AOL Acquires HuffPo

From today's NYT on AOL's acquisition of the Huffington Post:

By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business. 

I'm not sure which is funnier:  that AOL is apolitical or that Arianna will leave her politics out of it.  Bwahahahahahaa!

Okay.

Editor of HuffPo's Health Unit Mocks Death of Cornell Student

Friday, September 11, 2009, a 20 year old student at Cornell University, Warren Schor, pictured left, died of complications from the swine flu. IvyGate Blog chose the tragedy as an occasion for mockery and silliness.

IvyGate is a blog that purports itself to be a "news and gossip blog that covers the Ivy League" and is written by current and former students. In the past they've covered stories such as the Princeton class president who set a squirrel on fire and more recently, mocking the distribution at Harvard of a pamphlet instructing students not to defecate in the shower.

When Warren Schor died last week, IvyGate published this article, originally under the byline of Molly Fitzpatrick, now under the byline of Adam Clark Estes. The article mocks Schor's death and the administration attempts to encourage students to stay healthy by practicing good hygiene. So intent was IvyGate on its mission of mockery that they couldn't even get the dead student's name right in the original article, first identifying him as "William" Schor, until offended commenters called out the error.

The comments following the article are unanimously offended by the post; one even points out the mysterious change in authorship: "You change the name of the author of the post but yet you keep the disrespectful and inconsiderate tone of it. At the very least get rid of that tasteless photo. Ivy Gate Media should be ashamed. Shame on you."

So why the change of byline? Was Fitzpatrick embarrassed and having second thoughts about her poor taste? Was she pressed to pull the article? Why did blog editor Adam Clark Estes take ownership of the post?

In addition to his responsibilities as editor of IvyGate, Estes is also Associate Editor of Huffington Post Investigative Fund, described by Arianna Huffington this way: "This nonprofit Fund will produce a wide-range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers." The site considers itself a "watchdog" of sorts, reporting on fraud, abuse, and waste in government.

In June, Estes announced the formation of the Investigative Fund's Health Unit whose purpose is to track the progress of ObamaCare. So why is a Huffington Post editor and one in charge of the Health Unit, mocking the death of a young man with H1N1?

Following the death of Schor, Cornell University officials suspended most social activities for a week in an attempt to quell the H1N1 outbreak on campus and protect the students, a move which Estes saw fit to poke fun of: "[The] Inter-Fraternity Council had instated a weeklong [sic] moratorium on social events to help prevent the spread of the disease. But, due to a flood of flu-related visits, Gannett also has stopped scheduling routine appointments, so they may just be canceling frat parties to avoid the standard Sunday morning rush for Plan B. After the jump—a lesson in hygiene and how your Atari will kill you. "

Estes (or Fitzpatrick) then wrote, in response to administration officials asking students to wash their hands, "you should never take it for granted that a frat house will have soap."

And if the mocking tone and the botched initial identification of Schor were not enough, IvyGate saw fit to illustrate the piece with a photo of a pig and the word "Crap!" over it. Tasteless.

It is unfortunate that Estes and Fitzpatrick, and I'm assigning responsibility to both, chose to mock the death of Warren Schor. The young man has a family that is grieving and a close network of friends. As editor of IvyGate, Estes assumes the responsibility for this post whether he wrote it or not; the change of byline was probably unnecessary.

IvyGate has reached a new low in insensitivity and should respond to the requests of its readers, as well as a common sense of decency, apologize to the family, and pull the post.

Update: Linked by The Daley Gator! And Carol's Closet! Also Backyard Conservative, thanks! Also Legal Insurrection! Welcome Michelle Malkin readers!

Update 2: Now a Memeorandum thread.

Update 3: This morning, IvyGate posted an update to their story. They took down the picture of the pig and replaced it with a "more somber picture" and modified some of the language. I'll let you decide if you think it's an apology of if one is needed:

UPDATE: Some have questioned whether it's appropriate to have jokes in the same post that acknowledges a death. No element of this post mocks the deceased or those grieving—in fact, any humor is directed at the administration and their lack of response that precluded the student's death. However, since we wrote most the post before the death, then updated it afterwards, the tone may now be off. It's our policy never to take down posts, but as a concession we've added a more somber picture and adjusted some language.

From the comments following the post, it's not enough for some.

One More Word on Van Jones

One last word on Van Jones and then I'm going to let him slither off into whatever hole he crawled out of before he became newsworthy.

Carl Pope has a post on HuffPo (linked by Memeorandum - I don't spend time reading HuffPo if I can help it), in which he repeats a meme I've seen coming from the left on this whole story. Van Jones was attacked by the right because he and Obama are black. For crying out loud, people! You were supposed to be the party that puts this race debate to bed. Quit dragging it back out of the box! Race had NOTHING to do with the sacking of Van Jones.

Pope writes, "What we underestimated was the power of the fact that both Jones and the Barack Obama are black. Yes, the hysteria was about politics -- I don't think Fox News really cares about Jones's ethnicity -- but it was enabled by race. Calling Bush a "crack-head" is seen by a large part of America as worse than calling him "addict-in-chief" because crack is not just a drug -- it is a drug used largely by black people. It reminds those Americans who are still uncomfortable with Barack Obama that we have a black president."

How deep did you have to reach to come up with THAT one, Mr. Pope? Your paranoia is astounding.

Van Jones could be purple or blue for all I care; he was targeted because of what he said and because of the petitions he signed which indicated his belief that our government blew up its own World Trade Center and killed over 3,000 people. He is a self-avowed communist. He became a communist in prison. He supports cop killers. I don't care what color he is, he doesn't belong in the administration nor does he need to have oversight of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Pope isn't the only one perpetuating the race paranoia; Nadra Redding says that the only reason anyone is protesting Obama's speech to school kids tomorrow is because he's black.

Charlie Rangel continues to insist that opposition to ObamaCare is primarily because Obama is black.

It's well past time to move past all that. The folks that are making these claims are failing to look at the issues that invite the controversies in the first place. There are plenty of reasons to object to ObamaCare and the education speech was problematic because of the instructions that came with it, not the speech itself. Nobody even knows at this time what the speech is.

And Van Jones? Enough said.

HuffPo Does P.R. for Uighurs

I am in total accordance with Jammie Wearing Fool on this one: what kind of goofy PR is HuffPo doing for the Chinese Uighurs in Gitmo?

"Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, detained for more than six years and counting at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, are firing back at Newt Gingrich, who has accused them of terrorist ties and says that releasing them into the United States would endanger the country.

"The seventeen Uighurs told their translator, Rushan Abbas, how they felt when they heard Gingrich's remarks. Abbas has been working with them in Guantanamo since 2002, initially contracted by the Department of Defense. The Uighurs' rejoinder to Gingrich is the first quasi-interview with detainees still imprisoned in Guantanamo."

The Uighurs undoubtedly do not want to be released to China because they would certainly be tortured or executed as terrorists. They certainly see the benefits of being released onto American soil so image rehabilitation through the media is their best shot. Now, all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe they are not terrorists at all but just misunderstood choirboys picked up by bounty hunters for no good reason.

In a recent column, Newt Gingrich claimed that" '[b]y their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law.

"No, they have never admitted that, says Abbas, adding that the Uighurs call the claim 'baseless, factless slander against them.' Abbas returned from Guantanamo Monday. She now works with the Uighurs' defense attorneys, but said that her comments to the Huffington Post were not intended as advocacy on their behalf.

"The Uighurs call relatives in the United States and Europe often, she says, so stay up on the news. They were surprised to hear the accusation from the former Speaker of the House.

"Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things? He doesn't know us. He should talk to our attorneys if he's curious about our background," Abbas relates. "How could he speak in such major media with nothing based in fact? They were very disappointed how Newt Gingrich was linking them to ETIM which they never even heard of the name ETIM until they came to Guantanamo Bay."

Factless slander? As I've posted before, Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu made many trips to Gitmo in the course of researching and writing his book, Inside Gitmo. His research included interviews with prison officials and review of legal documents, among other sources.

Cucullu writes, "Just to be clear, these men are not choirboys who strayed on the path home from church services. They were captured in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, in which they were by their own admission undergoing training so that they could return to China to be terrorists supporting an independent uighur Islamic nation" (140).

But now, according to HuffPo, this is all a fallacy. They never admitted this.

Just what exactly does the media think goes on in an al Qaeda training camp? What exactly does the media think these people are training for? To be cashiers at Wal Mart? They train people to be terrorists in al Qaeda training camps.

This idiotic assertion was also made in the case of John Walker Lindh who put himself in an al Qaeda training camp but then wants to claim the victim role and pretend like he was just there to study religion or some such nonsense.

Based on the HuffPo article, and on Cucullu's book, the Uighurs actually have it pretty good at Gitmo, relatively speaking. Not as good as a free ride in the United States, but better than they had it in Afghanistan. They have big screen TV, a personal diet plan, better medical care than some American citizens, an ocean view and "they call relatives in the United States and Europe often."

But they do have that nasty Newt Gingrich picking on them. "Why does he hate us so much?" they asked. Maybe because most Americans have a low tolerance for terrorists. We don't need to give them an engraved invitation, an escort into the country, and wait for them to attack us to know that they are terrorists.

Meanwhile, HuffPo is handling their PR.

Sarah's Style

I don't know WHAT I was thinking but I decided to take a random look at the Huffington Post today. I guess with the RNC coming up tonight and Gustav blowing out I'm back onto politics. Anyway, what a handy trick for my low-blood pressure! The Huff Post takes care of that like you would not believe. Between that and Maureen Dowd's column (thanks Sarah!), I'm all riled up.

I'll not comment on Dowd as my friend Sarah handled that one. But the Huff Post - hilarious. The article that got me going is actually from The Times Online but linked on Huff (on their Palin attack page - the same page that's taking odds on Palin's withdrawal).

We are now down to attacking Palin's fashion. WHO didn't see THAT coming? We can't attack her on issues so lets attack her hair-do and her lipstick! A quote: "Miss Wasilla 1984 knows that America’s real golden age was the Eighties. Dynasty on the TV, Reagan in the White House. What could be finer?" While I do agree that nothing could be finer than Reagan in the White House, this is just petty! The article even suggests that Palin was photoshopped into a boat photo. Good grief, get a life.

I'm assuming the article is "tongue-in-cheek" because I don't think anybody takes the Huff Post seriously. Do they?