Nancy Pelosi under fire for PhotoShopping Democratic Congresswomen into a picture. Can u tell who or how?

WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — A photo of the Democratic congresswomen taken Thursday on the Capitol steps has been making its rounds on the Web with House minority leader Nancy Pelosisaying the group of 61 women “makes history as the largest number of women ever in a party Caucus.” But there were only 57 women present for the actual photo, the missing four were photoshopped in.

On Friday, Pelosi defended the altered picture that was posted on her Flickr photo-sharing site.

 

The photo showed four House members of the 113th Congress who were not in the original picture tacked into the top row. They arrived at the Capitol steps late.

  

“It was an accurate historical record of who the Democratic women of Congress are,” Pelosi said in a news conference. “It also is an accurate record that it was freezing cold and our members had been waiting a long time for everyone to arrive and … had to get back into the building to greetconstituents, family members, to get ready to go to the floor. It wasn’t like they had the rest of the day to stand there.”

Watch Pelosi’s response in this AP report:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pelosi-under-fire-for-photoshopping-democratic-congresswomen-into-pic-can-you-tell-how/

Pelosi said the photo reflected the nation’s diversity, because it included women from every community and religious faith.

“So we were pretty excited about it,” Pelosi said. “We got a lot of response back from the country, and one I loved was when they said, `Can the women in Congress hear the people cheering across the country?’”

And in case you were wondering, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-CT, was not ​among those Photoshopped in — despite her outfit choice that Meredith pointed out on TheBlaze blog.

This story has been updated to reflect that the second photo was not in fact the original photo that was photoshopped to include the four women. It is a different photograph altogether but was still taken that day. Thank you to the Blaze reader who called this to our attention. 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pelosi-under-fire-for-photoshopping-democratic-congresswomen-into-pic-can-you-tell-how/

The Real Problem With Al Gore's $100 Million Payday From Selling Current To Al Jazeera.

All sorts of people are hurling all sorts of criticisms at former Vice President Al Gore over the $500 million sale of his Current TV network to Al Jazeera. Gore is helping a foreign government spread propaganda in the U.S.! He’s doing business with a network that’s sympathetic to terrorists! He’s taking oil money! He’s trying to avoid paying taxes!

These accusations range from borderline silly to flat-out wrong. The real problem here is that Gore, in pocketing an estimated $100 million from the sale, provides a textbook reminder of the conflicts of interest that arise when politicians hopscotch between high office and the private sector.

For a channel available in 60 million households, Current has a tiny audience, a fact reflected in the paltriness of its advertising revenues (less than $20 million annually, according to SNL Kagan).

Almost all of its value, therefore, was tied up in its reach. That distribution to 60 million homes was what underlay Al Jazeera’s willingness to spend a half billion dollars. (This even though some 9 million homes fell out of the deal after Time Warner Cable, which controlled them, balked at carrying a new Al Jazeera channel.)

Distribution is dear because it’s hard to build. So how did Current succeed in building so much so fast? Through “a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting of industry giants” by Gore himself, according to Brian Stelter of The New York Times. Gore “leaned on” Rupert Murdoch, then in control of DirecTV, and other operators of cable and satellite systems, not only to carry Current but to pay it a carriage fee out of proportion to its actual viewership.

If Murdoch et al didn’t push back too hard, it’s because they knew they could simply pass the carriage fee along to their subscribers. That’s been standard operating procedure for pay TV operators since 1999, when a provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed price controls that had previously governed the rates they could change for expanded basic services.

The results have been dramatic. According to theFCC, between 1995 and 2010, the average cost of expanded basic services rose from $22.35 to $54.44. That’s a 6.1% compound average annual increase, versus 2.5% for inflation over that period.

That’s a lot of extra money flowing into the coffers of pay TV operators. And whom do they have to thank for it? Among others, Al Gore, who, at the ceremony marking the signing of the bill into law, “stressed how public interest was central to the telecommunications revolution,” according to Salon.

This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest Congress was hoping to prevent when, in 1958, it passed the Former Presidents Act, which established a pension in order to ensure that no ex-Commander in Chief would be tempted to “demean the office he has held or capitalize upon it in any way deemed improper.” Gore, of course, was vice president, not president, but the principle holds.

There’s no conspiracy here, no dark secret. All of this has unfolded in plain sight over a period of years. But when it looked like Gore was truly in it to build a durable, independent, public-minded news institution, it was hard to be too critical of him for leveraging the prestige and connections of the office he once held to achieve that aim. Now that he’s decided the mission is worth less than the windfall to be made from abandoning it, the whole thing takes on a somewhat different tint, doesn’t it?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/04/the-real-problem-with-al-gores-100-million-payday-from-selling-current-to-al-jazeera/

Reaction to CSIS report on Canadian Islamists

BY DANIEL PROUSSALIDIS ,PARLIAMENTARY BUREAU

FIRST POSTED: FRIDAY, JANUARY 04, 2013 05:55 PM EST | UPDATED: FRIDAY, JANUARY 04, 2013 06:18 PM EST.

CSIS Director Richard Fadden. (ANDRE FORGET/QMI Agency)

OTTAWA — A Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report on Sunni Islamist radicalization within our borders sets off alarm bells for author and journalist Tarek Fatah.

"We, Muslim Canadians, know the truth," Fatah told Sun News Network. "We know much more than CSIS does and I can tell you this is a very watered down version of reality that they've let out. There are people in this country who would wish and hope to die if they could so something to destroy Western civilization."

Fatah says his native Pakistan is the focal point for Islamist terrorism and that Canada should be very wary of young men who travel there and then come back to the country.

His warnings come after CSIS released a heavily-censored threat assessment that says Islamist radicals occasionally come to Canada from abroad.

The assessment also warns radicalization is happening in Canadian prisons, families, and through jihadi websites.

Even so, the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada takes a more measured view of the assessment.

"In terms of judging CSIS's conclusions or not, that's very difficult to do," said the council's executive director Ihsaan Gardee. "They're obviously operating with a lot more information than we are."

Gardee says studying radicalism is important, but he's worried the CSIS assessment could "lead to a general re-emphasizing of stereotypes and myths that people hold against people from a Muslim background."

Fatah says Muslims themselves need to marginalize those who are willing to kill themselves and others.

"This is a war between Muslims and Islamists," he said.

— With files from Faith Goldy

Morsi in 2010: No to Negotiations with "the Descendants of Apes and Pig