

Republicans currently in the Senate raised more money during the 2014 election cycle in direct, federally regulated campaign contributions from individuals and political action committees deemed pro-Israel than their Democratic counterparts, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and analyzed for The New York Times by a second nonprofit, MapLight. The Republican advantage was the first in more than a decade.

The alliances in Congress that pro-Israel donors have built will certainly be tested as they lobby lawmakers to oppose the deal with Iran and perhaps even expand sanctions against the country, despite objections from the Obama administration.

Continue reading Turns out donors really do notice which party doesn’t cater to anti-Semites.