A Different Drummer
An on-line journal of articles and musings forbidden by the mainstream media.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Knoxville Horror Trial Dates Set for One Year from Now; MSM “Discovers” Four-Month-Old Case
By Nicholas Stix
The MSM is finally starting, modestly, to report on the Knoxville Horror in Tennessee, even as far from the crime scene as Denver! (A tip o’ the hat to Modern Tribalist.)
On Thursday, Knox County Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner announced that the four defendants charged in the January 7 Knoxville kidnapping, robbery, gang-rapes, murders of, and thefts of property belonging to Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, will each have a separate trial, each of which Judge Richard Baumgartner foresees as lasting two weeks. (Judge Baumgartner is being perhaps a tad optimistic in his estimates.) The state indictments can all be read here.
Newsom was anally gang-raped, and then murdered several hours after being kidnapped; Christian was vaginally, orally, and anally gang-raped, and murdered approximately 24 hours after the couple was kidnapped. At one point, one or more of the defendants allegedly also poured cleaning fluid down the presumably then still living Christian’s throat, but a false report by Michelle Malkin notwithstanding, none of the defendants has been charged with torture.
George Geovonni Thomas, 24, is charged with having shot Newsom to death and set his corpse on fire. Christian may have been strangled. (See this story on the stonewalling campaign by authorities in Knoxville.)
And as reported on February 1 by Knoxville’s WATE 6 News, at least one of the killers dismembered Christian, placing her body parts in five separate garbage bags and putting the bags in a garbage can in the kitchen of the apartment of defendant-brothers Letalvis Darnell Cobbins, 24, and Lemaricus Devall Davidson, 25, where police found the bags. After the February 1 report, the dismemberment of Channon Christian was no longer included in any of the articles this reporter has seen; I only came into the possession of the aforementioned report on May 17, thanks to a reader’s help.
It is not known whether the killers murdered Christian first, or began dismembering her while she was still alive, something for which there is a precedent among black racist torture-killers of whites.
Ex-con Letalvis Cobbins, alias Letalvis Davidson (convicted of felony third-degree attempted robbery on May 19, 2003, in Queens, NY – hey, today’s his anniversary!), is scheduled for trial on May 12, 2008. Cobbins is indicted on 46 Tennessee state felony counts, including aggravated kidnapping, aggravated robbery, aggravated rape, felony murder, premeditated murder and theft.
Cobbins’ girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman, 18, was indicted on 40 state felony counts, including aggravated rape, felony murder, and premeditated murder. In a touching courtroom moment on Thursday, according to WVLT-TV 8 reporter Gordon Boyd, Coleman mouthed the words, “I love you” as she was led out.”
Coleman was referred to in initial reports as a “witness” rather than as a suspect, and was a source of much material that eventually went into the case against her and her fellow defendants. An able defense attorney would try and spin Coleman’s cooperation into a mitigating factor at trial, and if she is convicted, during the sentencing phase. (Although Tennessee is a death-penalty state, Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols has inexplicably refused to reveal whether he will seek the death penalty.) How loving Cobbins is presently feeling about Coleman’s cooperation with federal agents and local police may be another matter entirely.
Cobbins’ ex-con brother, Lemaricus Davidson (convicted of federal carjacking charges in 2001, he served but a token sentence), is charged with the same 46 counts as Cobbins, and is scheduled to go on trial on July 14. (According to published reports, Eric Dewayne Boyd, 34, told federal agents that Davidson confessed to him that he had murdered Channon Christian.)
Ex-con George Thomas, likewise indicted on the same 46 counts, is scheduled for trial on August 11, 2008.
Ex-con Eric Boyd has been charged federally, in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, with “being an accessory after the fact to carjacking,” for having allegedly helped Cobbins and Thomas flee apprehension to neighboring Lebanon, KY, where a local-county-state-federal interagency task force arrested the three without a struggle. Boyd’s trial date has yet to be set. Boyd has not been charged with any of the state crimes. (Michelle Malkin also erroneously reported that Boyd was charged in the murders, kidnappings, and rapes of Christian and Newsom.)
Cobbins, Davidson, and Thomas, were also charged federally with carjacking and two counts of federal weapons felonies, but at the request of the U.S. Attorney’s office, a federal judge dismissed the federal charges “without prejudice,” meaning that they may later be reinstated, so that the Tennessee state prosecutions may go forward first.
Having separate, consecutive trials offers potential advantages to prosecutors. Earlier defendants may seek to impute all guilt for the crimes they are charged with upon defendants who have yet to be tried, and may provide a wealth of information that can be used against their alleged accomplices. Or they could simply be fonts of misinformation and lies.
For an example of such gamesmanship in the present case, when Letalvis Cobbins and George Thomas were initially apprehended in Lebanon, KY, they reportedly claimed in affidavits to federal agents that Eric Boyd, the man who had allegedly helped them escape capture in Knoxville, was in fact the rapist-murderer. So much for loyalty or gratitude.
It is not known whether Cobbins or Thomas has of late made any public expressions of love to Boyd.
On May 18, “Christopher Felon,” one of the contributors to the black supremacist Web site, Svengali Media, which celebrates all black-on-white racist atrocities, and has celebrated the rapes, tortures, and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, left the following two comments to my last column on the Christian-Newsom case:
The more one learns about this case, the less justifiable the four-month-long national media blackout becomes. One could devote entire three-hour blocks of cable news time exclusively to this story, without ever having to use the endless loops or even partial repeat passages on which cable news relies for filler with big stories, and enjoy blockbuster ratings. How did the media suddenly develop an allergy to making money?
Friday, May 18, 2007
Another Michelle Malkin Stooge Gets the Knoxville Horror Story Wrong
By Nicholas Stix
An Eric Stakelback, at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, wrote today, “And with our good friend Michelle Malkin turning in a powerful video blog on the topic yesterday at Hot Air TV, I figured the time was right to tell you the horrific details of the rape, torture, mutilation and murder of two Tennessee college students, 23-year-old Christopher Newsom and 21-year-old Channon Christian.”
Stakelback then goes on to recite the rumor-based blog of one of Malkin’s lazy cronies, as if it were Gospel, replete with the unsourced Internet rumors about a dismembered penis, cut-off breasts, and urination on the victims.
From now on, any time Malkin “reports” a story or credits one of her cronies with reporting it, or one of her cronies credits her with reporting it, you have to ask yourself, “Who is the real reporter whose credit is being stolen?”
The Internet revolution has come full circle, and is now dominated by individuals as corrupt as those they claimed to be replacing.
Hit this link, in order to write Eric Stakelback. And hit the following link to read the real Knoxville Horror story.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Shame on You, Michelle Malkin!
A Republican Diva, Journalistic Ethics, and the Knoxville Horror
By Nicholas Stix
Yesterday, Michelle Malkin posted a video on the Knoxville Horror, about the carjacking-kidnapping-robbery-gang rape-sodomy-murder of Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, 23, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Letalvis Cobbins, 24, his brother Lemaricus Davidson, 25, George Thomas, 24, and Cobbins’ girlfriend, Vanessa Coleman, 18, have been charged with murder, rape (anal, in Newsom’s case; vaginal, anal, and oral, in Christian’s case), armed kidnapping, armed robbery and theft.
(Today, May 17, the accused have a court date in Knox County Criminal Court. Last month, a court source told me that the defense attorneys would merely be presenting motions, likely including one for a change of venue, and that the case would not be proceeding to trial for many months.)
That would be my story. As in, the one I spent five weeks covering for American Renaissance, which published it two days before Malkin posted her video. In other words, she had to know about my story. Only she not only never mentions me, but splays screen shots during her “story” of non-stories written by Republican blogger cronies of hers (some of them after my story had run) who had not only not researched the story, but who simply copied and pasted every wild Internet rumor they came across – Mark Alexander, Matthew Sheffield, James H. Lilley of the Baltimore Reporter, who has been reprinted all over the place, et al. Malkin even goes so far as put a link next to her video to a blog post by Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, which is nothing but yet another link to a mutual Republican blogger crony, LaShawn Barber. A link to a link! That last bit of blogrolling inspired two images in my mind: One is of a closed, corrupt system, every bit as bad as the so-called MSM. The other, equally obscene image, is of a sort of orgy that became popular, or so I’ve read, in New York during the Age of AIDS, in which … well, I think I’ve gone far enough with that image.
Malkin even shows a screen shot of the Wikipedia entry on the story, in which someone linked to my story immediately after mine appeared on May 14. However, as my next column will show, the Wikipedia entry, for reasons largely typical of that particular propaganda organization, is as unreliable as those of the bloggers.
You’ll notice that I have not embedded a single link to the non-stories I’ve cited. Typically, I’m link-crazy; in preparing a story for publication, I’ll spend hours finding links to supporting and related stories. But I have no intention of driving traffic to the sites of journalistic frauds and goldbricks.
And Malkin doesn’t even get the story right!
For one thing, she lists Eric Boyd first among the defendants, and then lists all of the charges (and even some non-existent charges!), as if Boyd had been charged with the full list of crimes that Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas and Vanessa Coleman have been charged with in Knox County Criminal Court. But in fact, Boyd was not charged at all in the 46-count state indictment. Boyd has been charged federally, in U.S. District Court (also in Knoxville), with “BEING AN ACCESSORY AFTER THE FACT TO CARJACKING,” for having allegedly helped Cobbins and Thomas flee apprehension to neighboring Lebanon, KY, where a local-county-state-federal interagency task force arrested them without a struggle. (More on that apprehension in a future column.)
Malkin also “reports” that the defendants have been charged with “torture,” but no such charge is in either the state or federal indictments. I know that, because unlike, Malkin, I took the trouble to contact the county and federal courts in Knoxville, obtain the federal indictments, as well as the federal affidavits, for the modest cost of $4.90, plus the cost of several long-distance telephone calls, and r-e-a-d the state and federal documents. (Of course, the calls and conversations with court clerks took place over the course of a few days.) Malkin obviously didn’t do any of the reportorial leg work. She’s a diva, and divas are above that.
(The caps were not my way of emphasizing the charges, but rather the way the feds wrote the indictments, which I just re-read from the documents the federal court clerks sent me.)
Her misreporting of the “torture” indictments ties into her misreporting of the “torture.” Granted, pouring cleaning fluid down a living woman’s throat counts as torture in my book, but the authorities have taken a much different tack, in rationalizing that act as having been meant to destroy DNA evidence.
Malkin also quotes the claim that Channon Christian was found in five separate garbage bags. That claim is not in my report, because I could not find a reliable report of it. Granted, I found an alleged copy of a news report that had been posted to a message board, including the sentence, “Her body was in five separate dark trash bags.” But the message board is for the Neo-Nazi group, Original Dissent. Call me intolerant, call me crazy, but I do not find posts at Neo-Nazi message boards to be credible news sources. And that one sentence was in boldface. Considering that Neo-Nazis and white nationalists have worked so hard to spread rumors in this case, without independent corroboration, I just can’t trust the poster at Original Dissent.
I tried hunting down the original story, but the link no longer worked, and none of the different versions of the story in question that had been published at the same time and still available on the Internet contained the sentence, “Her body was in five separate dark trash bags,” or any equivalent. That doesn’t mean that the sentence is untrue. As I reported in my American Renaissance story, the Knoxville PD has steadfastly refused to provide the causes of death or the conditions in which the corpses were found. It is my hope that my story will cause public pressure to be brought to bear on KPD Chief Sterling Owen IV, and Knox County Attorney General Randy Nichols, to finally release the autopsy reports for the victims. As I reported in my story, all I have gotten from both offices so far has been a massive stonewall.
Some people don’t like the idea that American Renaissance reports such stories. Though they haven’t read it, they hate it. When AR editor Jared Taylor approached me in March, asking me to cover the story for him, I was honored. Unlike the haters, I’ve read dozens of issues of AR. I have compared many stories on race that either the magazine or its editor Jared Taylor, in his book, Paved with Good Intentions, and I both covered, and their stories always checked out.
The reason AR has flourished for so long, is because when it comes to scientific research, journalism, and writing on race, it is the gold standard, and because it reports on issues such as black-on-white crime and racial differences in IQ that the socialist/communist and Republican MSM both refuse to report on, and that even allegedly conservative (read: Republican) academics refuse to do honest scholarly research on, that is, if they will research the issues at all.
I’ve been doing the same sort of work since 1990, when I considered myself a “liberal” (before I learned that “liberal” was a euphemism for socialist or communist), and founded my short-lived New York magazine, A Different Drummer. I’d be perfectly willing to write the same material for the New York Times, Daily News, New York Post and Newsday, but they refuse to publish it. In fact, one of New York Newsday’s (RIP) editors whitelisted me back in 1991 for a letter in which I expressed the mildest, tongue-in-cheek criticism of a racist black coed he had published.
In the moral law posited by both Kant and Rousseau, “If you desire the ends, you desire the means.” Applied to this case that means, if you desire that black-on-white crime be honestly reported, you desire the medium that will honestly report it. That means that people who say they won’t read American Renaissance’s reports on black-on-white atrocities, really don’t want to know about them, and don’t want anyone to report on them, but are too dishonest to say so. Add to that dishonesty the corruption of the Republican blogosphere, and you have people who would rather that the public read their own phony “reports” on a racist atrocity, and those of their cronies, than that they read real reporting on it.
Imagine the roles were reversed, and I had just acted as if I had reported a major story that Malkin had spent five weeks researching and had broken nationally two days earlier, but without mentioning her at all, and instead mentioning a bunch of blogger cronies of mine who, like me, had not done any reporting on the story, or who had mixed up known facts with Internet rumors. (Of course, since the bloggers I’m variously friends or friendly with are real veteran journalists, a role reversal is hard to imagine.) Malkin would have immediately sicced her lawyer on me, and used her blog to attack me.
Malkin is both benefiting from other reporters' work, and giving credit to her undeserving blogger cronies, who did no reporting. Why should anyone do any real reporting, if blogger divas like Malkin, Reynolds, et al., are just going to get the credit, and keep it among their cronies? Since no one seeing Malkin’s video or reading her cronies will know about Knoxville authorities’ stonewalling regarding the autopsies, he will not generate any pressure to release them. And since most of Malkin’s cronies are content to repeat Internet rumors, why should anyone bother with the time-consuming, exhausting work of newsgathering? All we need is the Internet rumor chamber.
In the past, I have only written positively of Malkin. I held fire when she snubbed me in 2004. She wrote a blog about the Rev. Al Sharpton, in which she cited some of her cronies by name. Quality cronies, by the way, not non-reporting bloggers. (And I’m not denying that bloggers have broken stories. But when they do, they are acting as journalists, who happen to use the technical medium known as a “weblog” or “blog.” A blog is but a tool; it is only as good as the writer using it.)
That time, though Malkin wouldn’t cite me by name, she at least linked to my October 7, 2001 Toogood Reports exposé on Sharpton, “Rudy and the Rev. Bozo.” And I did get a lot of hits off that anonymous link.
And a couple of years ago, I did her a personal favor by keeping her out of a story that could have negatively impacted on her personally. I hadn’t even thought about that until this minute. I never expected a quid pro quo from her, but I certainly didn’t expect her to stab me in the back. As my mom always says, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
But hey, Malkin is a diva, and I’m just working press.
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Knoxville Horror: The Crime and the Cover-Up
Nicholas Stix, Special to AR News, May 14, 2007
The most complete account of the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
On Saturday, January 6, 2007, Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23, of Knoxville, Tennessee, went on a date from which they would never return. On their way to the home of another couple, they were carjacked and kidnapped. Over the next 24 hours they were beaten, gang-raped, tortured, and murdered.
If Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom had been black and their killers white, everyone in America would know their names. Because they were white and their killers are black, their fate has been shrouded in a thick silence that has given rise to a host of gruesome rumors. Their story highlights the strange and twisted nature of race relations in America….
For the rest of the article, go to American Renaissance News.
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Many blacks are pulling for Knoxville's 'SuperThug' & Carjacker Lemaricus Davidson to win the 2007 Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition for 2007. Others are still on the sideline as to whether it was appropriate for the competition editor, Kirkland Perkins, to waive the rapist disqualification rule and invoke the 'Emit Till' excuseable rape clause so Davidson and his brother could compete.
I soundly support Savannah's 'Slave Avenger' Michael 'Turtle' Thorpe. The family of Thorpe's victim, Jennifer Ross, owned slaves and never paid their reparations. This is keenly why Thorpe is Perkins *favorite* to win the 2007 Rights.
Voting online's been added. And it is exciting that Knoxville's George 'Detroit' Thomas received enough votes to qualify to compete! There's never been 3 competitors from the same city and for the same crime in the competition ever!
http://www.svengalimedia.com/race/sexiest_black_male_felon_2006.html