Holder vs White House: Who Is Accountable?

Game on.

Issa Demands Retraction of NY Times Hit Piece

I wrote earlier this week about the sorry excuse of a journalist Eric Litchblau, an ideologue that is one of the NY Times go-to writers who attacked Congressman Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee that is closing in on corruption in the Obama Administration like the Allies closed in on Berlin.

Issa is not taking the Litchblau hit piece laying down, and has demanded a retraction based upon 13—yes,THIRTEEN—erroneous statements (or as well call them, lies) in the front-page Times smear job.

Below is the formal request for a retraction sent by Rep. Issa’s office yesterday to editors of The New York Times:

On behalf of Rep. Darrell Issa, please accept this as a formal request for a full front page retraction, including the headline, "Helping His District, and Himself," that ran in the Monday, August 15 edition of the New York Times. The request for a full front page retraction is based on numerous errors that invalidate the primary assertions made in the story that is a false and sensationalized account Rep. Issa's efforts to conduct congressional oversight of the Obama Administration and other matters.

This request is being sent after New York Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, who wrote the story, refused to share the contact information of his editors for a discussion of errors in the story as requested by Rep. Issa's congressional office.

The central claim in the New York Times story is an allegation of self-dealing on the part of Rep. Darrell Issa, as the story describes, "with at least some of the congressman's actions helping to make a rich man richer" and "specific actions that appear to have clearly benefited his businesses."

The New York Times story cites three central examples it believes justifies these allegations:

• A medical complex purchased by Rep. Issa in 2008 that the Times story alleges enjoyed a 60 percent appreciation as it increased in value from $10.3 million to $16.6 million, "at least in part because of the government-sponsored road work" that Rep. Issa supported.
• That he "went easy" on Toyota during 2010 hearings on unintended acceleration due to "his electronics company's role as a major supplier of alarms to Toyota."
• An alleged 1900 percent profit Rep. Issa's charitable foundation made on an investment of "less that $19,000" that was sold seven months later for $357,000 "months before the stock market crashed."

All central examples, however, are wildly inaccurate, and the truth deserves to be told.

• The medical complex the Times story alleges enjoyed a 60 percent appreciation since it was purchased for $10.3 million and is now valued at $16.6 million is a patently false claim. According to the buyer's final settlement statement, the property in question was not purchased for $10.3 million as the New York Times reported but for $16.6 million – the exact same figure of its current tax assessment. According to these numbers, the appreciation is not 60 percent but roughly zero. In addition, the government sponsored road work noted in the article has not even begun and Rep. Issa's requests for the project (which were publicly announced and made on behalf of and at the request of the City of Vista, and the San Diego Association of Governments which is the regional transportation planning authority) all came before the 2009 property purchase.
• The allegation that Rep. Issa "went easy" on Toyota during 2010 hearings because of "his electronics company's role as a major supplier of alarms to Toyota" is again an example of a factual error in the Times story that lends no support to the story's central premise. While the Times story tells readers that Rep. Issa's former company, Directed Electronics, is a "major supplier of alarms to Toyota," the story offers no evidence, and Directed Electronics is, in fact, not a supplier to Toyota. The New York Times also fails to note that Rep. Issa does not have a personal financial interest in Directed Electronics.
• The "1,900 percent" profit allegation is, again, based on reporting errors by the New York Times. This is assertion is based on an incorrect form obtained by the Times. According to a financial transaction record, the Issa Family Foundation's initial investment in the AIM Small Company fund was not $19,000 but $500,000. The asset was later sold for $375,000 resulting in a $125,000 loss – not a 1900 percent gain as was reported.

In other words, the claims leveled against Issa by Litchblau entirely fabricated. The writer and his editors totally failed to fact-check their claims. The real question here is, "Where did they get their information?"

I'm guessing the same place that plagiarist Sari Horwitz got her smear piece in Pravda on the Potomac, which was Barack Obama's White House.

Now back to the demand for retraction.

In addition, the lede line of the Times story – an attempt by the New York Times to foreshadow a corporate image of Rep. Issa's congressional office – contains a factual inaccuracy in introducing intentionally distorted imagery. The story begins, "Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars." As this video shows, however, the office building located at 1800 Thibodo Rd. in Vista does not overlook a golf course. Because of these errors, and another error the New York Times did correct that grossly exaggerated the value of some holdings held by Rep. Issa, the following lines in the New York Times original story that ran August 15 are incorrect or made on baseless assertions:

• The title, "Helping His District and Himself" implies that Rep. Issa has engaged in self-dealing. The only evidence the story offers for this assertion are factually flawed assertions.
• The lede, "Here on the third floor of a gleaming office building overlooking a golf course in the rugged foothills north of San Diego, Darrell Issa, the entrepreneur, oversees the hub of a growing financial empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars." The building where Rep. Issa's office is located does not overlook a golf course as the reporter Eric Lichtblau implies he personally observed.
• "Mr. Issa has … split a holding company into separate multibillion-dollar businesses." Rep. Issa does not own a single multi-billion business (The Times has issued a correction for this error).
• "As his private wealth and public power have grown, so too has the overlap between his private and business lives, with at least some of the congressman's government actions helping to make a rich man even richer and raising the potential for conflicts." The only examples the New York Times raises of Rep. Issa's public actions benefiting his private holdings are the erroneous examples previously noted.
• "In one case, more than $800,000 in earmarks he arranged will help widen a busy thoroughfare in front of a medical plaza he bought for $10.3 million." The story erroneously reports the property's purchase price which was, in fact, $16.6 million. It also fails to mention that at the time he sought funding for his district he did not own this property.
• "At the same time, the value of the medical complex and other properties has soared, at least in part because of the government-sponsored roadwork." The roadwork in question has not begun and, as noted previously, the New York Times' assertion that the value of the medical complex has "soared" is based on false information. The Times' statement also conflicts with the statement of a quoted source in the story, Dean Tilton the local commercial property broker, who describes this as the worst market in twenty years. The Times suggests road projects miles away from those owned by Rep. Issa benefit him. By this logic, wouldn't the entire area be booming as a result of Rep. Issa's earmarks?
• "But beyond specific actions that appear to have clearly benefited his businesses, Mr. Issa's interests are so varied that some of the biggest issues making their way through Congress affect him in some way." The New York Times fails to provide accurate examples of "specific actions that appear to have clearly benefited his businesses."
• "After the forced sale of Merrill Lynch in 2008, for instance, he publicly attacked the Treasury Department's handling of the deal without mentioning that Merrill had handled hundreds of millions of dollars in investments for him and lent him many millions more." The New York Times fails to note that Rep. Issa's transactions with Merrill Lynch have been appropriately disclosed in his annual ethics filing.
• "In Mr. Issa's case, it is sometimes difficult to separate the business of Congress from the business of Darrell Issa." Again, the New York Times story fails to provide factually accurate examples for this assertion.
• "Then, Mr. Issa brushed aside suggestions that his electronics company’s role as a major supplier of alarms to Toyota made him go easy on the automaker as he led an investigation into the recalls." Rep. Issa's former company is not a supplier to Toyota.
• "In one 2008 sale, months before the stock market crashed, his family foundation earned $357,000 on an initial investment of less than $19,000 — a return of nearly 1,900 percent in just seven months, the foundation reported to the Internal Revenue Service." This assertion is based on an incorrect document. The actual purchase price was not $19,000, but $500,000 and resulted in a $125,000 loss.
• "That suggests the foundation may have acquired the shares from a third-party broker." This assertion is based on the false 1900 percent claim.
• "Mr. Issa is keenly interested in Goldman's performance." This statement lacks a basis in fact as Rep. Issa does not have investments dependent on Goldman Sach's performance.

I appreciate your attention to these thirteen errors contained in the August 15 story and look forward to hearing your response to our request for a front-page retraction of the story due to the inaccuracies that fully undermine the premise of the article.

Thank you,

Frederick Hill
Director of Communications

According to journalistic ethics (not that the MSM uses them anymore), a retraction should go on the same page in roughly the same place as the original article. Considering the blatant and numerous failures in researching and editing this article, the New York Times clearly owes Congressman Issa a front-page, above-the-fold and detailed retraction, along with an explanation to their readers of how such a smear made it into print.

In an ethical paper, I'd also expect suspensions or firings for the writer and editors involved, but since we are talking about the Times, I have no expectation of such competence.

At What Point Are There Consequences?

Far Left blowhard Ed Shultz deceptively edited video of Republican governor and Presidential candidate Rick Perry in order to provide "evidence" that Perry made a racist comment, calling Barack Obama a "black cloud hanging over America."

The problem is, Perry did nothing of the sort.

Perry was speaking to a crowd about the exploding national debt being a "black cloud hanging over America." The video in full context clearly shows that the candidate is clearly talking about the debt, and nothing but the debt.

Caught red-handed, Shultz apologizes for deceptively editing the video clip. He does not—in any way, shape, or form—apologize for doctoring the video footage to support his slander of Governor Perry as a racist.

At what point does NBC News and MSNBC display a modicum of journalistic integrity and respect for their audience by suspending or terminating firebrands that fabricate evidence and tell terrible lies to deceive their viewers?

Does NBC News and MSNBC have so little respect for their viewing audience that they feel it is acceptable to lie to them without care or consequence, other than the occasionally half-hearted "I'm sorry that I was caught" non-apology apology Shultz issues here?

The news media wonders why respect for their profession has plummeted. They can find their answer with a glance in the mirror.

Think Progress Lies About Rick Perry's Response to Reporter's Question

If someone asks you an obtuse question about someone else, and you chose to answer by replying, "I dunno, you need to ask him," is that fairly characterized by saying that the person who was asked the question was the one doing the questioning?

In the community-based, radically-warped views of Think Progress the apparent answer is, "Yes! if we can get away with it."

Do you hear that sound? That is the sound of desperation, my friends, and it permeates the agenda-driven media space that demands Barack Obama be re-elected, no matter what.

Times Reporter Eric Lichtblau's Hit Piece on Issa Full of Fact Errors, Reported Plagiarism. Bears Marks of Obama Administration Desperation

Eric Litchblau is not a reporter. He never has been.

What Eric Litchblau of the New york Times happens to be is a political ideologue with few scruples, and undeveloped sense of right and wrong, and honor... well, it simply was never in his DNA.

He was infamously part of the Times reporting team (along with James Risen)that leaked the existence of a NSA program that included intercepting terrorist communications in an attempt to politically hobble the Bush Administration. The disclosure served to tip off terrorist plotters to use other forms of communications, and was ultimately deemed legal by the federal court.

Before that final confirmation, however, Litchblau played fast and loose with the truth on more than one occasion, and even reversed the facts of stories so that he was essentially fabricating the news.

Old habits, unpunished by a rabid and unscrupulous editorial staff, once again surfaced today in a hit piece directed at Congressman Darrel Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee that has been ranging in the Obama Administration in the Gunwalker scandal and a number of other questionable activities.

Perhaps out of desperation, Litchblau's latest article simply makes up facts... those it doesn't apparently plagiarize from left wing blogs, that is. Even left wing radicals that are the Times biggest idolators are calling him out for his theft.

My big question regarding the Litchblau piece is whether or not it was even written by Litchblau. Actually, I suspect Litchblau wrote the story—at least the parts he didn't allegedly steal—but the question remains as to why he would put such a poorly researched, easily debunked and roundly condemned article, unless he was doing it as a political favor to the the Administration.

It was, after all, the White House that shopped a hit piece targeting Issa just months ago that had similarly desperate and sloppy details in a story so weak that a number of news organizations and even a left wing blog passed on it for being not credible.

The hit piece seems to confirm that Issa is damaging the Administration with his Oversight committee probes. As more federal agents, supervisors, and political appoints come forward to point out corruption and criminality, you can only expect the media to publish more manufactured smears in hopes of tarring the reputations of the men and women who just might make the 44th President of the United States the first one ever impeached, put on trial in a criminal court, and extradited to face even more criminal charges.

Update: An editorial in the Washington Examiner suggests that it is DHHS, and not DOJ and DHS that has spurred the White House attack dogs in the press to attack Issa, and they make the very accurate point that these are not just attacks, but in-kind contributions to the Obama campaign.

The simple fact of the matter is that Issa is determined and was released as chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform committee in the most target-rich environment in the history of American government... and that he is very good at his job.

Politico Reporter Changes Venues, Works for Same Cause

He's just the latest of many reporters that have quit "journalism" in recent years to officially work for the same folks they've actually been working for the entire time:

A Politico reporter who often penned stories about Sarah Palin and other Republicans has quit journalism to work with the Democratic Party in Arizona, sources tell The Daily Caller.

That reporter, Andy Barr, has covered national politics for the publication since 2008. Barr leaving to help elect Democrats will likely fan the flames of critics who say Politico has a liberal bias.

It's not exactly clear what his new job duties are. Barr wouldn't say, but told FishbowlDC, which first reported that Barr was leaving, that he left Politico on "very good terms." That report said Barr, who is from Phoenix, is taking a "political job," but didn’t say where he is going.

The media would do the country a tremendous service if they could be relied upon to report upon stories objectively. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of reporters and editors in the media business have a strong leftward personal political slant, and that affects their reporting as well. It has just become more overt in recent years.

Of all the news outlets, it is unsurprisingly Rupert Murdock's News Corp that is the most politically balanced, with only a slight edge in donations to Democrats over Republicans (51%-49%). The balance carries over to news reporting in News Corp, which is why they are more trusted and viewed than many of their rabidly liberal counterparts.

How is Keith Olbermann these days, anyway?

Gunwalker Goes Pravda

I did a total of six radio appearances last week related to "Gunwalker," and Mike did at least two (including one today).

Here's a fresh Youtube clip of my Friday night appearance on Cam and Company.

Writer That Ran with Post Character Assassination Piece Shopped by the Adminstration Just Came Off 3 Month Suspension for Plagiarism

None dare call it journalism.

Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli blocked all escape routes that his reporter Sari Horwitz might have mapped when he told Yahoo News reporter Michael Calderone yesterday, "There are no mitigating circumstances for plagiarism."

Horwitz stole from at least two Arizona Republic stories about the prosecution of Jared Lee Loughner earlier this month, the Post reports today. (Here's the Post editor's note on the matter.) Brauchli delivered his justice swiftly. Having learned of the plagiarism in a Monday e-mail from Randy Lovely, editor of the Republic, Brauchli had sentenced Horwitz to a three-month suspension by Wednesday.

If the 3-month suspension ran from March 16-June 16, Horwitz was back on the job less than a week before she ran this bogus story under her name. PJM sources claim someone in the Obama Administration allegedly shopped the article to various news outlets for a week in an attempt to try to stymie Congressman Darrell Issa's investigation in the Administration's role in the Gunwalker plot.

They weren't successful, but they are doing a damn good job of making the Administration look like guilty criminals flailing for a way out.

Talking Gunwalker on NRA News

Just a quick programing note. I'll be on NRA News with Cam and Company tonight, (SiriusXM Satellite Radio Patriot 125) at about 10:20 EST to talk about BATF's Gunwalker fiasco.

We'll be discussing my recent article at Pajamas Media, Gunwalker under Fire.

Update: The video:

"Gay Girl From Damascus" Actually a Che-Loving, Jew-Hating Douche From Georgia

Didn't much care about it before and so I can't pretend to be outraged now, but is is funny that so many "educated" rubes got sucked into buying this.

"I'm not a government-abducted Syrian lesbian. I'm you."

Breitbart Takes Over Weiner Press Conference, Stuns MSM

I would not have believed it if i wasn't watching it with my own two eyes.

Embattled Democrat Anthony Weiner was expected to take the stage at a 4:00 PM press conference, when Andrew Breitbart took over the stage and the message.

After providing his version of events reading the media the riot act for their biased coverage, Breitbart left the stunned journalists almost speechless in his wake as he strode off stage.

Update: Weiner joins his press conference a half hour later makes half-admissions of his guilt before and after his marriage.

"I haven't told the truth, and I've done things i deeply regret."

Admits his guilt, will not resign at this time.

Media Suppresses Leftist Violence (Again)

Michael Thomas describes himself as a liberal Democrat and communist. The police say he's mentally unstable, but that's redundant.

A Portland man charged with sending threatening letters to Gov. Paul LePage admitted to agents that he sent those and other threatening letters to national political figures, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, according to testimony Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

Authorities also found a gun and an ammunition clip in Michael Thomas' desk drawer when he was arrested Friday, FBI Special Agent Pamela Flick testified; and Thomas told her that if they had showed up later, he would have launched a shootout with police.

Thomas claims he would have carried out his death threats if he had the means. In other words, he had the intent of becoming the next Jared Lee Laughner, just not the ability to carry it out.

Because all of his targets were Republicans, and Thomas is a self-described Democrat and communist, the MSM won't give this story the front-page treatment they would if the situation was reversed.

It's far too important for them to protect the narrative.

O'Keefe Wins Again: NPR CEO Vivian Schiller Resigns In Wake of Hate Speech Revelations

On Fox right now:

NPR CEO Vivian Schiller has resigned, the radio network announced Wednesday.

The announcement comes a day after a hidden-camera video was released showing a senior NPR executive criticizing the Tea Party as "racist."

NPR condemned the comments, but the company announced Wednesday that the Board of Directors just accepted Schiller's resignation, "effective immediately."

Schiller was a liberal elitist bigot who encouraged bigotry and hatred of conservatives while part of the organization. She resigns one day after controversial conservative activist James O'Keefe released video of a sting where NPR executive Ron Schiller (no relation) was filmed bashing conservatives as xenophobic, racist, and scary. Ron Schiller, who was leaving NPR for a position with the Aspen Institute on April 1, has now been terminated.

The Aspen Institute claims in their mission statement:

The Aspen Institute mission is twofold: to foster values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue for discussing and acting on critical issues.

His naked bigotry on full public display, I frankly have no confidence that Ron Schiller is capable of performing the job he was hired to do objectively, but whether or not to rescind his job offer is a decision Aspen Institute and it's benefactors must make, not I.

Update: Ron Shiller out at Aspen Institute. No word on whether he'll join Media Matters or Think Progress.

Rolling Stone Owes U.S. Military an Apology and a Retraction

I called out Rolling Stone for this non-story last week.

Now that Michael Hastings' military-hatefest is being rapidly torn asunder, will Rolling Stone admit their incompetent editorial process and disdain for the military allowed a bogus story to be published?

A Runaway Reporter

I've dealt with many different kind of communications mediums over the years, and have been tasked at various times to engage in persuasive communications. One of the most most basic kinds of communications, it simply seeks to win the favor, approval, and/or consent of the target audience. It is practiced in nearly every level of human interaction, from a parent convincing a young child to perform a task to a salesperson or marketer attempting to convince a client that "Solution X" will provide an answer or solve a problem. It's used by public officials trying to convince voters to select them, and it is used by journalists and propagandists to shape public opinion.

An article the Rolling Stone attempts to make this behavior into a major political scandal. It sounds quite nefarious; a military psychological operations team is tasked with creating presentations to convince visiting congressional representatives.

But when you read past the hyperbole and insinuation endemic throughout the article, you come realize that there isn't any "there," there.

A military unit normally tasked with understanding, targeting and persuading the local population was pressed into service to more or less Google the records and positions of visiting dignitaries in order to tweak boilerplate presentations to match the VIPs preferences and learning style, so that military briefers could more effectively communicate with them and then achieve a favorable response. Objectively, that appears to be all there is to this story.

Subjectively, this is the story of a disgruntled employee attempting to cast his former employer in the worst possible light, pounced upon by a journalist that has previously found fame and fortune sensationalizing a similar story. Both of these men have obvious motives. What is far less clear is their case that anything remotely unethical—much less illegal—took place in what were essentially corporate marketing operations that in an of themselves were utterly ordinary in execution.

Michael Hastings make his career when he interviewed General Stanley McCrystal and ultimately ended his career. He's trying so hard here to repeats his past success. It's too bad the apparent facts refuse to back his desire for more attention and fame.

Big Time?

When Keith Olbermann moved to Al Gore's current TV, he joined a network that has just 18,000 primetime viewers. (h/t Drudge)

That's 841,372 viewers less than this almost four-year-old video of a Peter Gabriel song from 1986.

Rock it, Keith.

They think so small, they use small words
But not me, I'm smarter than that,
I worked it out
I'll be stretching my mouth to let those big words come right out
I've had enough, I'm getting out
To the city, the big big city
I'll be a big noise with all the big boys, so much stuff I will own...

To Boldly Go Where No One Has Watched Before

The buzz this morning is that ousted MSNBC host Keith Olbermann will be joining Al Gore's Current TV, a channel so obscure most of us had to look it up because most Americans don't even know it exists.

You know, kind of like the network Olbermann left.

I joked last night on twitter that it was kind of like a merger between a chain link fence company and a ship builder. You know their product is going down, the only question is how long it will take.

Associated Press Falls For "Pallywood"-Style Stunt in Egypt

Glance at this gritty cellphone video from Egypt, and you might think you're watching video of protester being gunned down by riot police.

You'll note first that the shot does not come from the distance. Bullets fly far faster than sound, and yet this protester is dropping to the ground as the shot is going off. It also sounds to my ear like a pistol shot; one coming from the side of or behind the camera, at that.

Second, the man drops like a sack of potatoes. This suggests a central nervous system shot to the head or spine. He flopped back completely prostrate, where a through-and-though wound from the government forces to his front would dump substantial blood from an exit wound at the rear.

There is no blood.

This was a poorly staged scene, ladies and gentlemen.

And the media has shamefully fallen for it.

Again.

Olby Out... But Why Should I Care?

The political blogosphere and Twitter have been in a uproar over Keith Olbermann's abrupt departure—some are saying a firing—from MSNBC.

The "highest-rated host on MSNBC"—which is damning with faint praise, indeed— will reportedly be off the air for some time as part of a contract buyout, but will soon be part of some sort of online venture.

I think it's great. He wasn't worth watching on television. He'll be even easier to ignore online.

Horrors! Media Matters Freaks Over Email From Fox News Executive That Calls For Accuracy in Reporting on Climate Change

Lighten up, Francis:

In the midst of global climate change talks last December, a top Fox News official sent an email questioning the "veracity of climate change data" and ordering the network's journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

Unless you've been living under a rock—or inhabit a cultish, community-based reality—you are well aware that the "science" of climate change science is being hotly debated, and has been for several years. This has been exacerbated by allegations of climate change scientists hiding and/or manipulating data, and of course the heavily-politicized nature of the subject.

Is it a scandal to point out that contested theories are, in fact, hotly contested?

It is for Media Matters, just one of along line of activist groups that has decided that using the near-certain threat of short-term ecological disaster is a great way to establish control over the general population in the service of their wider agenda.

Despite protestations to the contrary by those with vested political and financial interests, climate change science is a field of study in its infancy with significant room for debate.

Asking for reporters to note the controversial nature of climate science claims is the only responsible position for a news manager to take.

The real question Media Matters should be asked is why they refuse to push for that kind of transparency in other news agencies.

The Spin Factory Shrieks

Think Progress—an organization built from the ground up to skew media coverage to the left—is complaining this morning because they were provided with a memo of a Fox News executive playing their game... and playing it just as well or better.

At the height of the health care reform debate last fall, Bill Sammon, Fox News' controversial Washington managing editor, sent a memo directing his network's journalists not to use the phrase "public option."

Instead, Sammon wrote, Fox's reporters should use "government option" and similar phrases -- wording that a top Republican pollster had recommended in order to turn public opinion against the Democrats' reform efforts.

Both sides play the spin game, and always have. Think Progress is particularly aggrieved at this particular example because (a), they had it, and (b) calling it the "government option" was both more effective and more accurate messaging than than their less-accurate "public option" construct.

There is nothing morally, ethically, or legally wrong in choosing the more accurate term "government option." We are, after all, talking about a government-run health-care law.

Think Progress is throwing a hissy-fit because Sammon sent out a memo because he wanted to make sure that his network used the more accurate and yes, more divisive description of Obamacare.

As much as these totalitarians would like to regulate the words we can use, they haven't managed to establish that level of control.

Then again, that is probably what irritates them the most.

Aaron Sorkin is a Whiny Little Man-Bitch, Isn't He?

It's starting to feel like "all caribou, all the time" around here, but you take your litmus tests where you find them.

Sarah Palin's less-than-picture-perfect caribou hunt on her reality show has earned her some derision on both sides of the political spectrum.

On the right, critics find her gun handling and shooting skills suspect, as well as her decision to shoot a rifle that had been dropped earlier in the hunt. Not only did she fire it and complain about it missing high, she shot it five times before going to another rifle with which she finally dispatched what must have been one of the world's dumbest herbivores. Some doubt her authenticity as a hunter and shooter as a result of the episode, while some question her judgment as she continued to use a damaged weapon. By and large, these criticisms have all be rational.

And then there is the comically absurd commentary frothing forth from the Left.

I discussed Maureen Dowd's mangled attempt earlier, but shrill screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was so furious that he produced a self-parodying gem that simply must be read to be appreciated for it's stupidity.

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

"Torturing animals"?

I'd invite Mr. Sorkin to visit any commercial slaughterhouse of his choice, and compare the killing processes there against the taking of a game animal by a hunter. His belt and loafers lived a tortured life in a factory farm and died a tortured death in a commercial slaughterhouse. Palin's caribou lived free in nature, and died there.

I'm able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don't watch snuff films and you make them. You weren't killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I've tried and tried and for the life of me, I can't make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing.

Oh, what nutty goodness. As noted above, the commercially raised, slaughtered, and butchered animals that Sorkin exploits for his needs and comforts are done by others with cold efficiency, stripping the animals of their dignity along with their flesh. Palin's kill was explicitly made to fill her freezer. His argument that she, like millions of others in America and generations of mankind going back to the beginning of our species, should not find pride and an feeling of accomplish in one of mankind's oldest rituals merely shows how ignorant this pretender really is about the human condition... and it perhaps explains the thinned excrement he typically produces as entertainment.

Hunters hunt for many reasons, but the most common are to connect to our shared cultural past, to commune with nature, and feel the satisfaction of being self-sustaining. It shouldn't be a surprise that a parasite that derives his existence from mimicking the human condition is unable to relate to the authentic state.

I'm able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.

Oh, the compassion of the faux compassionate. Sorkin, a cookie-cutter liberal, gives unrestricted sympathy to animals he finds adorable, exploits the ones that upholster his custom-made furniture and adorn his plate, and harbors hatred in his heart for those who can do what he cannot... provide for themselves. You can almost hear his testosterone-deprived raisins shriveling with anger as he rages.

So I don't think I will save my condemnation, you phony pioneer girl. (I'm in film and television, Cruella, and there was an insert close-up of your manicure while you were roughing it in God's country. I know exactly how many feet off camera your hair and make-up trailer was.)

And you didn't just do it for fun and you didn't just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there'd be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. What a uniter you'd be -- bringing the right together with the far right.

(Let me be the first to say that I abused cocaine and was arrested for it in April 2001. I want to be the first to say it so that when Palin's Army of Arrogant A$%holes, bereft of any reasonable rebuttal, write it all over the internet tomorrow they will at best be the second.)

I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged and The Learning Channel should be ashamed of itself.

Sorkin thinks the distant past needs to be dredged up for us to mock him or find his perverse sense of morals and manhood cheap.

That he is a living parody simply wouldn't cross his mind.

Update: And can someone please explain to these idiot liberals the difference between a moose and a caribou?

Dowd Inexpertly Slaughters and Guts a Metaphor

Bitter Maureen Dowd indulges in Palinism again, using the caribou hunting episode of Sarah Palin's reality show in order to... do something with words.

It appears to be a metaphor, but she pokes at it with uncertainty.

The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics. The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he's trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being.

Palin's father advises her to warm up her trigger finger. And trigger-happy Sarah represents the Republicans, who have spent two years taking shots at the president, including potshots, and tormenting him in an effort to bring him down.

The Republicans think they have hurt their quarry on the tax-cut deal, making him look weak and at odds with his party. There's an argument to be made for what the president did, but he doesn’t look good doing it.

When all the Democrats are complaining and all the Republicans are happy, it just can't be a good deal for Democrats.

If it appears that Dowd was starting to make a comparison between our President and a caribou before boring herself with the subject by the end of the paragraph, then your reading is correct.

The next paragraph barely attempts to lift its head, muttering a bit about political potshots. The next after that only mentions quarry, but by then Dowd is spent, and the comparison fizzles out. It is the kind of pointless and random comparison we'd expect from substance abusers (a "methaphor?").

Dowd clearly doesn't understand the beast or the circumstances it faces. It is not "elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them."

The Obambi is instead a timid beast, unable to identify the clear threat standing out in the open in front of him or make the basic decisions that would save itself.

It isn't "a reasonable mammal." It isn't trying to "rise above" anything. It's simply too dumb to act in its own best interests. It cannot function apart from the herd.

It is perhaps that bitter and bloody realization that caused Dowd to abandon her her comparison. Any hunter can be successful when the game leads itself to slaughter.

NPR, or the Onion?

Taxpayers should not be subsidizing NPR's second-rate liberal commentary or slanted news... we have for-profit corporations for that.

Neither should we be paying for absurd satire... and I sure hope this was satire.

The president played basketball yesterday with some friends in the gym of the Fort McNair Army Base, and reportedly took an elbow in the mouth from an opposing player who went up for a shot.

It took 12 stitches to close The First Fat Lip, if you please. I'm not sure that Joe Frazier needed 12 stitches after the Thrilla in Manila, though the White House stressed that a smaller filament was used, which increases the number of stitches, but leaves a smaller scar.

I wonder if having a larger scar wouldn't actually fortify President Obama's profile, as he contends with Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vladimir Putin. Imagine a president with a gnarly, vivid scar telling the rulers of China, "Nice country ya' got here. I'd hate to see something happen to it if you didn't stop foolin' around with the value of your currency. Know what I mean?"

The problem is that in politics or in basketball Obama is a comically overrated amateur, and that never intimidates anyone.

KTVA Reporters Deserve Firing For Attempts to Rig Election

There is not more accurate way to describe this story. Reporters and news managers at CBS News affiliate KTVA have been captured plotting a string of so-called "October surprises." They expressly discuss ways to fabricate news stories they hope will damage the campaign of Senate candidate Joe Miller.

This is a morally reprehensible and indefensible act of conspiracy to defraud the viewers of KTVA and any other citizen that may pick up these vulgar fictions.

The entire news staff of KTVA should be investigated by the appropriate authorities to determine if state and federal laws have been as badly broken as has been the public's trust.

As a news outlet, KTVA is now hopelessly compromised. They've utterly destroyed their credibility. Thee is little choice for the station owner but to fire the entire news staff. None of them can be trusted.

And they have no one to blame but themselves.

CNN Provides Rick Sanchez the Opportunity to Do the Reich Thing

This whole thing happened so far I didn't ever get a chance to write the "whoa," much less the "gotta go."

Basically, one of CNN's lesser lights came out as a conspiracy-minded anti-Semite on a radio show yesterday afternoon, and was terminated today after the story got out.

I'd say I'm sorry to see him go, but quite frankly, he brought very little to the air in the first place.

Unsigned WaPo Op-Ed: Where are the Republicans who will reject pandering and prejudice?

It is more than a little bit fascinating to see liberal "conventional wisdom" on display, especially when it is unsupported by reality.

This editorial, for example, is rife with deception and ignorance.

BROADLY SPEAKING, there seem to be three strands of argument against building a mosque or Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

The first is that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 people there in 2001 really did represent Islam and that to pretend otherwise is a dangerous delusion. The second is that, no, al-Qaeda does not speak for Islam, but many people -- including survivors and relatives of the victims -- naturally associate the two, and therefore it would be insensitive to locate anything Islamic so close to the scene of the crime. The third, for many politicians, seems to be that most Americans oppose construction of the mosque, and therefore opposition is useful (for Republicans on the attack) or safe (for Democrats cowering in a corner).

All three of these are objectionable. It is true that more Muslims around the world than one might wish sympathize with some of Osama bin Laden's thinking, view America as an aggressor nation and accept as justified some of what Americans view as terrorism.

The writer of this unsigned piece provides little in the way of qualification here... "more Muslims around the world than one might wish" sympathize with the bin Laden's thinking. The writer might be interested to know that bin Laden's thinking is firmly rooted at the very core of Islamic theology, and his calls to wage jihad perfectly reflect that of his religions' primary prophet, Mohammed, who warred, killed, and took as slaves entire tribes during his lifetime as he spread his newly-created faith at the point of a sword.

The writer also seems to have forgotten the celebratory mood that erupted in many, if not most parts of the Arab world to the news that that thousands of Americans had been killed on 9/11. The fabled "Islamic street" was thrilled.

Almost a decade later, even our so-called Islamic allies are anything but. A clear super-majority of Pakistanis view the United States as the enemy. That view holds sway across Arab Islamic cultures.

But it's also true that many more Muslims reject such thinking, see Islam as a fundamentally peaceful religion and view al-Qaeda as foreign and repugnant.

Anyone who holds the view that Islam is a fundamentally peaceful religion simply choses to ignore the faith's origins, history, religious texts, and modern practitioners.

Islam is intractably linked to violence, as violence is the primary way the faith has been spread for the 1,400 years since it was founded. From early skirmishes to the Battle of Badr onward to today's wars and terrorists, Islam is rooted in forcing itself upon others. It it true that some Muslim cultures have declining support for al Qaeda and the Taliban, but that is only because fellow Muslims are the bulk of their victims. When al Qaeda and the Taliban kill non-Muslims, even those Muslims who disapprove of the groups as a whole find joy in the deaths of infidels.

As Muslims struggle with how to adapt their religion to the challenges of modernity, Americans should be showing respect for those in the second camp, not lumping them together with the terrorists and their supporters.

Here the writer either chooses to ignore key tenants of Islamic religion, or simply professes ignorance. Islam cannot be modernized. That is it based upon the unshakable and un-editable word of Allah is a key tenant of the faith. Author Salman Rushdie has had a fatwa (death sentence) on his head for decades for challenging that belief, by basing the title of his book The Satanic Verses on verses said to have been edited out of the early Koran. Islam cannot be modernized. It was designed from the outset to hold anyone attempting to modernize or change it as a blasphemer, worthy only of immediate and violent death. Islam requires philosophical stasis as a key element of it's controlling philosophy.

And if the Muslims who want to build a community center are no more responsible for, or supportive of, the attacks of Sept. 11 than any other Americans, how can their plans be "insensitive"? The hurt feelings must reflect misunderstanding or prejudice on the part of the objectors, and the right response to misunderstanding and prejudice is education, not appeasement.

This, like so much elitist pap, is based up self-congratulatory mental masturbation, as the writer congratulates him or herself for their tolerance. The imam pushing this project holds Americans to blame for the 9/11 terror attacks. Like many other mosques raised around the world, it would be purposefully constructed as a victory symbol, as Muslims have done at the sites of their conquests since the very beginning. It is no accident that many of the most revered mosques in Islam were once Christian churches or Jewish synagogues. Islam literally means "submission," and it demands that from all, whether they are Muslims or not.

The many Republicans and Democrats who have come out against the mosque—including the presiding Senate Majority leader and the recently retired Democratic National Committee chairman—are not bigots. They are realists. Opponents of this victory mosque are not prejudiced, but instead terribly aware of precisely what the mosque is meant to symbolize to the Islamic faith in every nation in which it is practiced.

This Washington Post op-ed serves only to expose the historical and theological ignorance of this declining newspaper's editorial board.

None of us should apologize for rejecting intolerance, especially intolerance in the guise of a suicidal multiculturalism.

The Laredo Truthers Ride Again

The same folks that bought San Diego-based rumors of a Texas invasion by drug cartels several weeks ago are standing by their stories, and now attempting to claim vindication.

Kimberly Dvorak, the San Diego County Political Buzz Examiner that started the story, now claims to have evidence that her story is true.

Her evidence? An image that she claims is a a screen from a police blotter report.

Digger's Realm is now trumpeting this as absolution, as is Mondo Frazier from Death by an Thousand Papercuts and Big Journalism.

They choose to believe that a supposed computer screen, obtained (or fabricated) by unrevealed sources, that cites neither the name or address of the ranch or the person making the call to law enforcement, proves their case.

The want us to believe that the police officers and sheriffs units that weren't ID'd were deployed, and that the lack of any report of contact or observation by these unknown LEOs is justification for the claims that the various law enforcement agencies and named officials cited in the story who said it didn't happen, are lying.

We still don't have an address. We still don't have a victim. We still don't have anyone with any eyewitness accounts, or physical evidence that such an event took place.

People will believe what they want, regardless of facts. That is the only evidence of anything I've even been able to discern regarding this story.

You Were Duped, Rubes

Liberals love to think of themselves as better educated, more experienced free thinkers, too sophisticated to be conned or controlled.

I have a revelation for you, my friends.

The latest JournoList dump from the Daily Caller reveals the collusion of the liberal media as they worked together to find ways to attack Sarah Palin, right after the Alaskan governor was named John McCain's surprise pick to be the Republican Vice Presidential candidate.

Amidst this debate over how most effectively to destroy Palin's reputation, reporter Avi Zenilman, who was then writing about the campaign for Politico, chimed in to note that Palin had "openly backed" parts of Obama's energy plan. In an interview Wednesday, Zenilman said he was offering "typical offhand political analysis" and that Journolist was one of many online places he scoured for news to post to his blog.

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. "Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get," Hayes wrote.

Suzanne Nossel, chief of operations for Human Rights Watch, added a novel take: "I think it is and can be spun as a profoundly sexist pick. Women should feel umbrage at the idea that their votes can be attracted just by putting a woman, any woman, on the ticket no matter her qualifications or views."

Mother Jones's Stein loved the idea. "That's excellent! If enough people – people on this list? – write that the pick is sexist, you’ll have the networks debating it for days. And that negates the SINGLE thing Palin brings to the ticket," he wrote.

Months of this shaped the narrative and the pop-culture view we have of Sarah Palin, a skilled politician that rose through the ranks of Alaskan politics based upon a foundation of integrity, grit, and courage to become—for a time—a governor with (I think) the highest approval ratings ever (please correct me if i am wrong).

This now-exposed collusion between members of the media, shared with their co-conspirator politicians and Hollywood allies, was used to create a purposely warped view of who Sarah Palin is, and what she represents.

How can you tell if you were affected by this orchestrated mischaracterization?

I'll leave that to you to discuss.

Treason of the Press

The Daily Caller dropped an article today proving the collusion we've long suspected among members of the media. The article exposes the thoughts of some of the liberal writers that belonged to JournoList, a listserv of hundreds of left wing journalists, educators, and pundits, in relation to revelations about then-candidate Obama's relationship to his pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Wright was Obama's pastor for more than two decades at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, where he preached sermons steeped in black liberation theology, a cultish mix of liberation theology—a Marxist blend of religion and Marxism that originated in South America— and racial separatism/ black supremacist thought.

As you may suspect, it seems that every blogger on the center-right has an opinion about the revelation—for most Americans, actually just a confirmation—of the collusion among journalists in support of left wing Democratic politics, politicians, and policy.

But this collusion is more than just an example of media corruption. It is an example of these journalists and pundits using their positions, accumulated credibility, and power to thwart the freedom of speech from the inside.

Allow yourself just a few minutes to consider the ramifications of this surrender of ethics and their demand for conformity, and you will be terrified.

It isn't just that the roughly 400 JournoList members conspired behind a common cause. No, the far more alarming revelation exposed is that they conspired to support one political party and one candidate and sought to silence all that opposed them.

Michael Tomasky, a writer for the UK's Guardian accidentally hit the nail on the head, when he stated:

"Listen folks–in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn't about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people."

While he meant that in a different context, he's entirely correct; this kind of collusion is about how the media, "kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people."

They are targeting not just a minor-league shock radio talker, or local news opinion columnist (though they are obviously in favor of that as well when they feel it is warranted). They are going after ABC News. They don't even want to attempt to convince ABC News to change their focus. They intend to use "power" to issue a "warning."

Even worse, Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones suggests using left wing propagandists at Media Matters to help facilitate the strong-arming attempt.

The conversation reveals that journalists are not only colluding to shape the news in favor of one political ideology, but more than willing to use their influence in an attempt to silence those they see as obstacles to their machinations.

It is journalistic oppression. It is an explicit betrayal of the free exchange of ideas that liberty depends upon like oxygen.

Americans have repeatedly risked their lives, fought and died, for the freedom of speech that the denizens of JournoList would steal away.

Fortunately we live in an age where such collusion cannot be kept secret, and there is a price to be paid for such treachery.

In entirely unrelated news, I'm hoping you'll consider hitting the big yellow "Donate" button in the right sidebar if you're a CY fan. I don't do fundraising very often, but I'd appreciate it if you would consider sending a few bucks to my gun bling and House cane fund.

Think Progress Ripped Content From Tea Party Video To Create Fraudulent Racism Vid

You would have thought that the three separate entries I dedicated to exposing the lies yesterday in this article and video by the progressive propagandists at Think Progress, I would have said all there is to say.

But there is more... and it is shocking.

Remember "Activist 2," the Saint Louis Team Party infiltrator, that claimed "I'm a proud racist, I'm white?"

It seems that Think Progress used a clip from this video, a video entitled "Proof that the Tea Party is not racist."

The guys at SharpElbows.Net thwarted this infiltrator, heavily documenting his attempt to mingle with Tea Party protesters in Saint Louis.

Think Progress misrepresented everything this video and the Tea Party stands for, and against.

If staffers, including editor-in-chief Faiz Shakir should not be terminated for this behavior, I'd like to know why.

Another Think Progress "Tea Pary Racist" Debunked

The selective editing and inherent dishonesty from Think Progress just keep getting worse.

At the beginning of the Think Progress video claiming that Tea Party protesters are racists is a man with his bi-racial son and black wife who claims that Barack Obama is "too black to be President."

Kind of an odd statement from the patriarch of a mixed race family, isn't it? I daresay it seems like something must have been taken out of context.

And it was!

Let Coast Rebel has the entire video clip... in context.

Barack Obama's just a bad guy. That's all I can say. He's... He's too black to be President.

And you look at the color of my wife, it's not the color of his skin that troubles me, it's not the blackness of his skin that troubles me.

It's the blackness inside... his heart.

He's a bad guy.

But not bad enough to take the proud father of a handsome bi-racial son and label him to all the world as a racist. For that you need a lower life form.

You need a Think Progress intern.

Busted for Fraud, Think Progress Decides to Play Cover Up... Poorly

Oh, Think Progress... aren't you clever?

You apparently didn't like us promoting your video, and so you marked the version linked in that previous entry as "private", blocking access to most users.

Uh, guys?

Merely blocking that video and replicating it elsewere doesn't do you any favors, or save you any embarrassment. Amusingly, it it indicates that you know you have a problem, but that you simply don't care to correct your lies.

I'd feel sorry for you, if you had souls.

But your offending article is still online. Your video may change locations, but is easily relinked. The more often you do it, the more obvious your panic becomes.

About the only thing you can do at this point to save face is to issue a retraction, but we know that isn't likely to happen either, is it?

That wold require humility and integrity, two character traits that have rarely burdened you.

Keep playing games, my friends.

We'll keep busting you.

Think Progress Caught Using Liberal-Manufactured Signs From "Crash the Tea Party" as Evidence of Tea Party Racism

Do you remember the abortive "Crash the Tea Party" movement? It was the brainchild of a liberal that explicitly called for progressives to commit fraud in order to attempt to discredit the Tea Party protests.

At Pajamas Media we covered the abortive effort extensively, and made note of the very real bigotry the Crashers unwittingly revealed... in themselves.

This morning, I came across this video from Think Progress:

Typical of the kind of dishonest effort Think Progress produces, the video heavily edits clips so that you have no idea what the context of a statement is or precisely what someone they've edited is trying to say.

Worse, the video "liberally" makes use of counter Tea Party protesters and infiltrators, including "Crash the Tea Party" drones, in order to fabricate their view.

The guy who claims "I'm a proud racist, I white" was actually driven out of the Tea Party protest he attempted to infiltrate.

Nice work, Think Progress!

Seconds later, Think Progress stitches together a series of posters they claim belong to Tea Party protesters.

Really, Think Progress?

Did you not think we'd remember the amusing signs your fellow liberals created for their little abortive "Crash the Tea Party" stunt in Boston? Let's just say that some were more amusing than others, and some just showed pathetic and angry progressives often are.

There is an old saying that you're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.

At Think Progress, they're ready to make up the "facts," yet again.

Update: Oh, Think Progress... did you really think you'd get away with it?

Also, RightKlik discovers that another of the men featured in the video made his comments in 2006... well before the Tea Party was even a dream.

Update: Think Progress even tried to portray the father of a bi-racial boy as a racist as he speaks in front of his own son.

Seriously... is there anyone in this video who is what Think Progress says they are?

Greatest Headline/Opening Line Combo in News History

Via Caleb Howe on Twitter:

Puppy thrown at German biker gang

A German student "mooned" a group of Hell's Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said.

I know it will surprise you to find out that this chap was off his meds.

Blob Seeks to Envelope BP

No, we're not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We're talking about quarter-ton half-wit Rosie O'Donnell, calling for the U.S. government seizure of BP.

What good is the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or foreign policy, anyway? Just declare this foreign-based multi-national an enemy of the state, Rosie, and be done with it.

Hugo Chavez would be so proud...

Shocking News From Truthout.Org

They're actually willing to publish Jason Leopold again.

Considering his previous history of less than credible reporting and what I'll gently refer to as "personal issues," they are taking a mighty big gamble.

Bigot Retired

I must admit I like Drudge's take on this news, as he writes "Helen Sent to Poland."

She was a nasty bit of work, accepted by equally nasty peers for a half century. She simply made the mistake of getting caught.

Now that she has the free time, perhaps she'll join the next terrorist ship to Gaza. Hopefully she'll try out for the position of anchor.

Reuters: On the side of Terrorists, Once Again

This time, they've been caught cropping a photo so that while you see the Israeli soldier lying wounded on the deck of the Gaza blockade runner Mavi Marmara , you don't see the Turkish mercenary standing over his body with a combat knife.

Reuters employees have a history of supporting terrorism via propaganda. We should not be surprised that they are up to their old tricks.

But Invading His Privacy Is a Bad Thing

Joe McGinniss, the deranged/obsessed left wing author who rented the home next door to Sarah Palin while writing about her, has now threatened to call the police on a reporter that wanted to talk to him.

The charge? Trespassing.

Think Progress Duped By Class Project

And the sad thing is, the kids weren't even trying to fool anyone; Think Progress simply did it to themselves.

The Center for American Progress seemed to have blockbuster news on Tuesday: an expose titled "Telecoms' Secret Plan To Attack Net Neutrality."

On its Think Progress blog, the liberal advocacy group announced it had "obtained" a PowerPoint document "which reveals how the telecom industry is orchestrating the latest campaign against Net neutrality" through a pseudo-grassroots effort. The story was echoed on Slashdot, Boing Boing, and innumerable pro-regulation blogs.

There's just one problem with Think Progress' claim: It's not, well, accurate.

In a case of truth being stranger than astroturf, it turns out that the PowerPoint document was prepared as a class project for a competition in Florida last month. It cost the six students a grand total of $173.95, including $18 for clip art.

The "No Net Brutality" campaign idea was one of the four finalists created as an assignment for a two-and-a-half week "think tank MBA" program. The other finalists were a project promoting free speech in Venezuela, one supporting education reform in Poland, and one dealing with sales taxes rates in Washington, D.C. ("No Net Brutality" came in third. The Polish reform idea won.)

Not only was the PowerPoint document presentation no secret, but it was posted publicly on the competition's blog, along with an audio recording of the event in Miami where the student contestants presented their ideas to the judges.

The mastermind behind this SNAFU is Lee Fang, who some of you will recognize as a faithful but unimaginative Oliver Willis-grade drone.

(h/t/ Simon Owens)

Great Moments in Copy Editing

Oh my:

It takes 14 keystrokes to type "(delete space)" and just one to actually, you know, do it.

Dana Milbank Caught with Live Boy, Dead Constitution

In his best work, his trenchant insights lead to thought-provoking articles that almost make you forget his insatiable lust for prepubescent boys and his heroin habit.

This is not Dana Milbank's best:

By George W. Bush's standard -- you're either with us or against us in the fight against terrorism -- NRA chief Wayne LaPierre should be just a few frequent-flier miles short of a free ticket to Gitmo right about now. Seems he and the rest of the gun lobby are fighting for terrorists' right to buy firearms.

The Bush administration urged Congress to pass a law barring people on the terrorist watch list from buying explosives and guns. The gun lobby objected. Now the Obama administration is urging Congress to pass the same legislation, and the gun lobby continues to object.

On Wednesday, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, using the star power they acquired in the apprehension of the Times Square bomb suspect, came to Capitol Hill to plead for Congress to change the absurdity in the law that keeps those with alleged terrorist ties off airplanes but enables them to legally buy guns and explosives.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, Dana Milbank railed against alleged civil rights violations he attributed to the various evil shamans of the Bush Administration. He seems to have gotten past that, now that a little inconsequential tyranny suits his peccadillos.

He now proclaims that faceless government bureaucrats should have the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, based upon nothing more than their name appearing on a list... a terrorist watch list so comically flawed that it contains the names of infants and nuns, Congressman and Senators. A list nearly impossible to appeal. A list that often seems utterly insane.

Still, Milbank feels comfortable denying the constitutional rights of citizens in this instance. It satisfies his gun control fetish, and allows him to slander the NRA, the group dedicated to defending the Second Amendment when no other civil liberties organization will. Milbank labels them terrorists. Milbank, the pedophile/addict, seems to enjoy slander and libel as it suits his needs.

Seems fair, doesn't it?

Can Irony Be Fatal?

If it is, we'll be ignoring the funeral of Matthew Yglesias later this week.

Here's a free hint, kid: don't talk crap about someone being a shill for ideologically-driven publications and think tanks when that sums up your entire resume. Your bosses might find you ungrateful...or they may giggle over the fact you're a malleable idiot utterly lacking in self-awareness.

Love Unrequited

Yesterday, six gay-and-out military veterans handcuffed themselves to the fence outside the White House as a way of protesting the Administration's handling of "don't ask, don't tell" provisions they'd like to see struck down. The police response was to bum rush the journalists covering the unfolding story, forcing them away from the protest in what appears to be a clear violating of First Amendment rights.

The outrage on left-wing blogs to this totalitarian behavior is as shrill as it is predictable, as is the blubbering of left-leaning new organizations. Both campaigned for Obama, championed him, fawned over him, and in return, they've been rejected and marginalized by his Administration time and again.

The sad thing is that you know they'll come crawling back for his approval like whipped dogs.

How pathetic.

NY Times About To Put American Lives at Risk?

I sure hope that Brad Thor's tipster is wrong, but considering the recent track record of the leftist media giant, I won't be surprised if the New York Times really is considering publishing a list of names of Americans working to protect U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The release of this information serves no practical purpose other than to expose these individuals and their families to threats of violence. The intent can only be to undermine and distract those individuals. This puts the lives of our soldiers and Marines in greater danger.

How can they morally justify this?

Update: CIA Deputy Director suddenly "retires." Thor seems to think this was the man who leaked the names of DoD personnel to the press.

I would not want to be him.

Breitbart Challenges Congressional Black Caucus Members to Offer Proof of Alleged Tea Party Racism

As video after video suggests that Democratic attempts to troll for racism among tens of thousands of Tea Party protesters was a failure that resulted in formerly respected Congressmen lying to the media, Andrew Breitbart has issued them a challenge:

It's time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

And surely if those cameras did not capture such abhorrence, then someone from the mainstream media — those who printed and broadcast his assertions without any reasonable questioning or investigation — must themselves surely have it on camera. Of course we already know they don’t. If they did, you'd have seen it by now.

THOUSANDS OF TIMES.

Rep. Lewis, if you can't do that, I'll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test. If you provide verifiable video evidence showing that a single racist epithet was hurled as you walked among the tea partiers, or you pass a simple lie detector test, I will provide a $10K check to the United Negro College Fund.

I suspect Lewis will not collect one thin dime from Breitbart, and it's a shame, really. If Lewis has no evidence, and won't take a polygraph, and won't apologize for fabricating these slurs, it strongly suggests that a man who spent the early part of his life combating racism has been corrupted in his later years into embracing it himself.

CBO Numbers Cited By Dem Leadership are Bogus; Could It Backfire?

Matthew Continetti notes that Steny Hoyer to various new organizations about the CBO's health care cost estimate are speculative, based upon preliminary numbers that does not take into the account reconciliation proposal, review, and refinement.

In other words, they're crap. The media ran with Hoyer's claims without having the evidence in-hand.

Will the media hold Hoyer and his Democratic allies accountable for this subterfuge, or are they in on the fix?

And will this lie damage already faltering Democratic efforts to force through a bill that the public clearly doesn't want passed?

Update: To lie was their goal all along:

If it kicked in right away, the decade-long estimate would obviously be well into the trillions. So they simply stalled it for four years, incurring just $17 billion in costs — or 1.8 percent of the total 10-year estimate — through 2013 so that wavering Democrats could go back to their districts and tell baldfaced lies to their constituents about the pricetag. A perfect ending to this travesty.

In what can only be cast as a desperate act, the Democratic leadership is trying to convince members of their Party to out-and-out- lie to their constituents.

I guess we'll find out Sunday if on-the-fence Dems are willing to make that lie.

Howell Raines: Why Can't I Be You?

Howell Raines, who championed advocacy journalism in the name of liberalism at the Times during his brief stint as executive editor, is lamenting the fact that the kind of journalism he practiced hasn't succeeded in quashing all alternative viewpoints.

Of course, he phrases it a bit differently:

One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.

If Raines had a "professional conscience" there is the distinct possibility that he would still be the executive editor of the New York Times instead of posting grouchy op-eds on the pages of his old competitors.

But Raines was by any measure a horrific editor with a fear-based leadership style, and a Stalinist penchant for purging those who did not bow down to him:

According to insiders, Raines is the kind of 1950s-style autocrat who manages through humiliation and fear. Aside from right-hand men Gerald Boyd and Andy Rosenthal and a core of loyalists, morale is said to be at a new low. There are many rooms in that palace and nobody sees the whole picture. But, says one source, "the old timers who lived through the worst of [former executive editor] Abe Rosenthal say they have never seen anyone be so arrogant, so petty, so mean. Vindictiveness is in." Another source says, "It's no longer about managing down. It's about paying obeisance to the king." Among cognoscenti, 43rd Street is now known as the "republic of fear."

It is very much in his nature for Raines to call for the heads of those who would have ideas that do not conform to his own, or those who do not bow down to his latest infatuation with a silver-tongued fraud. Luckily, America caught on to Barack Obama far faster than they did Jayson Blair.

As always, the autocratic Raines will be the last to figure it out.

We're Not Canadians, Eh?

McDonald's used crowd shots from Carolina Hurricanes games to represent Canadians in their north-of-the-border Olympics ad, "Anticipation."

What... they can't find a crowd for them otherwise?

I Thought He'd Be Greener

But how do the other Star Wars action figures feel?

In case you were wondering, this is CNN.

L.A. Times Can't Tell Difference Between U.S. Army, NRA

Hey, they've all got guns, right?

A caption for the photo (bizarrely placed at the end of the article) notes that the photo was taken at a memorial service for those killed at Fort Hood by Muslim Major Nidal Malik Hasan in an apparent act of jihad... which also has nothing to do with the NRA.

Andrew Breitbart Comes Out Swinging at CPAC

Andrew Breitbart had quite the time at CPAC, getting into verbal altercations with a black racist and a serial liar face-to-face, while taking down a another ignorant ideologue at the New York Times during a speech.

As others have noted, Darlye Jenkins of One People's Project is a left wing hate blogger without any expectation of standards or morals, and so he is hardly worth confronting, any more that it is worthwhile going after Amanda Marcotte or Oliver Willis for their wheezings.

Max Blumenthal, the limousine liberal offspring who has made a career out of attempting to destroy the reputations of individuals through lies, distortions, and innuendo also found himself downrange of Andrew, and scurried out in an embarrassed huff after being caught in another lie in the span of a few minutes.

And of course, Breitbart ripped into Kate Zernicke of the Times for lying about Jason Mattera in print, implying that Mattera was a racist for using his own normal speaking voice.

It was an interesting series of vingettes, as we saw progressive journalistic politics practices by dishonest individuals, biased online magazines, and ideologically-driven "news" organizations. All were exposed for using the same sort of tactics. These confrontations expose a simple truth: there is little difference in the ethics of rabble-rousing blogs, new media, and mainstream media outlets, with the only real difference being that the larger organizations have more reach and may face economic penalties if they are caught in a lie and do not retract it in a timely manner.

Is Think Progress Capable of Publishing the Truth?

I'm a blogger, and have always worn my political views on my sleeve, and that seems to be the case for most political bloggers, right or left. We see the world through a certain point of view, and react to that news as we interpret it. I often disagree with how my peers on the left and right view things, but I can at least understand that their view—how ever much I disagree with it or view it to be distorted—is an honest one.

I can't say the same, however, about Media Matters or Think Progress, who like their nutty contemporaries at World Net Daily, seem intent on twisting even the most innocuous, innocent statement into something approaching an outright misrepresentation or lie. For a pair of sites that revel in painting their opposition as monsters in love with waterboarding, they seem far too comfortable with torturing reality.

Max Bergmanns' latest distortion targeting new Senator Scott Brown is a perfect example of the kind of willful deception that regularly oozes from , and Professor William Jacobson dissects the distortions with a surgeon's precision.

I almost feel sorry for them, individuals so wedded to an intellectually bankrupt ideology that they've given up all decency, integrity and honor in order to viciously cycle lies for a living. Anything to be relevant, I suppose. Even if that relevance is based upon habitual deception.

Research Bleg for a Student

Good morning, bloggers and blog readers... have I got an assignment for you.

Last night a student contacted me because she is working on a paper for a class, and she needs our help:

Unfortunately my instructor is very strict and in my opinion attempting to push her political views on the class. Unfortunately for me, I have never been a conformist and I feel I am being set up to fail. My assigned topic was The Media and the Military. My stance is the media (American) does not support the troops as much as they should. (I have articles where journalists admit what they are allowed to write about and not, and most of it shows that the military's positive actions are shoved to the back burner while bad news about the wars are headlines.)

...

I completely understand that the in your face lying is not out there and that the rhetoric used by the mass news media is sneaky and takes someone with linguistic ability to differentiate. You mentioned "plausibly 'accidental' smears or misreporting." This is what I am interested in. I have read the reports on the laws saying that you need to prove it was reported falsely intentionally. (I think that's a crock!) This is how Newsweek got away with it's misreporting of the specific torture events in 2005. Do you know of any other stories like this?

Here's the problem: the instructor won't let her use blogs as a source, thereby forcing her to rely on the media to report when they lie.

If you can think of examples where the mainstream media, academics, or other acceptable sources have documented examples of their brethren lying about the U.S. military, please leave them (with links) in the comments.

Selling Fear and Politics

Because she could not recite the alphabet, Joshua Tabor shoved his daughter face-down into a bowl of water. When authorities came for her, she was found cowering in a closet, covered in scratches and bruises.

Joshua Tabor is mentally ill and an unfit father. No sane person disputes that.

The UK Daily Mail, however, sensationalizes the brutality with the headline "U.S. soldier 'waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn't recite alphabet.'"

Tabor's sadistic act—as described by the Daily Mail itself—isn't waterboarding or remotely similar to it. Tabor's act of brutality was drowning. Waterboarding, as brutal as it is, only simulates drowning, and is done by professionals in controlled conditions. Tabor could have very easily killed his daughter.

By purposefully mis-characterizing Tabor's brutal act, the Daily Mail both minimized the life-threatening abuse of his daughter and simultaneously made an (as yet) unfounded correlation between his being a soldier and his suffering some sort of post-combat mental condition, when they did not know at press time if he was ever deployed.

It is cheap political grandstanding from a newspaper that has the obvious goal of warning UK readers that if their soldiers continue to fight in Afghanistan, their children could be next.

The Daily Mail should be ashamed of themselves, but they would have to be capable of feeling shame first.

A U.S.-based version of the story provides both more facts, and less editorializing.

Let There Be "Light"

My final word on the Trijicon fiasco, at Pajamas Media.

Err America Goes Dark

I would have said they finally failed, but that would have erroneously implied that they were successful at some point, at some iteration, under some management. They never were.

The company, which was founded in 2004, never found a substantial audience or sound financial footing. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006, but managed to stay on the air at that time. The network churned through several owners and several attempted reinventions, with little to show for it.

&qout;The fact of the matter was, it was always a very challenging business proposition, and it never had the right management," said Sam Seder, who hosted programs on Air America until last year.

The headwinds were enormous, he said, adding, "Radio is a dying industry."

I suspect that the growing stable of conservative talk radio personalities that emerged over the same time period would scoff at Seder's self-denial. America doesn't seem to have the first problem supporting long-time talkers like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, and they've found that there is plenty of room for other center-right stars to emerge in recent years, such as Mark Levin. The simple fact of the matter is that the nation isn't nearly as liberal as the majority of the media/infotainment industry is, or as liberal as the media/infotainment industry would like America to be.

If they had ever been honest about that fact, Err America would have never gotten off the ground.

Something Borrowed?

Did ABC News swipe photos from an internet forum and claim them as their own?

While working on an article about the latest sub-par hit piece investigative report from Brian Ross and his team at ABC News blog The Blotter, I ran across an accompanying slideshow of Trijicon weapons sights, which started out with these two captioned images.

Interestingly enough, these two images appeared on the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association (POFOA) forum a week ago... and they weren't the original source, either.

How do we know these came from images of the same optics?

The ACOG on the PAFOA sight is clearly the same one claimed by ABC News, with very distinctive scuff marks on the body of the scope tube.

The Reflex sight on the PAFOA sight is also clearly the same one claimed by ABC News, with a small dimple to the left of the NSN number.

So which is it?

Did the PAFOA contributor acquire a copy of ABC's images early,or did ABC claim images that came from another, earlier source?

Does ABC need to next investigate EX20:15?

NY Times Apparently Planning To Commit Suicide Online With Paywall

I can't improve on that headline.

A significant number of people refuse to even register for news and opinion that they kind find elsewhere online with no strings attached. News is close to being public domain these days with exclusives becoming widely disseminated blog fodder within minutes, which means charging for the reporting of the Times is a non-starter, as they will simply be bypassed for free content and commentary.

Does the Times honestly think that their stable of Op-ed writers is sufficiently loved and admired enough for people to fork over their hard-earned dollars for them in enough numbers to offset the decrease in advertising eyeballs they will get when non-subscribers go elsewhere for equally competent writing?

I'm sure the Times likes to think that they are special and the cream of the crop, but the simple fact of the matter is that there is no shortage of pundits that write just as well, and many have far more interesting perspectives than the often formulaic missives being offered up by the Old Grey Lady.

The Times apparently thinks of itself as a super-premium product. One can only wonder how long it will be before they realize they are not nearly as special as they think.

Our "Elite" Media: Anyone With a Gun is a Sniper

Just in case you haven't been paying attention for oh, your entire life, our media operates by creating fears, and then compelling you to tune in/buy a copy/listen to the next segment so that you can find the solution (and they can sell more advertising). That truth applies to the national media you likely despise, and the local newsmen and women you've come to " and trust."

A wonderful example of selling fear is the story of the so-called "Berea Sniper." Someone has been shooting at cars in this Ohio town since this past August. No one has been injured by the shooter, who police said is using a weapon that is "something in between" a BB gun and an assault rifle.

Well they have a suspect in custody now.

Check out what passes for a sniper's weapon in this day and age.

No, that isn't the wrong photo.

The suspect, Paul Hausmann, has been tooling around this Cleveland suburb plinking and his fellow citizens with a .22-caliber replica of an old cowboy six-gun.

But a story a story about what is essentially vandalism—even vandalism with a firearm—doesn't get the local chiropractor and car dealer to buy advertising. Heavily hyped stories that sell fear keep our local Ron Burgundy wannabes paid. We live in an age where any crank with any sort of a firearm (even BB guns) is a "sniper," because hyping fear is what sells advertising.

The truth only matters if it pays.

Rather Denied

Dan Rather has lost his final appeal in his breach-of-contract suit against CBS that stemmed from the faked Bush Air National Guard records story:

His request for an appeal was declined today, putting the entire legal matter to bed, finally. "Naturally I am disappointed in today’s ruling because we know it is a grave miscarriage of justice, " he said in a statement to the Times. "Most of all I am disappointed that no court or jury studied the evidence and heard the actual facts of the case. The case was dismissed on purely technical grounds. My mission continues to be working to ensure that the media can gather and report news unfettered by the influence of government and major corporate interests."

To this day, Rather still believes in the story he reported.

Limbaugh in HI Hospital With Chest Pains

Via KITV:

Conservative radio talk host Rush Limbaugh was rushed to a Honolulu hospital on Wednesday afternoon with chest pains, sources told KITV.

Paramedics responded to the call at 2:41 p.m. at the Kahala Hotel and Resort.

Limbaugh suffered from chest pains, sources said. Paramedics treated him and took him to Queen's Medical Center in serious condition.

Sure, now Obama's motorcade isn't available as an ambulance service...

Update: Limbaugh now resting comfortably.

You Know You're Screwed When Even Your Whores Stop Taking Your Calls

While the competition to verbally fellate Barack Obama has been intense in the op-ed section since he first started his presidential run, the various staffers of the New York Times have always been among the most reliable. From Krugman, Rich, Freidman, and Douthat, etc. when it came to the man who would become President, they always gave good ed. It is, after all, the service for which they are employed.

So it was a bit shocking to see one of the premier courtesans of the Times, Maureen Dowd, finally rip into the Administration for one of its characteristic failures:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

[snip]

Before he left for vacation, Obama tried to shed his Spock mien and juice up the empathy quotient on jobs. But in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, he once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links. At least you have to seem concerned.

[snip]

Citing the attempt of the Nigerian's father to warn U.S. authorities six months ago, the president intoned: "It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect's name on a no-fly list."

In his detached way, Spock was letting us know that our besieged starship was not speeding into a safer new future, and that we still have to be scared.

Heck of a job, Barry.

Now, if only Krugman will admit Obama is destroying the economy...

Editor & Publisher Leads By Example

The unreadable and reliably-biased editorship of Greg Mitchell comes to an end.

Did Obama Administration Try to Silence NPR Reporter?

Executives at National Public Radio recently asked the network's top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her regular appearances on Fox News because of what they perceived as the network's political bias, two sources familiar with the effort said.

According to a source, Liasson was summoned in early October by NPR's executive editor for news, Dick Meyer, and the network's supervising senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. The NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she'd seen no significant change in Fox's programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.

NPR’s focus on Liasson's work as a commentator on Fox's "Special Report" and "Fox News Sunday" came at about the same time as a White House campaign launched in September to delegitimize the network by painting it as an extension of the Republican Party.

So NPR—a reliably left-leaning organization—has a problem with Liasson's appearances on Fox News—which she had been doing for a decade—at precisely the same time that the Obama Administration was trying to destroy the network's credibility.

The real question here is whether someone in the Obama Administration asked Elving and Meyer to pressure Liasson to leave Fox News, and if such influence is unethical or illegal.

I know... we can ask the Justice Department to investi—

Dang. Never mind.

Earning the Reputation of a Bird-Cage Liner

What do you get when you let a ideologically driven sensationalist with an economic interest in rabble-rousing use a suspected fraud as his key source of information?

Why, an article in The Nation, of course.

The Few. The Proud. The Frum.

"The Marines are elitist too."

The Marines have a right to be.

From the oh-so-important http://www.frumforum.com/

ASU Journalism Students Start Practicing Early

Today they're in the media; tomorrow they'll be writing for it:

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was asked by a panel of journalists Monday night to explain his relationship with the media, his various law enforcement policies and whether his office conducts racial profiling.

Arpaio told the panel that his office is an "equal opportunity law enforcement agency" that will arrest anyone who violates the law.

Later in the interview at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, protesters began singing a version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and chanting as Arpaio was asked about a federal investigation and his policies on illegal immigration.

Personally, I think Arpaio should have responded to these dunces with a drawling, "What we have heah is a fail-yah to communicate," but I doubt the protestors would have been bright enough to pick up on the reference.

Politics of Eco-Terrorist from NJ Sentenced to Chinese Prison Strangely Absent from Times Reporting

Isn't it funny that any crime with even a hint of center-right political nuance is triumphantly paraded about by the media as an example of right wing extremism (and thereby justifying Obama Administration demagoguery), but verified left wing terrorism—even from known progressive terrorist organizations—is never cited as such?

Take for example, the story of Justin Franchi Solondz as reported in the New York Times.

Justin Franchi Solondz, an environmental activist from New Jersey who spent years evading charges of ecoterrorism in the United States by hiding out in China, was sentenced to three years in prison by a local court on Friday on charges of manufacturing drugs in this backpacker haven.

After serving his time, Mr. Solondz, 30, who is on the F.B.I.'s wanted list, will be deported to the United States, where he faces charges stemming from what the authorities say was his role in an arson rampage that destroyed buildings in three western states as a member of a group related to the environmental extremist organization Earth Liberation Front. He was indicted in absentia in 2006.

You don't get a much more direct link to left wing terrorism in the United States than the ELF (without joining the boards of directors of which our President has been a member), and yet, the Times just can't quite bring itself to recognize the political slant of the convicted terrorist/drug dealer in their story.

No bias here, folks.

Move along.

CNN's "Militias are Crazy!" Day 2

After yesterday's report attempting to portray a militia group as borderline terrorists, CNN's Jim Acosta used today's report to try to portray the founder of the group as also being an unfit parent.

Lee Miracle may run training exercises for the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia once a month in a rural area outside of Flint, but he's just as busy at home. He and his wife Katrina have eight kids, and there are more than 20 guns in the house. This explains why Lee refers to the family as "Lee and Kate plus eight plus a gun rack."

Make that several gun racks. The Miracle children are very much growing up in the militia. They take part in militia training exercises, including the weapons training.

We were there when 13-year-old Megan fired off her shotgun, but even the couple's six-year-old has had her share of target practice.

CNN's dimwitted followers obediently go where they are led, all but wetting themselves in the comments. One reader professes shock and outrage that a family has both children and guns in the same house, declaring that "somebody should do something" about that. The next poster down rhetorically asks if there is any difference between the militias and the Ku Klux Klan. It is tough to discern whether they feel having guns or belonging to the Klan would be more distasteful.

The hit job CNN did on the Miracle family was as easy as it is predictable.

They crafted both the text of the blog entry and tone of the video to inspire shock that young women and girls in the family are being taught to shoot firearms.

Being CNN, they never mention the fact that these young ladies are adequately supervised, use both the proper eye and ear protection, and in the one instance they broadcast, use a single-shot, preferred by many for training young and new shooters. In other words, the Miracle children exhibit the tells of youth taught how to act responsibly around firearms. That the women are as empowered to use firearms for their defense as are the males somehow doesn't excite the pseudo-feminist leanings of the CNN staff.

Those things don't fit CNN's narrative, you see.

It's much better to play up a caricature and beat down a strawman. Why waste time trying to discover why increasing number of people have determined that our federal government too incompetent, corrupt, and power-mad to trust?

After all, it's only news.

Riddle Me This...

Why is it that grass roots activist opponents of the President are gleefully derided as "teabaggers," when it is the subservient liberal special interest groups that worshipped him up until the election—only to be cast aside afterwards with one broken policy promise after another— are the ones left with a bad taste in their mouths?

About the Obama Thesis Hoax

When you were younger, your parents probably told you that "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is."

That bit of homespun wisdom should have been applied to a blog post that claimed tertiary knowledge of a Barack Obama college thesis lambasting both the free market system and the Constitution.

The authors claim a defense of satire now that the blog entry was disclosed as such, though that warning came far too late for those that managed to push the story to multiple web sites and even talk radio.

If people had carefully read the entry before promoting it, however, this paragraph offered a big red flag:

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: &qout;I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.&qout;

When the blog entry claimed that the first ten pages of the President's thesis was given to the general media and not one soul wrote or talked about it that should have sent up huge warning flares that something was wrong with this story.

That no one bothered to contact Joe Klein to see if the document reportedly released to him been, is an example of shoddy fact-checking.

Sadly, this gives the left wing blog Media Matters more than enough excuse to run a headline that begins "So desperate they'll believe anything—" and have some justification for doing so. Michael Ledeen was quick to post a column noting that he'd been duped by the thesis hoax, which was a responsible way to handle such a situation.

Now, if we can only get the same Media Matters partisans that gloated over this incident to develop or even borrow the integrity to admit they were duped by a lying ACORN Philadelphia employee, we can call it a good day.

Hersh: Pentagon Out to Ruin Obama

From the always fascinating Seymour Hersh:

"A lot of people in the Pentagon would like to see him [Obama] get into trouble," he said. By leaking information that the commanding officer in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, says the war would be lost without an additional 40,000 American troops, top brass have put Obama in a no-win situation, Hersh contended.

"If he gives them the extra troops they're asking for, he loses politically," Hersh said. "And if he doesn't give them the troops, he also loses politically."

The journalist criticized the president for "letting the military do that," and suggested the only way out was for Obama to stand up to them.

"He's either going to let the Pentagon run him or he has to run the Pentagon," Hersh said. If he doesn't, "this stuff is going to be the ruin of his presidency."

Funny. I thought Obama was doing a pretty good job of destroying his Presidency on his own.

As for Hersh, he's had some notable successes, and some equally spectacular duds. How are Dick Cheney's death squads working out for you, Seymour?

No Surprises Here: WaPo/ABC Skews Poll for Public Option

Mercy me:

The sampling comprises 33% Democrats, as opposed to only 20% Republicans. That thirteen-point spread is two points larger than their September polling, at 32%/21%. More tellingly, it's significantly larger than their Election Day sample, which included 35% Democrats to 26% Republicans for a gap of nine points, about a third smaller than the gap in this poll. Of course, that's when they were more concerned about accuracy over political points of view.

Remember when I wrote that poll watchers need to remember the recent Gallup poll on party affiliation? Gallup polled 5,000 adults and found that the gap between Democrats and Republicans had closed to the smallest margin since 2005, six points, and had been reduced more than half since the beginning of the year. For the WaPo/ABC poll, though, their sample gap has increased almost 50% during that time.

Given that skew, it's hardly surprising that they find a 57% approval rating for Obama, up three points since last month, almost the entirety of the gap increase since the last poll. His 48% tie on health care should be a significant disapproval instead, and the 45%/51% slide on the deficit has probably expanded at the same rate as the deficit in a survey with a realistic sample.

The purposeful skewing of the polling data is an old political trick, and one increasingly popular among the media, especially when they are more interesting in influencing the news than reporting it. That Dan Balz and Jon Cohen of the Washington Post would use such obviously flawed data suggests they are more interested in advocacy than journalism.

The public does not support government-run health care.

Americans shocked politicians this summer with their opposition to another government takeover, and the they they were none too subtle about it as they showed up at townhall meetings, rallies, and marches.

No amount of media deception can change the fact that Americans are rejecting Obamacare, the media promoting it, and the politicians that an increasing number of Americans feel were put into office not by the American people, but by the media and special interests.

The media and their allied progressive politicians are increasing playing to an audience of themselves.

No wonder Fox News is causing the White House to scream in anger.

Along with a handful of newspapers and new media, they're the only "honest" news left.

Rush Limbaugh's Critics are Big, Fat Idiots

I don't listen to talk radio, and so I only hear what Rush Limbaugh says when someone else mentions it. That said, he's been on the air as a conservative talker since the mid 1980s, with an audience of 20 million. His political and social views, vocabulary, and style are perhaps more well known than any person on the planet.

That is why recent attempts to attribute a series of false racist quotes to him is so unsettling.

Limbaugh has strong views on many topics, and if he was a hardcore racist, he would have been called out for it decades ago, boycotted, and perhaps forced off the air. But the simple logic it takes to process that thought is easily blinded by hate, and a number of left-wing journalists and bloggers have decided to post various false racist quotes attributed to Limbaugh in an attempt to ruin his bid to buy the St. Louis Rams football team.

None of the false quotes even sounds remotely like Limbaugh in tone or substance, and even more tellingly, none are sourced, a red flag to any competent journalist or blogger in a day and age when such things can be easily falsified on the Internet.

Why do these journalists and bloggers lie? Why do they commit an easily disproven libel and slander in order to tar an opponent?

It's about power and control, and the moral relativism that infects them, convincing them that even the most blatant smear is justified if it thwarts their political enemies or can help them achieve even the most temporary victory.

There is a very simple reason that conservative media are ascendant and liberal media are in decline. People have learned that liberal media cannot be trusted to get even basic facts right if their agenda can be forwarded with bias and fraud. Fox News and other conservative outlets may or may not be "fair and balanced," but they certainly comes closer to being the most trusted sources of news, because the American people simply find them more trustworthy.

Chris Matthews Fantacizes About Rush Limbaugh Dying a Violent Death

Uttered this morning:

You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big? In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody's going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he's going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But we'll be there to watch. I think he's Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you watching, Rush?

Miami Herald goes Race-Baiting

According to the Miami Herald headline:

Fla. GOP members shoot Muslim targets at gun range

This is the target they were shooting at.

Now, do you see a Muslim, or a terrorist pointing a rocket-propelled grenade?

You can find this and other racist GOP shooting subjects at, uh, Law Enforcement Targets, Inc.

The real racism here is that several layers of producers and editors at the Miami Herald thinks "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonyms. The next time they want to look for people with racial/cultural biases, they'll have to go far.

Shovel-Ready

Writing in Tina Brown's Daily Beast, Conor Friedersdorf takes issue with the success of Andrew Breitbart's media outlets, claiming that Breitbart should try to meet the standards of the... New York Times?

Andrew Breitbart is the man in the middle of the current madness. Credit him for sponsoring Big Government, the site that broke the ACORN story and prompted the Times to begin monitoring breaking news on partisan sites. These are substantial accomplishments that improve the state of journalism.

But Mr. Breitbart's role hardly ends there.

As a proprietor of Big Government and Big Hollywood, part of the team that runs The Drudge Report, and a regular guest on Fox News, especially Sean Hannity's show, he is a leader among folks who complain that the Times is a pernicious force in American life—that it ignores stories that cut against its ideological bent, too often makes mistakes in its reporting, and gives insufficient consideration to ideological insights other than those held by its staff. This is somewhat odd given that Mr. Breitbart's media empire, and the outlets with which he most closely associates himself, are thoroughly ideological enterprises, publish few if any ideologically heterodox pieces, seldom if ever correct factual mistakes, and ignore liberal insights entirely.

Friedersdorf's screed is daft, to put it mildly.

The idea of an unbiased, objective media is a late 20th century invention proffered primarily by those within the media establishment that wanted to continue to push their ideas and ideals without being challenged by upstarts.

Sadly for Mr. Friedersdorf, that illusion was dashed long ago, mostly due to the heavy liberal bias that manifested itself time and again not just in how a story was covered, but which stories were covered to the exclusion of others.

What Breitbart's various sites provide are platforms for a center-right view of the world, with insights every bit as valid as those that the left-leaning media tries to sell. Apparently, the idea of a free marketplace of ideas isn't one critics admire once put into actual practice.

Are Big Government and Big Hollywood ideologically-driven? Unreservedly. But more importantly, Breitbart's sites all wear their viewpoint unabashedly on their proverbial sleeves... if only the Times and other news outlets weakly feigning objectivity would display such intellectual honesty!

But honesty is not part of their business model, nor is objectivity, nor is competence, or accuracy. If he thinks otherwise, Mr. Friedersdorf may need to check the prescription on his rose-colored glasses.

That said, Friedersdorf's hissy fit at the building of a conservative media empire that provides an alternative to the worldview he would like to protect is hardly surprising.

His specific criticisms, however, are amusing, especially coming from someone who writes at the Atlantic, home to infamous Trig Truther, hypocrite and ideologue Andrew Sullivan.

The temerity to criticize conservative media for inaccuracies and bias is laughable considering the dismal track record of the left-leaning legacy media, but the fact that Friedersdorf published his thoughts in Tina Brown's Daily Beast—the left-leaning, status quo-defending, botoxed and digitized old media-with-a-new-face—is even more ripe, considering that Brown's own husband abused the Beast in an article full of half-truths and outright lies that Brown refused to retract or correct.

Both old and new media have significant room for improvement, but demanding that a successful and growing enterprise follow the example of a legacy media spiraling into the ground is, quite frankly, absurd.

Crazy on the Left and Further Left

I don't often read NewsMax. I don't have anything against them, I just have limited time and resources and rely a core group of news sites, blogs, and aggregators to gather information on a daily basis.

I rather wish I did read more frequently however, because if I did I might have been able to catch John L. Perry's column from yesterday, Obama Risks a Military 'Intervention' before it was sent down the memory hole. Clicking on that link will now redirect you to the NewsMax home page; Perry's column has also been scrubbed.

The scathing response from the blogosphere—based upon what I've been able to cobble together from quotes on several sites—seems warranted.

The simple fact of the matter is that author seems to have come unhinged, and for reasons perhaps structural to the site's editorial process, the column made it to print without a sanity check by the editors.

While the number of people dissatisfied with Obama's foundering Presidency continues to balloon and his popularity erodes on a seemingly daily basis, we are a nation of laws, not a nation of mob rule and coups by military strongmen. We will have out chance to remove President Obama in 2012 as we have always removed bad Presidents, at the ballot box.

There has only been one successful coup in American history, perpetrated by the Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan and allowed by a Democratic governor and President.

Advocating to repeat such a disgrace as Perry apparently did is utterly unacceptable. NewsMax was right to yank a column that never should have made it to print, and should reconsider their relationship with Perry and what that association now represents.

Update: It is also worth noting that Perry is not a conservative; his bio says he worked for both LBJ and Carter Administrations and Democratic Governor of Florida, LeRoy Collins.

From further on the left, Gore Vidal laments the "fact" that Americans are just too stupid to appreciate the genius of Obama, and also suggests that a military coup is in America's future.

Update: A statement from NewsMax:

Statement from Newsmax Regarding Blogger In a blog posting to Newsmax John Perry wrote about a coup scenario involving the U.S. military.

He clearly stated that he was not advocating such a scenario but simply describing one.

After several reader complaints, Newsmax wanted to insure that this article was not misinterpreted. It was removed after a short period after being posted.

Newsmax strongly believes in the principles of Constitutional government and would never advocate or insinuate any suggestion of an activity that would undermine our democracy or democratic institutions.

Mr. Perry served as a political appointee in the Carter administration in HUD and FEMA. He has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger.

Here is the copy of the original Perry column in its entirety, as provided by a reader:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military 'Intervention'

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 10:35 AM

By: John L. Perry
There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the "Obama problem." Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. So, view the following through military eyes:

Officers swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to "obey the orders of the president of the United States."

Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized.
They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

They can see that the economy — ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation — is financially reliant on foreign lender governments.
They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.

They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America’s troop strength is allowed to sag.
They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time.

They can see the nation's safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.

So, if you are one of those observant military professionals, what do you do?

Wait until this president bungles into losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear bombs falls into the hands of militant Islam?

Wait until Israel is forced to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear-bomb plants, and the Middle East explodes, destabilizing or subjugating the Free World?

What happens if the generals Obama sent to win the Afghan war are told by this president (who now says, "I'm not interested in victory") that they will be denied troops they must have to win? Do they follow orders they cannot carry out, consistent with their oath of duty? Do they resign en masse?

Or do they soldier on, hoping the 2010 congressional elections will reverse the situation? Do they dare gamble the national survival on such political whims?

Anyone who imagines that those thoughts are not weighing heavily on the intellect and conscience of America’s military leadership is lost in a fool's fog.

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a "family intervention," with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for Newsmax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.

A Great Idea for 1993

Been there. Done that.

And truth be told, the traffic wasn't overwhelming.

And while it is no doubt cool to see your mug shot on the page beside Charles Krauthammer (and to a lesser extent, Eugene Robinson), the idea of a pundit reality contest will be less than riveting entertainment for anyone not intimately involved.

As you may imagine, the folks in the blogosphere are having a field day tearing this apart.

Drudge's Easy Libel of the Military

Earlier today I noted that Drudge's link to the use of LRADs as "acoustic weapons" was over the top, which he would have easily recognized on his own if he had simply applied logic to the very video he linked. Put simply, if an LRAD is being used as a weapon, various people would not be walking or standing directly in front of it.

It's common sense.

But Matt Drudge is after headlines and eyeballs, not accuracy, and that is why his inflammatory link that screams SEE U.S. MILITARY SNATCH PROTESTER... is so detestable.

It simply does no show what he claims it shows.

Look at the very image Drudge uses as his screen capture.

How many things immediately jump out at you that scream Drudge is wrong? Don't see it? Watch the video, and then I'll go over it in detail:

You should have noticed right off the bat that neither of the uniforms shown in this clip by the men that jumped out of the Crown Victoria are those currently being worn by our military.

See the officer on the left? He's wearing woodland BDUs. No active duty American soldiers wears BDUs, they wear ACUs, which are an entirely different style of uniform with a radically different camouflage pattern. Oh, and you might want to take a look at his shoulder, where you can see what appears to be a muted version of a Pennsylvania State Police shoulder patch.

The second Officer apprehending the protestor is also wearing a camouflage pattern that is not military issue. The same with the driver.

Any semi-competent national media figure should be able to tell the difference between a military uniform and a police tactical uniform, and I strongly suspect Matt Drudge does.

I just don't think he gives a damn whether he accuses the military of snatching Americans in broad daylight if that helps his bottom line.

Update: For reasons I'll never be able to understand, some of my conservative blogging peers have decided that the video is staged... faked by the protesters themselves.

The reasons they cite are similar to mine—that the uniforms are wrong for the modern military and mis-matched—but for some reason, they assume it was a staged event or "performance art" instead of Drudge simply being wrong about a very real event.

These were police officers, carrying out a real arrest, probably at the behest of the riot police 20 feet away we see at the end of the video.

And if the shoulder patch doesn't convince you they were cops, the gun should.

Dead-center in the middle of the frame you can see the bottom of a duty holster and the handgun itself printing through the uniform.

This was a police arrest, not an illegal abduction of an American citizen by the military on U.S. soil as Matt Drudge would mislead you, nor a staged event by the protesters.

Update: Via email Lawhawk notes a story that has a photo of PA State Police wearing woodland BDUs.

And in an update at Hot Air, Ed has the photo that should settle this for once and for all.

Law enforcement confirms a police arrest.

Quick Thought About ACORN and the Media

I think what bothers me the most about this still-developing story is that we have a fake prostitute trying to expose the truth, while the real prostitutes in the media are trying to sandbag the story as much as possible.

Reality-Challenged Politics Daily Inverts Political Cannibalism Story

It really takes quite a pair to completely reverse the events and actors in an incident in order to promote the story you'd prefer, but Politics Daily seems up to the task, fabricating a story about a Move.org protester who had his finger bitten off at a California protest.

(Click the image to see the full-size version in another window.)

It is particularly dishonest (or grossly incompetent) to completely reverse the actual sequence of events and identities of those involved in a story that has garnered considerable attention, but to do so after linking to those news sources and blogs that reported what actually occurred is particularly brazen.

Pressure Mounts Against MSNBC's Faked Racial Conspiracy

By now you've all heard about how MSNBC doctored video in order to push the fabricated narrative that open carry advocates at health care events were racially motived. MSNBC had tightly cropped an African-American open carry advocate with a Carbon-15 rifle slung over his shoulder so that you could not see his race, in order to argue that "white people showing up with guns" brought racial overtones to these protests.

Americans for Limited Government called for those involved in "a blatantly racist broadcast" to be fired on Tuesday, at which point MSNBC offered a pathetically weak non-apology attempting to claim that they were talking open carry advocates generally, even though the shot was focused on the carefully cropped image of an African American man the majority of the time.

Brent Bozell of the Media Resource Center added his thoughts today, stating that MSNBC must apologize for fomenting racial discord:

"This goes beyond 'sloppy' reporting by MSNBC. This was a deliberate effort to brand conservatives as racists – and now as violent racists.

"Since the beginning of the presidential campaign, this so-called 'news' network has tried desperately to convince viewers that opposition to Barack Obama must be race-based. Now they are actually producing deliberately misleading stories to push that agenda. As a 'news' network, MSNBC is a disgrace.

"MSNBC owes this man and the tens of thousands of protestors a public apology. It should also extend that apology to its tens of thousands of viewers."

MSNBC is guilty of attempting to incite racial strife. They obviously hoped find some sort of political silver lining in labeling opponents as white racists, even when those that oppose them are black.

I do think Bozell must have misstated MSNBC's appeal, however.

Do they really have tens of thousands of viewers?

Blackwater USA: Your Preferred PowerPoint Presentation Vendor Solution

Mark Manzetti claims in the New York Times that the Central Intelligence Agency hired Blackwater USA in 2004 to locate and kill top al Qaeda members. He backs this up by claiming that various alleged anonymous sources told him so.

But as an embarrassed CIA Director Leon Panetta was forced to admit, the program was little more than a PowerPoint presentation and a collection of ideas within the CIA. It never got off the ground, and was never operational.

What, then, did Blackwater actually do?

Manzetti's article certainly has an accusatory tone, but it doesn't seem to provide any evidence that they did anything at all, other than to give the reactionary left a reason to collectively freak out once more at the mention of Blackwater's name.

Is the Media Rooting for an Obama Tragedy?

I first asked that question back on January 11, 2008, and at that time dark fantasies of a Barack Obama martyrdom had already been hopefully forecast in the left-leaning media for a year. It's been two-and-a-half years, and they're still trying to hype his pending demise, if not engineer it.

Now we have MSNBC caught red-handed doctoring video in order to push an inflammatory racist narrative. It is fraud perpetrated by a news organization for propaganda purposes, pure and simple.

Contessa Brewer, her editors, and producers at MSNBC should all be fired for this purposeful deception of their viewership, and the cable network itself should hold a open and transparent investigation into how the biases they've encouraged in their newsroom have led to such lies. It will never happen, of course.

They lack the integrity to even feign ethics anymore.

Dishonest MSNBC Edits Out Face of Protestor in Order to Push Narrative of Racism

Via Hot Air, it has to be seen to be believed.

MSNBC's Contessa Brewer: "A man at a pro-health care reform rally just outside wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip. The Associated Press about a dozen people in all at that event were visible carrying firearms.

The reason we're talking about this—a lot of talk here Dylan—because people feel like yes, there are Second Amendment rights, for sure, but also there are questions about whether this has racial overtones. You have a man of color in the Presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists."

White people?

This is Chris, the racist white person that had the Carbon-15 carbine on a sling over his shoulder and a gun on his hip that Brewer was talking around in order to keep her talking point intact. Note that in the beginning of this video, MSNBC went to great pains to edit out Chris's head (and race) so that they could provide a race-baiting narrative.

And journalists wonder why people don't find them credible...

So That's The Five Hole...Hockey Reporter Arrested, Suspended For Running Prostitution Ring

He also covered racing, so feel free to pile on with jokes about drafting, rubbing, and fifteen-second "pit stops."

Kevin Provencher advertised his prostitution ring's services on Craigslist and other Web sites and rented hotel rooms in Andover, Massachusetts, and in New Hampshire where the women would have sex for money, prosecutors said. The ring may have operated in Canada, they said.

Provencher, a sports writer at the New Hampshire Union Leader for more than two decades, was arrested at his Manchester home early Wednesday and was taken to Massachusetts, where he was ordered held on $10,000 cash bail during his arraignment in Lawrence District Court. He pleaded not guilty to two counts of deriving support from prostitution.

Provencher, 50, has been suspended from the Union Leader, where he has been its primary motor sports reporter since 1990. He also has been the newspaper's beat reporter covering the Manchester Monarchs since the American Hockey League franchise's 2001 inception.

Tarheel Media Spin Hard to Cover Governor's 22% Sales Tax Increase

Influential North Carolina media like WRAL TV and the News and Observer seem intent on covering up a massive tax increase proposed by Governor Beverly Perdue.

First the spin from WRAL.

Trying to break a legislative stalemate on state budget negotiations, Gov. Beverly Perdue on Tuesday called top lawmakers to the Executive Mansion to lay out her own plan for raising extra revenue in the coming year to erase a projected $4.6 billion deficit.

Perdue called for raising the state sales tax by a penny for 13 months, beginning Sept. 1. The increase would raise more than half of the $1.6 billion in revenue she would like to include in the 2009-10 fiscal budget.

And now from the News and Observer:

Gov. Beverly Perdue told legislative leaders Tuesday she wants a 1-cent sales tax increase and a total tax hike package of $1.6 billion to balance the budget.

Perdue, a Democrat, met with lawmakers at the Executive Mansion and gave them a list of tax and other revenue options that she would like to see passed. It was an effort to help break the impasse between Democratic Senate and House leaders over what taxes to increase and how much.

Highlights of Perdue's wishlist, provided to Dome, include: an "emergency" 1-cent increase in the sales tax that would expire in October 2010, an emergency income tax surcharge on single taxpayers who earn more than $500,000 and married couples filing jointly making more than $1 million.

"Raising the state sales tax by a penny" or calling it a "1-cent increase" seems like small potatoes until you realize that North Carolina's current sales tax rate is already 4.5% and by raising the rate another cent—to 5.5%—Perdue is seeking a 22% sales tax increase.

Neither news outlet did the due diligence to point out the substantial rate increase the governor is pressing for instead of reigning in out-of-control government.

One can only speculate why that may be.

Thomas: Obama Worse Than Nixon

Wizened White House Press Corps gnome Helen Thomas says that the current administration's attempts to control the press is the worst she's seen:

"I'm not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well--for the town halls, for the press conferences," she said. "It's blatant. They don't give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame."

Anyone who has been closely following Obama's Presidential run has long known that our neophyte leader has forged an illusion of competence by being more heavily stage-managed than a teen pop group (while being roughly as qualified). It really says quite a bit when a reporter as experienced and blatantly liberal as Thomas rips into the administration as she has.

Then and Now

Evan Thomas, 2007, "...our job is to bash the President..."

Evan Thomas, 2009, "...he's sort of a God."

h/t reader SmithRoz

Media Survey Bleg

Aaron Veenstra, a PhD. Journalism Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is asking for your help:

My primary research interest is political blogs and I am conducting a experiment with blog readers that I would greatly appreciate your readers' participation in:

http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~asveenstra/09study-3/start.html

...This study will hopefully shed some light on some understudied areas of news effects by letting me focus on a group of heavy news consumers who are highly interested in politics and current events.

Completing this survey will take about 15-20 minutes and will require a high-speed Internet connection (a connection that's fast enough for YouTube will work fine). As thanks for participating, 10 respondents will be randomly selected at the conclusion of the study to receive $25 gift cards to Amazon.com.

For those of you would would like to let a researcher know what you think of the news media and blogs, here's your shot.

Finally! Anderson Cooper Comes Out of the Closet

A bit of personal wisdom approximately 50 seconds in.*

Other so-called "professional" journalists engaged in the juvenile wordplay as well, all--perhaps not surprisingly--on networks that aren't doing so well.

*MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is not gay, despite a performance history that might suggest otherwise.

Yeah, low-hanging fruits.

Oh, wait. People, people...

Their Favorite Fictions

Two readers sent me a link to another infuriating and dishonest New York Times story about Americans guns begin purchased in the United States and being smuggled south for use by Mexican drug cartels.

As you may expect, it picked up on the White House's favorite faux talking points:

Sending straw buyers into American stores, cartels have stocked up on semiautomatic AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, converting some to machine guns, investigators in both countries say. They have also bought .50 caliber rifles capable of stopping a car and Belgian pistols able to fire rifle rounds that will penetrate body armor.

As it so often does, existing BATF rules and regulations disprove the media’s assertions. Simply put, The BATF does not allow the manufacture or importation of firearms that can easily be modified into machine guns, and those drop-in parts which can quickly change a semi-automatic design are treated and as strictly monitored and regulated as machine guns themselves under U.S. law.

If there are conversions going on in Mexico, it means that the parts that make a machine gun a machine gun already exist in Mexico, meaning no additional laws targeting U.S. guns would make a difference.

And when you come down to it, I'm tired of government officials that favor gun control telling us that these conversions are taking place. I want them to show us specific conversions they have captured, making the serial numbers and manufacturing details of their parts public record so that we can determine for ourselves where these parts are coming from.

As for the .50 caliber rifles "capable of stopping a car," well, a typical car can be stopped with just about any centerfire rifle you would use for deer hunting, or with a typical shotgun. Implying that .50 caliber bullets have magical properties is rhetorically disingenuous. Yes, the .50 BMG cartridge produces far more energy than a typical rifle bullet, but the bullet isn't explosive, which is just what most pro-gun control stories stop just short of stating when they imply such firearms are threats to train cars, airplanes, and armored vehicles.

As for the .50 rifles being recovered in Mexico, commenters have remarked before how the .50-caliber rifles being recovered by the Mexican police look suspiciously like those sold to the Mexican military, right down to the same brand of scope and back-up iron sights (BUIS). Once again, that is not a problem that would be resolved by more restrictions in the United States.

As for the "Belgian pistols able to fire rifle rounds that will penetrate body armor," the authors are peddling yet another statement that is a only loosely based in fact.

The round in question is the 5.7x28, and it is not remotely a rifle cartridge.

It is chambered for pistols and personal defense weapons that falls into the submachine class of weapons , but that can shoot bullet designed for armor penetration. What the Times won't tell you is that armor-piercing bullets are highly-restricted under U.S law, for sale only to the military and police. Nor will the Times tell their readers that even when these pistols are loaded with the heavily-restricted "armor piercing" bullets, these bullets utterly fail to penetrate the more advanced body armor used by police and military units, and work reliably only on lesser armor classes.

Lastly, the Times neglects to mention that their rhetorical whipping boy 5.7x28 cartridge is failing to catch on in many circles, because while it does possess some armor penetration capabilities if using the restricted ammunition, it always uses a tiny bullet, and does not have a record of reliably causing incapacitating wounds.

You've got to give it to the Times for efficiency, though; they packed so many half-truths and lies in two sentences that it took seven paragraphs to detail them all.

But the Times isn't quite does just yet.

Watch the mastery in the deceptive sentence below:

Federal agents say about 90 percent of the 12,000 pistols and rifles the Mexican authorities recovered from drug dealers last year and asked to be traced came from dealers in the United States, most of them in Texas and Arizona.

If you read this quickly as most newspaper readers would, you'd come away with the distinct impression that 90-percent of the guns recovered from drug dealers in Mexico came from the United States, which is exactly what the author wants you to understand.

It is only upon reading the sentence deeper that you would recognize that the the phrase "and asked to be traced" is the key.

Mexican authorities only ask American authorities to track the small fraction of those guns that it suspects comes from the United States. The do not ask us to trace the majority of the guns they capture that are clearly not of U.S. origin. Of the total number of guns recovered from cartels, just 17-percent came from the United States--quite a big difference from the 90-percent the y tried to trick readers into accepting.

It is really quite sad that so many journalists feel they have the right to publisher such clearly biased information as fact, but their reporting is no more pathetic than the editors and publishers that allow journalists to publish advocacy instead of news.

News organizations are dying on the vine in the United States, and the media loves to claim that the Internet is to blame. That may be true, but if it is, it is because the Internet allows the media’s favorite fictions to be exposed, leaving their reputations—arguably their most important product" irrevocably damaged.

People won’t knowing buy damaged goods, and why should they?

Day by day, story by story, the Times justifies ever dollar it loses with another fiction that turns away another reader, and when they are gone, they will not be missed.

Complicity in Idiocy

Fox News posted the following highly-misleading graphic on the front page of foxnews.com tonight, as the click-through image for a story entitled Clinton: U.S. Shares Blame in Mexico Drug Wars.

The obvious implication of the image, echoing recent rhetoric by the Obama Administration and the Mexican government that the firearms industry in the United States is responsible for supplying drug cartels with massive amounts of firepower, including military weapons.

But what does the picture actually show?

A close look at the picture shows at the top a short-barreled AR-15 carbine where the flash hider begins immediately in front of the front sight.

Such weapons are highly-regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934, and buyers must have approval from the ATF and pay a $200 transfer tax. Such weapons are most commonly seen in use by law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border in urban tactical dynamic entry or SWAT teams. It is possible, and perhaps probable, that this firearm was acquired by cartels from Mexican law enforcement, and not from civilian firearms dealers.

The next firearm down, a civilian-legal AR-15 carbine, has a noticeably longer 16-inch legal minimum barrel, as does the Mini-14 carbine. The AR-15-style rifle below that has a 20-inch barrel.

Dominating the photo, however, is a collection of military weaponry that is simply unavailable for purchase by American civilians at any price. There are either rockets or mortar shells (probably the former, but I'm not sure) and a M-72 LAW, a disposable anti-tank rocket.

Our President and Attorney General and have been more than willing to mislead the American people by including military weaponry in displays of arms confiscated from cartels, in hopes of pushing for what the President likes to call "common sense" gun control measures, as if anti-tank rockets, hand grenades, IEDs and police and military-issued machine guns can be had under existing gun laws.

We except such deception from Barack Obama, a man who was once part of the anti-gun Joyce Foundation and who was part of an attempt to con the Supreme Court. We also expect the media to be largely ignorant and heavily biased in stories involving firearms.

We should, however, expect at least the most basic level of intellectual curiosity from our media, such as wondering why government officials are implying military anti-tank weaponry is available for purchase by civilians in U.S. gun shops.

Journalists are abdicating their responsibility to ask these questions.

This failure to follow the basic tenets of journalism is a large part of why the public holds the media in such low regard, and why their news organizations continue to collapse around them.

Associated Press Goes After "Hope" Artist For More Than Change

I was emailed a link to this story from AP's Media Relations office tonight.

It seems that the wire service wants credit and compensation from an artist by the name of Shepard Fairey for his Barack Obama "Hope" image that was admittedly based on the work of an Associated Press photographer, Manny Garcia.

Now it has been a long, long time—circa 1991—that I was in college learning the basics of media law in a journalism class, but my initial reaction was that derivative art was protected under fair use laws.

And upon further review, it's a good thing that I'm not a lawyer.

Fairey has apparently admitted his work came from Garcia's photo. It seems to me that the only real question here is whether or not Fairey settles our of court, or if he presses for a trial that he seems destined to lose.

CNN's Meserve Punked by Secret Service

Dude, where's my spotter?

The teams typically consist of two people, both armed with high-powered rifles, either of whom can shoot to deter an imminent threat. If one countersniper spots a threat, that person prepares to shoot while the other member takes on the role of "wind caller," telling the shooter how to adjust his aim to counteract the wind.

The wind caller takes cues from chimney smoke, flags or undulations from the atmosphere.

While the name of the primary shooter of a precision shooting team differs for political reasons with some calling him a sniper, countersniper, sharpshooter or kitten-of-the-gun, the second half of a sniper team is ubiquitously called a spotter.

A "wind caller?"

That's the obnoxious little kid that loudly yells "Mommy farted!" at the mall, causing a mortified, teeth-clenched-and-red-faced woman to momentarily yearn for a "decade-after" pill.

One can only imagine that Meserve and Ahlers did what CNN journalists so often do, taking the word of their subjects at face value—be they Hamas terrorists, tyrannical dictators, or straight-faced comedians with a badge—rushing the story to air without bothering with tedious fact-checking, or even a few seconds on the Internet to see if they got the terminology remotely right.

The dead-pan sniper found his mark, and CNN's Merserve published a subtle fart joke as news.

Bulls-eye.

Red Cross Confirms the Obvious: Israeli White Phosphorus Smoke Shells Used Legally in Gaza; Hamas Docs Continue Propaganda Efforts

I wrote several days ago that the Israeli use of 155mm M825A1 smoke shells was not in any way a "war crime," nor the use of "chemical weapons," nor in any way against the law of war, despite the cries of leftist journalists and Islamist activists.

Today, the International Red Cross agreed:

The international Red Cross said Tuesday that Israel has fired white phosphorus shells in its offensive in the Gaza Strip, but has no evidence to suggest it is being used improperly or illegally.

The comments came after a human rights organization accused the Jewish state of using the incendiary agent, which ignites when it strikes the skin and burns straight through or until it is cut off from oxygen. It can cause horrific injuries.

The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Israel to exercise "extreme caution" in using the incendiary agent, which is used to illuminate targets at night or create a smoke screen for day attacks, said Peter Herby, the head of the organization's mines-arms unit.

"In some of the strikes in Gaza it's pretty clear that phosphorus was used," Herby told The Associated Press. "But it's not very unusual to use phosphorus to create smoke or illuminate a target. We have no evidence to suggest it's being used in any other way."

In response, the Israeli military said Tuesday that it "wishes to reiterate that it uses weapons in compliance with international law, while strictly observing that they be used in accordance with the type of combat and its characteristics."

Sadly, even the Red Cross' statement is unlikely to stem spurious allegations white phosphorus is being used as a weapon, as these photos show:

caption: Palestinian Louai Sobeh, 10, is treated for burns at Shifa hospital in Gaza City on January 12, 2009. Palestinian doctor working in Gaza City Dr Yusef Abu Rish told AFP that at least 55 people were injured early yesterday by white phosphorous shells, banned under international law for use against civilians, but permitted for creating smokescreens. "These people were burned over their bodies in a way that can only be caused by white phosphorous," said Abu Rish. An Israeli military spokeswoman denied the claims. "There is no use of white phosphorous. Everything we use is according to international law," she said.

caption: Palestinian Mohamed Ahmed is treated for burns at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 12, 2009. Dr Yusef Abu Rish at Gaza City's Nasser hospital told AFP that at least 55 people were injured early yesterday by white phosphorous shells, banned under international law for use against civilians, but permitted for creating smokescreens. "These people were burned over their bodies in a way that can only be caused by white phosphorous," said Abu Rish. An Israeli military spokeswoman denied the claims."There is no use of white phosphorous. Everything we use is according to international law," she said.

caption: Palestinian Akram Abu Roka is treated for burns at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on January 12, 2009. Dr Yusef Abu Rish at Gaza City's Nasser hospital told AFP that at least 55 people were injured early yesterday by white phosphorous shells, banned under international law for use against civilians, but permitted for creating smokescreens. "These people were burned over their bodies in a way that can only be caused by white phosphorous," said Abu Rish. An Israeli military spokeswoman denied the claims."There is no use of white phosphorous. Everything we use is according to international law," she said.

Let me be very blunt: both the Palestinian doctor and the IDF spokesperson are almost certainly lying.

Israel is using white phosphorus, but it is not violating any laws of warfare, because the white phosphorus they are using is not weaponized. They are using air-bursting shells to make smokescreens, not impact-detonating munitions one would associate with offensive incendiary use. when it comes to the white phosphorus they are using, the spokesperson is telling the truth when she claims that "Everything we use is according to international law."

So why does the IDF continue to insist it isn't using white phosphorus? I'd suggest it is because most media outlets covering the conflict are either so biased or so incompetent that they couldn't or wouldn't explain to their consumers that not all uses of white phosphorus are the same.

As for Dr. Yusef Abu Rish, he's either unfamiliar with what white phosphorus burns look like, or perhaps more likely, is serving up a healthy dose of propaganda.

As I mentioned previously and Soccer Dad picked up upon, the IDF is deploying smoke shells. In specific, they are using M825A1 air-bursting smoke rounds fired from 155 howitzers. The M825A1 disperses 3/4-inch thick solid felt wedges impregnated with white phosphorus that disperse from airbursting shells in altitudes that appear in most photos to be 100 feet off the ground, or more. Each shell disperses 116 wedges.

These wedges can indeed cause horrific, potentially fatal burns if they hit people, but this kind of WP dispersal would mostly likely cause distinctive, penetrating, and localized burn injuries— not the scattering of surface wounds suffered by Sobeh, the nearly uniform and widespread facial burns of Ahmed, or the heavy, extensive burns suffered by Roka. All of their woulds could certainly be combat-related, and the later two are distinctively burns, but they do not bear the signs one typically associates with white phosphorus.

CNN's Alibi Hasn't Seen the Raw Tape, and Won't Produce It

Today I contacted Paul Martin, the co-owner of World News and Features whom CNN cited in their claim that Ashraf Masharawi's video of his brother's death in a Gaza hospital emergency room as the result of being fired upon by an Israeli drone was indeed legitimate as shown, and not staged as many right of center bloggers have contended.

I asked Mr. Martin a series of questions about the video, including queries about the apparent inconsistencies in the timeline in various versions as told presented by CNN and Channel 4 as noted by Dan Riehl, and why the family was so adamant that an Israeli drone fired a missile that targeted the two boys playing on the rooftop. Did the family members directly witnessed a drone firing a missile, or did they hear the explosion, go to the roof, see a drone, and assume it was a drone that fired?

I also asked Martin, who is in the business of selling news footage, if CNN and Channel 4 were clients, and if so, if they purchased the edited versions of this Masharawi video, or if they purchased the raw footage to be made into a finished product by these news organizations.

Martin responded this evening via email that:

We plan to post the entire unedited videotape of the whole event, on our website, as soon as we can obtain the whole thing from Gaza... something which can happen when there is an end to hostilities.

There you have it, folks. CNN's alibi hasn't seen the unedited footage, and we can't expect to have them even attempt to provide it until the conflict is over.

Interesting, isn't it?

World News and Features claims to specialize in getting footage delivered from high-threat combat zones to the world's media organizations, and their ace videographer managed to get polished, edited footage of his brother's death in the hands of foreign media organizations within hours of the attack, but now they say we'll have to wait until the war is over to get the kind of raw footage that one would think is their bread-and-butter product.

Fishy?

You don't know the half of it...

CNN Digs In On Israeli Airstrike Fraud

CNN is insisting that the story it aired of a Palestinian videographer filming his younger brothers death is entirely legitimate:

There's no truth to accusations by bloggers that a Palestinian camera crew staged a video showing the death of the videographer's brother after an Israeli rocket attack, said the team's employer.

"It's absolute nonsense," Paul Martin, co-owner of World News and Features, said of accusations leveled by bloggers at videographer Ashraf Mashharawi.

"He's a man of enormous integrity and would never get involved with any sort of manipulation of images, let alone when the person dying is his own brother," Martin said. "I know the whole family. I know them very well. ... [Mashharawi] is upset and angry that anyone would think of him having done anything like this. ... This is ridiculous. He's independent."

Raafat Hamdouna, administrative director at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said Friday that "Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel. He died later in the hospital. He was treated by the Norwegian team. When he was brought in, he was breathing. The team did their best to save him. I am not really sure if they even tried to rush him to the surgery room, because he was badly hurt."

This is CNN's evidence?

Martin is the co-owner of the news company that employees the videographer; he has an intense vested interest in maintaining the credibility and reputation of his company and employees at all costs.

And precisely what kind of news World News & Features produce [h/t Snapped Shot]?

WORLD NEWS & FEATURES is a unique specialist news and features provider, in the print, audio and video media, specialising in CONFLICT ZONES. It specialises in high-quality and impeccably-researched content. It only provides the material to non-competing clients. Under its unique system, each PREMIER CLIENT can brand the material as "From Our Own Correspondent" or "From ABC - Special to ..." or some other agreed wording. A PREMIER CLIENT can also commission the writing, filming or broadcast of specific stories relevant to that clients region, city or specialised interest.

Premium clients can commission the writing filming, and broadcast of specific stories. Commissioned news, sold at a premium. Isn't that another name for mercenary propaganda?

If so, I wonder who commissioned these... or if they were done pro bono.

HAMAS ALLIES PREPARE FOR RENEWED CONFLICT

ROCKET MEN OF GAZA

DYING TO SMASH ISRAEL WALL SAYS HAMAS

RESIST, SAYS HAMAS ARMED WING

Martin is trusted by Hamas on at least a professional level, and has a financial stake in the credibility of his employee's story. Neither of these conflicts of interest were disclosed by CNN, for the rather obvious reasons it undermines their claim of the story's credibility.

And then there is the apparent discrepancy between the injuries claimed by hospital adminstrator Raafat Hamdouna and the lack of evidence of such wounds in the video footage.

Hamdouna claimed:

"Mahmoud Khalil Mashharawi, a 12-year-old, was brought to the hospital, and he was breathing, but he was hit in the head and all over his body by shrapnel."

The video shot by Ashraf Mashharawi does not seem to support this claim.

While a frame-by-frame analysis shows a possible gash on the lower leg and what may be evidence of blood localized on the lower trunk, there is no evidence of any wound to the head or upper body.

Others that have been following this story also find CNN's affirmation of this story's credibility less than credible, including Charles Johnson and Ed Morrissey.

CNN has also yet to explain what kind of Israeli drone could have fired the purported missile, and what kind of missile would cause the minimal damage shown on the rooftop where it is claimed these boys were killed.

Anatomy of a Media Hoax

As the IDF campaign in Gaza continues, so do attempts by Hamas and Hamas sympathizers to use the western media as an often willing propaganda tool.

Yesterday, media critic Charles Johnson commented on Little Green Footballs about a 2-minute CNN story that purported to show the death of a Palestinian child in Gaza that was captured on film by his brother.

Here is a copy of that CNN story.

The video purports to show a truly horrific series of events. A boy and his friend are said to be struck down are struck down while they play, deliberately targeted by an Israeli drone aircraft armed with missiles. As doctors frantically perform CPR, the child apparently dies in front of his horrified brother, who continues filming. The boy is taken home, where he is cradled in the arms of a grieving family member. The video then cuts to the roof of the family home, where a family member shows where he claims the Israeli missile strike took the life of the two boys. The video then shows the family taking the boy to a local cemetary in a shroud, where he is to be laid to rest.

It is a truly horrible story, and one no doubt played out by heart-broken families on both sides of this conflict far too many times.

The only significant difference in this story, however, it that it is an obvious fake, featuring a series of images that any credible news editor should have quickly recognized.

But what marks this story as a hoax, and what elements point to media collusion in promoting this video as propaganda? Please watch the video above again, and we'll go through those elements step-by-step.

They are:

• basic medical procedures are poorly faked
• known propaganda actors are used in this film
• the site of the attack is poorly-constructed and inconsistent with a military attack.
• the body doesn't act like a body

First, let's return to the hospital, and take a look at our medical doctors and the life-saving procedures they are performing.

Narrated by Michael Holmes, the video opens with a Palestinian and European doctor hovering over what the narrator claims is a "victim of the violence."

The Palestinian doctor, on the right side of the camera frame, is shown to be mimicking a series of fast and shallow chest compressions as the doctor on the left examines a monitor.

The obvious problems? This is not how CPR is performed.

There is never an attempt to get the child to breath or to provide him with life-sustaining oxygen, and the chest compressions are far too shallow to be of any medical value at all. Real chest compressions performed during CPR are violent by necessity. For the lungs to fill with air heart to pump blood, they it must first be forcefully compressed using hard and deep pressure that uses a significant amount of upper body strength on the part of the person doing the compressions. The amount of forced used to successfully compress the chest would be very painful to a conscious victim, as the compressions often crack or even break the ribs. The doctor in this video is being very careful not to cause the out-of-frame victim any harm.

Such delicacy would not be practiced if desperate life-saving measures were actually needed. Nor would such care be wasted on a corpse used in such a re-creation. As we will discover later, this so-called victim seems very much alive and healthy, and they take great care to make sure he remains that way.

But enough about our Palestinian doctor poorly faking chest compressions. Let's have a look at our dashing Norwegian doctor on the left of the frame.

Sadly, the image quality is lacking i this still-frame from the video, but you get a much better shot of him accompanying this print story that happened to be running at the same time as CNN's video.

Isn't he quite the photogenic soul?

The BBC, CBS, CNN, Sky News, and other news outlets sure seem to think so, as they've all featured him and his special brand of spin:

International media reports, including those from the BBC, CBS, CNN and FOX’s sister station Sky News, present Gilbert as an ordinary doctor.

But a look at his record shows that Gilbert, 61, is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist "Red" party, and he has been involved in solidarity work for the Palestinians since the 1970s. He has criticized the international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts.

Gilbert volunteers at the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza with the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), an aid organization funded by the Norwegian government, and he has been interviewed by the media on a variety of issues. Israeli government officials have said Hamas hides weapons in the hospital where Gilbert works.

NGO Monitor, an Israeli human rights watchdog group, says Gilbert presents one-sided criticism of Israel to the media and has accused Israel of deliberately targeting civilians in its Gaza offensive to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel.

In addition to being supportive of the terrorist organization Hamas, Gilbert has voiced support for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

What makes mad Mads appearance in this video all the more shocking is that he can't be bother to even help make this bit of theater mildly convincing by even going through the motions of giving the victim air, a complaint quickly voiced by doctors who viewed the clip.

I'm no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child's sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can't make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there's no point in doing chest compressions if you're not also ventilating the patient somehow. In this video, I can't tell for sure if the patient has an endotracheal tube in place, but you can see that there is nobody bag-ventilating him (a bag is actually hanging by the head of the bed), and there is no ventilator attached to the patient. In a hospital, during a code on a ventilated patient, somebody would probably be bagging the patient during the chest compressions. And they also would have moved the bed away from the wall, so that somebody could get back there to intubate the patient and/or bag him. In short, the "resuscitation scene" at the beginning is fake, and it's a pretty lame fake at that.

Frankly, we need Foreman and House on this. If we're going to have fake CPR, we need to have fake doctors who can pretend to do it more convincingly.

Now, let's look at the impact site of the alleged Israeli drone's missile attack.

For reasons never explained in the video—or perhaps for obvious reasons—the narrator never quite explains why the Israeli drone found this incongruous pile of cinder blocks to be worth firing upon, nor does it explain why the drone stopped firing only after mortally wounding the one cinder block, leaving the other largely intact and still capable of posing a threat. I kid, of course.

The cinder blocks are the heart of the video segment filmed on the rooftop where the two boys were said to have been killed. A frame-by-frame review of this segment as the camera pans across the roof shows no evidence of scorch-marks, shrapnel, or scoring consistent with shrapnel in the area around the blocks that the brother suggests is the impact point.

There is no evidence of any penetration or contact with into the roof surface itself at that point or anywhere else shown— not a single mark, despite the fact that drone-class warheads typically have impact-dependent fuses that means they would have detonated on impact, or if delayed, would have penetrated into the home before exploding.

As the camera pains across the rooftop, confirming no evidence of blast damage, it pans past the kind of cheap resin chairs that grace so many homes and apartments worldwide, thanks to the magic of Chinese industry. You've probably had one like this yourself.

You've also probably thrown away your fair share of chairs exactly like this one as well.

One thing we have learned from years of foreign imports is that you can have "cheap," or you can have "quality," and this kind of chair is decidedly cheap. Flimsily made, they bend and break with little provocation, and perhaps just as interesting for our context, they are tossed violently a considerable distance with even a moderate wind.

Somehow, we're expected to believe that an Israeli missile detonated on this roof without causing any obvious shrapnel, or enough concussive blast damage to shatter a simple resin chair or even knock it over, and yet still have the power to kill two boys, including at least one that was on the far side of that chair (where the "blood" stains are) or shred the clothes hanging on the clothesline just feet behind the that.

Despite all the fiction so far, there is some actual truth in the video on the rooftop, when the narrator notes that the roof is "pock-marked." There are holes in metal panels and chipped concrete, as you can see in the images below.

You'll also note that the metal panels are corroded around the edges of the holes, which is interesting in that recent perforated galvanized metal shows up bright, only to corrode much later. The pockmarked concrete, likewise, shows the weeping of rust from the exposed iron rebar inside.

This rooftop does indeed show signs of damage, but it is far less obvious if the damage is a sign of substandard construction materials or from combat. In either event, the corrosion evident on both the metal and concrete assure us that the damage was done long ago. No missle impact here during this war, if ever.

Lastly, rest assured that our young victim is doing far better than his pretend treatment and shroud would indicate.

As he is about to be laid to rest, the shroud falls away, leaving his arm exposed to gravity. Conscientious even as a corpse, the young victim holds his arm tightly against his woundless body as the camera pans away. I suspect his family is celebrating his miraculous resurrection even as you read these words.

And what of his family?

His brother's grief was never too strong to keep him from documenting his brother's death, and he will cope by burying himself in his work. Considering that he is the general manager of the company that runs web sites for Hamas while they are at war, I'm sure he is quite busy, indeed.

As for CNN, they have carried on exactly as you would expect they would as the kind of company that would hide the torture of even their own employees just to retain favorability among despots.

While they quickly dropped the video from their site after being caught in this lie, leaving what must have been an uncomfortable void where the video used to be, they did so with no explanation, no correction, and no retraction.

It must have been a very interesting meeting when decided that the best way to handle this obvious farce was to double-down and continue to pretend this story was real, replacing the fradulent video with the print script of the story read by Michael Holmes.

The story is no less fraudulent, and the cover-up is far more damning.

This, truly, is CNN.

Pro-Hamas Doctors Caught Faking A Civilian Death... After CNN Airs Footage

Mads Gilbert, the radical Marxist Norwegian doctor that was the focus of a Fox News report earlier today for being an anti-Israeli Hamas apologist, has been positively identified as one of two doctors caught faking CPR on a Palestinian boy that "died" in video featured today on CNN.

The segment with Gilbert shows him and another doctor badly faking chest compressions and other life-saving measures on a live boy faking death in what can only be described as political theater. The video claims to be filmed by the brother of a Palestinian teen that claims the boy was one of two purposefully killed by a missile fired at them by an Israeli drone as they played.

Lawhawk, has more on why the fake CPR is so pathetically obvious to those with actual CPR training.

CNN editors who swallowed the story of the poorly-acted video unquestioningly—no doubt because it fit the anti-Israeli narrative familiar to CNN viewers and critics—have now pulled the video without explanation, correction, or retraction.

It has also been determined that the videographer who filmed his brother's "death" is the general manager of a company that hosts web sites for Hamas.

Dr. Gilbert was allowed into Gaza by the Israelis just 2 days ago to provide medical care. He was involved in faking war crimes less than 48 hours later.

Update: The CNN cover-up continues. Saddam Hussein's favorite network has now pulled the video completely from their site, instead posting a text story that continues the propaganda.

I suspect this attempt at avoiding the truth isn't going to work out very well for them.

Dear Terrorist Supporters: White Phosphorus is Not an Illegal Weapon

Pro-terrorist shills like this clueless twit give other leftist beards for Islamofascist oppression a bad name.

War Crime du Jour: Israel Deploys White Phosphorus Shells

When regarding the Christmas massacre conducted against the captive population of Palestine by the Israeli army in the name of the people of Israel's security, one is left to wonder: How deeply into Israel's vast arsenal must the IDF dig before the world's leaders act?

Do we wait until the nuclear option is put on the table? "Bunker busters" are already deployed; cluster bombs and the usual array of missiles, bombs, and bullets rained down on civilians and the civilian infrastructure. Hospitals, universities, police stations, mosques, and apartment blocks. Have we missed anything?

Just reality.

White phosphorus is in the inventory of most of the world's major military forces, including the United States, Great Britain, Russia. It is used for smoke screens, for signaling, and incendiary uses.

Global Security states it bluntly:

Israel used White Phosphorus against HAMAS targets in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in January 2009. This violated no international laws or conventions.

White Phosphorus in Gaza (as it was in Lebanon) is clearly being deployed as an obscurant, laying down a smoke screen to prevent Hamas terrorists from seeing advancing Israeli forces.

This is done to save the lives of soldiers from being targeted with IEDs and sniper fire, and—though leftists refuse to admit it— to also hopefully save the lives of Palestinian civilians by allowing Israeli soldiers to engage Hamas terrorists at close range with rifle and machine gun fire, rather than use more destructive arial bombing and artillery fire.

As for the "bunker busters" alluded to by the deluded author above, the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb, it too is designed to save lives by using minimal destructive force:

At just 5.9 feet long and 285 pounds, the bomb’s small size increases the number of weapons an aircraft can carry, therefore raising the amount of targets it can kill in one sortie. Because of its size and precision accuracy, it also reduces collateral, or unintended, damage in the target vicinity.

It is a small bomb that uses far less explosives that the 500-lb, 1000-lb, and 2000-lb bombs that air forces have had to rely upon in the past that could level several buildings or even a city block even with a precision strike, and being a bunker buster exploding below ground, it further decreases the threat of shrapnel and blast forces to innocent civilians.

As for the blackened bodies in Lebanon he cites as evidence of atrocities... well that was conclusively debunked, as was the fiction pushed by pro-insurgent leftists about the use of WP in Fallujah.

Keep your eyes out: you'll be seeing more of this pro-terrorist propaganda in the days ahead.

CNN's MRAP Story Feasts on Ignorance in Effort to Demonize Marine Corps

Once again, CNN puts its ignorance and dislike of the military center stage:

The U.S. Marine Corps knew of the threat posed by roadside bombs before the start of the Iraq war, yet did nothing to buy protective vehicles for troops, according to a report to be released by the Pentagon.

Additionally, Marine leaders in 2005 decided to buy up-armored, or reinforced, Humvees instead of Mine Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles to shield troops in Iraq from mines and other explosives -- a decision that could have cost lives, according to the report obtained Tuesday by CNN.

The report by the Department of Defense inspector general was requested by the Marine Corps in early 2008 after a civilian employee with the service complained that bureaucratic delays undermined the program to develop the armored vehicles.

Inspectors found that the decision not to buy MRAP vehicles in 2005 stopped the Marine Corps Combat Development Command, the agency in charge of finding the best protective vehicle from troops in Iraq, from "developing a course of action ... to attempt to obtain funding for [MRAPs]," according to the report.

The report found that the Department of Defense knew before the war started in 2003 of the threats of mines and roadside bombs in Iraq but did nothing to acquire "MRAP-type" vehicles ahead of the invasion.

What the author of this CNN article fails to explain is that you can have either mobility, or you can have armor; you can't have both.

A vehicle that can withstand IEDs built from artillery shells is going to be too heavy (14 tons in some variations) to leave the main roads or even cross many of the world's bridges. The has two significant and lasting effects. It cedes the majority of territory to the insurgents, and also creates targeting funnels where ambushes can be concentrated, increasing the likelihood of Marines being hit by IEDs.

When insurgents know that they face a vehicle with limited mobility, they can then concentrate on building bigger or more effective types of IEDs to defeat that specific vehicle, while simultaneously using the majority or their forces to dominate the surrounding towns and villages.

Historically, the Marines have always chosen mobility over armor, using speed, tenacity, and tactics to overwhelm opposing forces with weapons systems lighter armed and armored than that of their more heavily armed and armored Army counterparts.

It is true that some Marines who died in HMMWVs because of IED strikes may very well have survived strikes by similar weapons on MRAPs, but at what cost?

Would they have had the mobility to strike al Qaeda and insurgent supply lines running though remote areas of the country, or find weapons caches located on farms and in fields far away from the hardened roads that MRAPs require?

Could Marines have penetrated communities and established relations with friendly Iraqis to develop a counterinsurgency program while hiding inside these metal beasts? The answer to these questions is a resounding "no."

MRAPs are great vehicles for their intended purpose of protecting their occupants against IEDS, but their mobility is horrific, and cedes the majority of the battlefield to the enemy, leaving the enemy to pick the time and place of engagement with American forces.

In short, an early deployment of MRAPs into the Iraqi theater of operations may have saved some lives in the short run, but it would have crippled the Marines ability to take the fight to the enemy and put the insurgency on the defensive.

MRAPS and similar vehicles have a time and a place, as does every weapons system, but they are not nearly mobile enough to be as useful in an offensive war against a lightly armed and mobile enemy as are the lighter and less armored HMMWV.

Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. Even Army soldiers used to more heavily armored equipment find the MRAPtoo heavy and slow:

And so we rolled out of FOB Falcon in those giant MRAPs. It seems that most of the seriously experienced combat soldiers do not like MRAPs. Yes, MRAPs are great for the main roads and convoys, but they are too big and too cumbersome, and they get stuck in mud that you could peddle a bicycle through. MRAPs are not offensive vehicles. There is no doubt MRAPs can save lives – they’re like giant vaults on wheels, though I did see the wreckage of one in Afghanistan that had been nearly obliterated. When we’re on the main roads, I love MRAPs, but we will never win wars or major battles with those things, or by staying on main roads. MRAPs need good roads. Good roads are bomb magnets. In Afghanistan, many of the Taliban scoot around on motorcycles, and there is no doubt that mobility is a weapon. We should melt most of the MRAPs down and forge that metal into killing machines like Strykers. The combat vets from 10th Mountain that day were also not fans of MRAPs. And though it’s easy to find MRAP-lovers, the hardcore fighters seem to want more mobility than steel.

Marines encumbered by MRAPs cannot take the battle to the enemy, and Marines that can't take the battle to the enemy will not win wars.

CNN's article is a poorly-researched hit piece designed to attack the credibility and judgement of the Marine Corps.

Perhaps before questioning the judgment of others, they should start by looking at their motivations and biases first.

Dead-Tree Media Op-Ed Writer In Favor of Newspaper Bailout

Via Hot Air's headlines comes Kathleen Parker's self-serving idea:

Actively pursuing information through print media and participating in high-level conversations -- even, potentially, blogging -- makes one smarter.

The ISI insists that higher-education reforms aimed at civic literacy are urgently needed. Who could argue otherwise? But historian Rick Shenkman, author of "Just How Stupid Are We?" thinks reform needs to start in high school. His strategy is both poetic (to certain ears) and pragmatic: Require students to read newspapers, and give college freshman weekly quizzes on current events.

Did he say newspapers?! Shenkman even suggests government subsidies for newspaper subscriptions, as well as federal tuition subsidies for students who perform well on civics tests. They could be paid from a special fund created by, say, a "Too Many Stupid Voters Act."

Not only would citizens be smarter, but also newspapers might be saved. Announcements of newsroom cuts, which ultimately hurt quality, have become routine. Just this week, USA Today announced the elimination of about 20 positions, while the Newark Star-Ledger, as it cuts its news staff by 40 percent, lost almost its entire editorial board in a single day.

In his book, Shenkman, founder of George Mason University's History News Network, is tough on everyday Americans. Why, he asks, do we value polls when clearly The People don't know enough to make a reasoned judgment?

Of course, what Parker fails to mention is that The People don't know enough to make a reasoned judgement largely as a result of these same newspapers taking roles as advocates for one political theology instead of acting as unbiased journalists. The public, while underinformed but not nearly as ignorant as today's newroom and editorial board advocacy organizations would like, recognize the naked cheerleading and overt bias of the MSM, and quit buying their product.

Parker, Shenkman, and others with a stake in todays dying media want to legislate a market for a substandard product. Too bad for them, the People aren't as uneducated as they would like.

Staged?

Maryland Gomez, 61, was killed early Saturday morning when a tornado destroyed her home in Kenly, North Carolina. The Raleigh News and Observer ran the photo above, dominating page 1A above the fold in their Sunday paper. The photo is credited to Cary News photographer named Michael McLoone, and shows a Gomez family photo of the victim amid the wreckage of her home.

I may very well be wrong, but I suspect that this photo is staged.

Tornadoes are capable of astounding choreography, dancing over one home without disturbing a shingle, only to smash a neighboring home to kindling. Sometimes they'll even demolish an entire home, only to leave items in a single room almost untouched.

But I find it very hard to believe that:

this particular tornado,
on this particular night,
smashed this particular home,
and killed this particular woman,
and placed this particular photo,
ripped so delicately from its frame,
on this particular half of a smashed table,
with no human intervention,
while all beyond it is chaos.

Update: The N&O responds via email:

...There was no staging or Photoshop manipulation involved in the photo My [sic] Michael McLoone from the tornado aftermath. The situation was exactly as the photographer found it, and was not altered. This was indicated by the photographer in his communication with the photo desk on that day, and I have confirmed that in another conversation. Several friends, family members, and neighbors had been through the site, working to recover belongings of the family, and others had brought items found nearby back to the scene, where they were left.

It appears that the family photograph may have been placed on the table by human hands in the aftermath of the storm; the editors are simply claiming that the photographer was not responsible for the manipulation.

What's the Greater Irony Here?

That more people read this spoofed version of the NY Times today than the real print edition, or that the radical left wing stories offered in the spoof are probably too right wing for the real newspaper's editorial board?

Huffington Post Writer Stabs Ex-Lover 220 Times, Commits Suicide

Boynton, Beach, FL:

A woman who lived with her ex-partner on the city's south side stabbed her former lover more than 200 times with a Phillips-head screwdriver and then tried to conceal the killing, police said.

After committing the crime, Carol Anne Burger, 57, a writer who friends described as engaged and eager to move on with life, reported her old flame missing and then, a day later, shot herself to death in her backyard, police said.

[snip]

Burger, upset at the disintegration of her relationship and disgusted with the U.S. during the past several years, sometimes talked of moving to Panama or Mexico to start again.

That she had recently lost her job didn't help the bouts of depression she sometimes experienced, said her close friend and confidante, Helen Gale.

But when the Web site The Huffington Post tapped Burger to cover the election from Florida this month, the job seemed to give her renewed focus. Burger burned to write a story for the site's front page and poured herself into the work, Gale said.

This lady obviously had serious psychological issues. The article also states she came to hate the United States "during the past several years."

Uh-huh.

I wonder how much eight years of the self-induced hysteria we know as "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and the requisite feelings of impotent rage and looming oppression fed into her existing problems.

May God be with both families as they deal with this senseless tragedy.

Update: Perhaps interested in keeping up appearances, the Palm Beach Post has now removed all references to Burger's disgust of the United States.

Orson Scott Card Rips the MSM

Orson Scott Card eviscerates those Democratic Party flacks that call themselves journalists.

A taste of The Last Honest Reporter:

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

There's much more at the link.

Card, by the way, is a Democrat.

WaPo's James V. Grimaldi's Dishonest "Hit" On Cindy McCain

I'm going to start doing something I should have done long ago. When I catch a journalist committing fraud or nakedly partisan political journalism, I'm join to make sure that I name them, and not just the organization they work for.

Today's poster child for journalistic corruption is James V. Grimaldi of the Washington Post.

What kind of dishonest, biased journalism is the Washington Post reporter James V. Grimaldi guilty of?

In Exclusive: Verizon and AT&T Provided Cell Towers for McCain Ranch, corrupt reporter James V. Grimaldi tries to insinuate that Cindy McCain is guilty of some sort of ethical violation because Verizon Wireless and AT&T installed portable cell phone towers to provide coverage at McCain's home in Hidden Valley near Sedona, Arizona.

Unethical reporter James V. Grimaldi writes:

Ethics lawyers said Cindy McCain's dealings with the wireless companies stand out because her husband is a senior member of the Senate commerce committee, which oversees the Federal Communications Commission and the telecommunications industry. He has been a leading advocate for industry-backed legislation, fighting regulations and taxes on telecommunication services.

I have a few simple questions for morally bankrupt Washington Post reporter James V. Grimaldi:

• Other than Stanley Brand, a former House counsel for Democrats, what are the names of the ethics lawyers you spoke with, and what positions have they held within the Democrat Party?
• Are any of the ethics lawyers you spoke with currently active as paid consultants or volunteers for Barack Obama's presidential campaign?
• Did Democratic operative(s) in Obama campaign suggested this story to you?
• Did you ever had any intention of directly informing your readers that the Secret Service requested these cell towers as a security issue?

Yes, you heard that right. Ethics-challenged Washington Post reporter James V. Grimaldi did his level best to obscure the fact that it was the Secret Service that requested these portable cell towers, as stable communications are a vital part of protecting the lives of Presidential candidates.

This isn't journalism. This is partisan politics.

It's nice to know what kind of corrupt reporters the Washington Post is willing to hire in men such as James V. Grimaldi, and the kind of political hit pieces they're willing to run as legitimate news stories.

Update: Jonathan Martin at The Politico confirms the Secret Service request:

A representative for the Secret Service confirms Verizon's statement earlier tonight that the company only put in a temporary cell service facility near the McCain ranch in Arizona at the request of the agency.

"We made a request of Verizon in I believe May that was covered under our contract and they did address our immediate needs," said Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren.

Secret Service: Media Claim of "Kill Him" Unfounded

Don't have any proof of rage-filled bigots at McCain-Palin speeches, even though you just know in your shriveled little heart that they have to be there?

Never fear. You can always just make it up.

The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled "kill him" when presidential hopeful Barack Obama's name was mentioned during Tuesday's Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama's[sic] name a man in the audience shouted "kill him."

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

"I was baffled," he said after reading the report in Wednesday's Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Drop the Filter

The New York Times could save some money if they fired fired the middlemen and simply let the Obama campaign post directly to their blogs.

The Ayers-Obama Media Primer

The Weathermen were not a 1960s group.
The Weathermen formed in 1969, declared war on "AmeriKKKa" (yes, that is where the popular spelling you hear in the rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and on left-wing political blogs comes from) in 1970, and carried out a string of attacks that finally ended with the arrests of the final remaining Weathermen, now called the May 19 Communist Movement, in 1985. One remaining Weatherman, Elizabeth Duke, is still a fugitive from the FBI and is considered armed and dangerous.

Calling the Weathermen a 60s terrorist group, when it did almost all of its bombing in the 1970s and 1980s, is as intellectually honest as calling Duran Duran a 50s rock and roll band because Simon Le Bon was born in 1958.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are domestic terrorists.
They not an "anti-war activists" nor "radicals." Activists and radicals organize protests and sit-ins and harass elected officials.

A person that uses a bomb instead of a ballot is a terrorist. A person that leads a group of individuals that likes to use bombs instead of ballets is a terrorist leader. As this particular group of terrorists waged war against their own country, they are called domestic terrorists.

Contrary to a meme being pushed by interested parties, the Weather Underground killed innocent people.
Brian V. McDonnell an officer with the San Francisco Police, was ripped apart by shrapnel Feb 16, 1970. He succumbed to his injuries two days later. Officer Robert Fogarty was permanently injured in the same blast. FBI mole Larry Grathwohl says Bill Ayers built the bomb, and that Bernadine Dohrn placed it on the station window ledge. Nyack, NY Police Officer Waverly Brown and Sergeant Ed O'Grady, along with Brinks guard Peter Paige, were killed in an armored car robbery that was a joint operation between the Weather Underground and elements of the Black Liberation Army in 1981.

In addition to their successful homicide bombings, the Weather Underground failed in several attempts at mass murder.
On March 6, 1970, a pipe-bomb being constructed in a Greenwich Village townhouse detonated, killing three Weathermen and causing two others to flee. Recovered amid the rumble were four 12" dynamite-filled pipe-bombs and several fused eight-stick bundles of dynamite that had been destined for a non-commissioned officers dance that night at Fort Dix, NJ, targeting American soldiers and their civilian dates. The attack would likely have been the worst terrorist attack on American soil prior to Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City.

Lesser known mass murder attempts of the Weathermen that same year included the attempted bombing of the Detroit Police Officers' Association, which Ayers wanted to occur when the building was fully occupied. An FBI mole within the Weathermen, Larry Grathwohl tipped police. A 13-stick bundle of dynamite was recovered and defused. A separate bombing targeting Detroit police foiled by Grathwohl involved 2 bombs, using 44 sticks of dynamite.

In 1984, Weathermen Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans were arrested while transporting 740 pounds of explosives and a cache of almost two dozen weapons, including a submachine gun.

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers do not cross paths casually, but have a lucrative multi-decade relationship.
Barack Obama and Bill Ayers met no later than 1987, where the worked together in the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools. There is some speculation that Ayers and Obama may have met even earlier in New York, perhaps as far back as 1984, but that connection hasn't been firmly established.

Ayers was instrumental in forming the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and arranged for Obama to be chairman of the Board of Directors over more qualified Board members. Obama returned the favor by funneling more than a million dollars in grants to Ayers' Small School Workshop. Obama and Ayers served together for years on the Board of Directors of the Woods Fund. Obama was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation, which may have influenced several grants made to Ayers.

Barack Obama "didn't know the history" of Bill Ayers' and Bernadine Dohrn's terrorist past when he kicked off his political career in their home in 1995.
Barack Obama has known Bill Ayers at least since 1987, and perhaps as far back as 1983-84. Bernardine Dohrn, once publicly labeled "the most dangerous woman in America" by none other than J. Edgar Hoover, was also well known as the inspiration for the 1988 movie Running on Empty. Subtle terrorists they were not.

Both Ayers and Dohrn were very well known throughout Chicago for their role in the "Days of Rage" riots and their terrorist leadership, and were minor celebrities among the radical leftist community Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama shared in Hyde Park.

In the Tank, and Not Even Trying

As if there was any doubt about the media being nothing more than an extension of the Obama campaign:

A READER AT A MAJOR NEWSROOM EMAILS: "Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. People cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working." I asked permission to reprint without attribution and it was granted.

The Anchoress hears it also to no one's surprise.

If you recall, several weeks ago Charlie Gibson used a doctored quote when interviewing Sarah Palin.

Gene Johnson of the Associated Press was the person (I hesitate to use the term journalist at this point) who purposefully truncated the quote to make it mean something entirely different, and so I contacted his superior, and noted he had clearly violated APs code of ethics by doctoring the quote.

After a period of silence, I asked the AP "In what way is altering a subject's quote to change the entire context of the quote, and present an entirely false interpretation of what the subject clearly said, not at odds with the Associated Press' ethics policy?"

The response?

"the remark could be interpreted in different ways"

Yes, when you allow persons to slice and dice quotes until they sound like what the media wants the victim to sound like, it certainly can.

Obama to Replace Biden

Obama/Sulzberger '08:

Though these facts are a matter of public record, the New York Times, in what can only be explained as a willful disregard of the truth, failed to research this story or present any semblance of a fairminded treatment of the facts closely at hand. The paper did manage to report one interesting but irrelevant fact: Mr. Davis did participate in a roundtable discussion on the political scene with...Paul Begala.

Again, let us be clear: The New York Times -- in the absence of any supporting evidence -- has insinuated some kind of impropriety on the part of Senator McCain and Rick Davis. But entirely missing from the story is any significant mention of Senator McCain's long advocacy for, and co-sponsorship of legislation to enact, stricter oversight and regulation of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- dating back to 2006. Please see the attached floor statement on this issue by Senator McCain from 2006.

To the central point our campaign has made in the last 48 hours: The New York Times has never published a single investigative piece, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Obama campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, his consulting and lobbying clients, and Senator Obama. Likewise, the New York Times never published an investigative report, factually correct or otherwise, examining the relationship between Former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson and Senator Obama, who appointed Johnson head of his VP search committee, until the writing was on the wall and Johnson was under fire following reports from actual news organizations that he had received preferential loans from predatory mortgage lender Countrywide.

Therefore this "report" from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper.

We all understand that partisan attacks are part of the political process in this country. The debate that stems from these grand and sometimes unruly conversations is what makes this country so exceptional. Indeed, our nation has a long and proud tradition of news organizations that are ideological and partisan in nature, the Huffington Post and the New York Times being two such publications. We celebrate their contribution to the political fabric of America. But while the Huffington Post is utterly transparent, the New York Times obscures its true intentions -- to undermine the candidacy of John McCain and boost the candidacy of Barack Obama -- under the cloak of objective journalism.

I'm not sure of Goldfarb's last claim. When was the last time anyone thought the Times practiced objective journalism?

What's in a Terrorist's Name?

Should we take Marc Ambinder's critique of the Barack Obama/William Ayers story seriously, when he knows so little about it that he can't even spell the terrorist's name properly?

Are We Fighting a Holy War?

(h/t Instapundit)

WaPo Editorial Board Beclowns Itself

As much as we in the blogosphere love to the describe nonsensical utterings of journalists, pundits, and talking heads as "self-parodying," it is rare that national news outlets truly earn that as well as the Washington Post editorial board has done with their editorial lamenting the demise of the D.C. gun ban and the passage of a House Bill that seeks to normalize D.C. citizen's rights along the lines of those recognized throughout most of the rest of the country.

The hysteric and unsigned op-ed, Open Season on the District, is really quite a wonder to behold.

THE U.S. SENATE represents the last, best hope to stop the mindless push to enact a dangerous gun law in the District. And stop it the senators must.

That "dangerous gun law" would bring the district's gun laws in line with the majority of gun restrictions in the United States, areas that have far less gun crime that historically have far less gun crime than D.C. a fact the editors purposefully avoid mentioning.

The House voted yesterday to adopt a measure that would gut the District's gun laws and that goes far beyond the Supreme Court's finding this summer of an individual right to bear arms. The bill would prohibit the District from requiring that weapons be registered -- the most reasonable and benign of measures. It would allow ownership of semiautomatic handguns and rifles and would place no age restriction on gun possession. And it would effectively strip the District of the ability to enact any regulations that could be seen as unduly burdening gun ownership. If even registration is seen as unduly burdensome, that leaves little room and little hope for other reasonable provisions.

Weapons registration, far from being "reasonable and benign," is recognized as a prelude to confiscation, and historically been used as such around the world. As a result, registration is very unpopular in the United States and is shunned in most cities and states.

Likewise, semi-automatic handguns and rifles are by far the most popular firearms purchased and owned in America today. The Post editorial board, like many who have a visceral dislike of firearms and little or no practical experience with them, either confuses semi-automatic weapons with machine guns (fully automatic weapons), or seeks to confuse and alarm the uninformed reader.

As for the comment on age restrictions, that is a purposeful deception verging on outright fabrication by the Post, and demands a correction. By Federal law, citizens must be 18 to possess handguns or handgun-only ammunition, and 21 to purchase handguns in the United States. It is true person of any age may possess a long gun (shotgun or rifle), but must be 18 by federal law to purchase one. The applicable law was designed so that minors can possess (hold, use) a firearm to participate in shooting sports. Clearly, the Post is engaging in fear-mongering to scare their readership to adopt their fear-based point-of-view.

The bill is not only a slap in the face to home rule, it is an affront to common sense and safety. How are police supposed to trace guns used in crimes if they are unregistered?

This is a pair of non-sequiturs.

"Home rule" does not excuse governments on any level in the United States from violating the Constitution, and that includes the District of Columbia. Somehow, I rather doubt the Post would venture forth with the home rule argument if the subject in question was the restriction of their First Amendment freedoms to engage in deceptive editorializing.

The registration of a firearm is irrelevant in tracing a weapon actively being used in crime, and once such a gun is confiscation the serial number is used for an ATF trace, currently used in every state, including the vast majority of those without gun registration.

How are they to protect lawmakers, dignitaries, visitors, workers and residents when guns are treated like any other product to be bought and sold with no restrictions?

Again, the "no restrictions" claim is more than hyperbole, it is a purposeful, calculated lie, as the federal laws alluded to above make clear.

As for protecting Americans and visitors, we've been doing precisely that throughout the rest of the United States for several hundred years with most areas suffering a far lower gun-related felony crime rate than D.C., this is another misleading question based upon a false assertion.

While many gun rights advocates tout their bona fides as law-and-order types, they apparently have no trouble ignoring the testimony of scores of police chiefs and law enforcement officers across the country who believe that sensible regulation saves lives.

Of course many police chiefs view gun restrictions favorably. Their primary and most immediate concern is to keep their officers alive, and if forced to admit it, their secondary concern is to minimize legal risk to teh department. A disarmed citizenry poses a lower risk to the police both legally and practically, and minimizes the chances of police being successfully sued in court for wrongfully killing an armed citizen. As police know they cannot be sued for failing to prevent crimes, they would much rather have their officers encounter disarmed victims at a crime scene than show up to find an armed and agitated citizen standing over a dead rapist or armed robber.

It doesn't mean that their preferences are better for anyone than themselves.

And never mind that even Justice Antonin Scalia, among the most conservative jurists in the land, went out of his way in District of Columbia v. Heller to note that a constitutional right to keep and bear arms and reasonable government regulation -- including registration and a ban on assault weapons -- are not mutually exclusive propositions.

Another non-sequitur. Scalia's opinion as a SCOTUS justice is not designed to be a law unto itself. His job is to interpret laws and determine if they meet Constitutional standards. The author of this editorial can just as easily argue that Scalia's opinion in Heller would support H.R. 6842, the very law this editorial so obtusely and emotionally argues against.

The drafters and supporters of this bill have done what many thought was impossible: They've made Justice Scalia look like a liberal.

Again, hyperbole that does not advance their argument, but which perhaps further advances the argument that they are finding it difficult to base their opposition on anything other than gut-level fears.

The National Rifle Association championed the bill, and House Democratic leaders caved in to its demand that the bill be brought to a vote after the organization threatened to withhold endorsements of conservative Democrats in tight races this year. Conscientious senators of both parties must now stand up to these intimidation tactics and prevent a dangerously bad bill from becoming law.

Unlike the editors of the Post, who have decided that they will attempt to tell you how to think, I'll do what they will not.

Here is the full text of House Resolution 6842, otherwise know as the National Capital Security and Safety Act. Read it for yourself.

Note that the law merely extends Second Amendment rights commonly held in the rest of the 50 states to citizens of Washington, D.C, and abolishes a patently silly D.C. law that arbitrarily labeled nearly every magazine-fed firearm machine guns.

And once you've read the law, and noted how the Post has chosen to misrepresent it, wonder how you can ever trust them to objectively report or editorialize on any subject, ever again.

Calabrese: Media Ignores Obama's Undermining His Own Country, Because They Want The Same Things

It is now becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama, in a meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, tried to undermine his own country's negotiations with Iraq during his July visit to Baghdad. Even the Obama campaign can't deny it because there were multiple witnesses to the exchange.

So once again, conservatives begin raising the question: Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? They're treating it like they treated the John Edwards affair story, which they ignored until they no longer could. But this is much more serious. The Democratic nominee for president of the United States attempted to scuttle a crucial status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and the government of Iraq. He blatantly urged the Iraqis to stop negotiating with the Bush Administration and wait until the next president – presumably him, at least as far as he's concerned – takes office.

[snip]

Why is the mainstream media ignoring the story? Well, first and foremost, because they want Obama to win the election. But it goes deeper than that. They're ignoring the story because they don't see anything wrong with what Obama did.

I'd love to give you more but that would violate fair use guidelines, so go here to read the rest.

Barack Obama illegally interjected himself into U.S. foreign policy and blatantly attempted to undermine a sitting President, secure in the knowledge that the Justice Department will not charge him with a law that hasn't been enforced in over 200 years, and knowing that the media doesn't care.

Want media attention?

Have some half-wit bail bondsman, head-wound patient, or strung-out meth junkies thrown in jail for threatening to kill Obama, even though not a single one of them could be considered a serious threat.

You'll get coverage in every major national and international news outlet for days as they fall all over each other to report that these isolated incidents are an example of how average, inbred racist rubes (Americans) cannot stand the thought of a Halfrican-American President.

But when Obama meddles in affairs that touches the lives of 140,000 soldiers—white, black, brown, yellow, and red—in a combat zone, purely for his personal political advantage?

Dead silence.

Not. A. Word.

It's a matter of priorities, folks. They want to protect Barack Obama, no matter how many Americans he endangers.

But who is going to protect us from him?

The Best They Can Get?

Air America talk radio host Randi Rhodes, last seen here almost a year ago when she claimed she was assaulted, before it was exposed that the culprit who knocked out her teeth was her own liver acting in self defense, is back in the news again.

Rhodes asserted Sarah Palin was a potential child molester, and sadly, no, I'm not kidding.

Rhodes is the same Air America host that recently claimed John McCain was treated well by the North Vietnamese that tortured him, and he has a lengthy history of other embarrassing rants that make liberals look like mean-spirited, ignorant fools... kinda like Obama's latest ad against McCain over email.

I'm not surprised at all that Rhodes would chose to stay in the gutter as that is very much her shtick. But is she really the among the best liberal talk radio has to offer?

WaPo Reporter Distorts Palin Deployment Speech

The willingness of the press to lie to undercut Sarah Palin is really getting obscene:

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

Anne E. Kornblut, just stop.

Unless Kornblut buried the lede, Palin said precisely nothing about Saddam Hussein or his government at all or any roll they may have had in 9/11. Kornblut simply made that up, because she wanted Palin to say that.

When Palin referenced "...the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans," is was an obvious reference to al Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot of the parent al Qaeda organization that plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, and while still funds and loosely controls the failing Iraqi branch.

And the parent organization is not happy with the branch office:

Al Qaeda's senior leadership has lost confidence in its commander in Iraq and views the situation in the country as dire, according to a series of letters intercepted by Multinational Forces Iraq earlier this year.

The letters, which have been sent exclusively to The Long War Journal by Multinational Forces Iraq, are a series of communications between Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second in command, Abu Ayyub al Masri, al Qaeda in Iraq's leader, and Abu Omar al Baghdadi, the leader of al Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq. These letters were intercepted by Coalition forces in Baghdad on April 24, 2008. One of the letters written by Zawahiri is dated March 6, 2008.

[snip]

"The letters confirmed our assessment that Al Qaeda has suffered significant damage and serious reverses in Iraq, including widespread rejection of [al Qaeda in Iraq's] indiscriminate violence, extremist ideology, and oppressive practices," General David Petraeus, the Commander of Multinational Forces Iraq told The Long War Journal. "Even Zawahiri recognized that [al Qaeda in Iraq] has lost credibility in Iraq."

Sarah Palin was obviously addressing the living al Qaeda terrorists that soldiers would face in Iraq, no the ghosts of a regime long dead. How biased or simply dishonest does a reporter have to be to twist that?

Here's a novel concept: why don't reporters limit themselves to reporting facts.

Or is that simply too much to ask for a media more interested in selecting a President than electing one?

Glass Houses

Sure, I can understand Fox News wanting to laugh at CNN for not being able to spot a Photoshopped picture of Sarah Palin's head on another woman's gun-toting, bikini clad body as a fake...

...but if they are going to mock the incompetence of other news organizations for not spotting a obvious fake, then should we let Fox off the hook for letting the description of the weapon she is holding as an "AK-47" stand, when it is decidedly not?

Reality Checked at MSNBC

Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews have been relieved of their anchor duties at MSNBC:

MSNBC tried a bold experiment this year by putting two politically incendiary hosts, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, in the anchor chair to lead the cable news channel's coverage of the election.

That experiment appears to be over.

After months of accusations of political bias and simmering animosity between MSNBC and its parent network NBC, the channel decided over the weekend that the NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host David Gregory would anchor news coverage of the coming debates and election night. Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Matthews will remain as analysts during the coverage.

The change — which comes in the home stretch of the long election cycle — is a direct result of tensions associated with the channel's perceived shift to the political left.

Frankly, I haven't watched Matthews or Olbermann during their stints as anchors, so I can't pretend to tell you with any certainty why they were pulled, but based upon why I know of them prior to their anchor duties, I would not be surprised if their was a perception of open Obama partisanship in their coverage that damaged MSNBC's credibility as a news organization.

I can tell you that news of the end of their run is helping create something of a Rorschach test exposing the biases of the political blogosphere. Simply scan the responses to the news of their dismissal and you'll see what I mean.

Of particular interest — from my perspective, anyway — was how some of the most radical leftist sites seemed to take their removal as a personal affront.

MSNBC may have tilted left as a business decision, but I wonder how carefully they calculated the downside of courting a politically-motivated audience that takes policy and programming so personally. Such a relationship may be advantageous if the network and audience remain on the same page, but such devotion is fickle as well as intense, and it appears that if a network deviates from the exact kind of coverage the audience prefers, then the backlash will be both intense and immediate.

By responding to the replacement of Matthews and Olbermann with such ferocity and anger towards MSNBC, the liberal audience may very well have dissuaded future forays into more liberal programming by MSNBC or other broadcasters.

Why should broadcasters take a programming risk, if the upside is minimal, and the downside can be so adverse?

By responding with such venom, the far left netroots have let their anger get the better of them once again.

Shocker: L.A. Progressive Writer Who Smeared Palin as a Racist and Sexist is a Life-Long Liberal With a Severe Hatred of Republicans

The LA Progressive post attacking Sarah Palin as a racist and a sexist that has been swallowed unquestioningly by the dimmer lights of the progressive blogosphere is the work of one Charley James.

Who is Charley James?

James is a far left-wing blogger that views radical activist web site Democracy Now! as "one of the few news and public affairs programs delivering real news"... perhaps not that surprising for the kind of person shocked that some damnable Americans in progressive Canada didn't appreciate his "Bush Lied/They Died" tee shirt.

James, who has been blogging at The Political Curmudgeon since June of this year, claims to be an independent investigative journalist, and I have no doubt that he is.

Why, just check out his unimpeachable fact-checking methodology:

To verify what friends were writing, I called the St. Paul Mayor’s Office (615.266.8510) where I was directed to the police (651.291.1111). A PR woman for the cops said I had to talk to the Secret Service (612.348.1800), which refused to answer any questions but asked for the spelling of my name before telling me to call Homeland Security (202.282.8000) where repeated calls were not returned. I tracked down the cell phone number of the St. Paul convention office of the Republican National Committee where the man who answered claimed to have no idea what I was talking about, helpfully suggesting I call the police before suddenly asking how I got the number. Ring around the rosy.

It was like trying to get an answer from Dick Cheney’s office. Translation: The e-mails were accurate.

This stellar journalist uses the long-validated "Olbermann method" of confirmation, where the inability to collect evidence to the contrary proves the worse rumors about your enemies are true.

So by all means, when Charley James writes that Sarah Palin is a racist that hates Eskimos, don't let the fact that she's been married to one for the past 20 years get in the way.

And the Beast Shall Eat Itself

A hot microphone, a revelation of dishonesty, and the violation of a long-held gentleman's agreement destroyed the credibility of the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan today, and may have changed the complexion of the American news media forever.

Noonan published an article just this morning labeling Sarah Palin as "a real and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy."

This same afternoon on MSNBC after a segment with NBC's Chuck Todd, Republican consultant Mike Murphy and Noonan were captured on still-live microphones ridiculing McCain's running mate.

Every indication is that the raw video was leaked directly from an increasingly partisan MSNBC to liberal blog Talking Points Memo.

With that leak, Noonan's credibility as a columnist was severely damaged if not destroyed, a fact she seems to realize even as she becomes the first casualty as a long held gentleman's agreement among journalists to overlook each others biases, faults, mistakes and lies has been ripped apart. The media now no longer looks after their own, and naked partisanship is now the order of the day.

After being exposed, Noonan wrote that she was "mugged by the nature of modern media," which is both absolutely true and utterly irrelevant.

Noonan revealed herself a hypocrite, and MSNBC, a network that has abandoned all illusions of objective journalism in favor of naked advocacy for Barack Obama and an exclusive allegiance to partisan politics of the far left wing of the Democratic Party, shattered a common courtesy between journalists, in order to tear another journalist down for a minor temporary gain.

All bets are off now, all gentleman's agreements dead.

Welcome to the real world, kids.

Brian Ross: Caught in the Smear

Brian Ross of ABC News is letting his political biases show in a most unseemly way.

Ross' article, Another Controversy for Sarah Palin, attempts to undermine the Republican Vice Presidential candidate by insinuating there is still some some controversy surrounding Palin's firing of the Wasilla Police Chief more than a decade ago.

Says Ross in his lede:

Gov. Sarah Palin is already facing ethical questions over her firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, and now she faces questions over the firing of a longtime local police chief.

Now faces?

The lawsuit filed in 1997 by the police chief, Irl Stambaugh, was dismissed by the judge, as Palin had every right to replace him and other town officials. As a matter of public record, other officials were also pushed out of office on Palin's reform pledge, but Ross inexplicably refuses to mention their firings. Ross seeks to frame resolved history as a current scandal, and then tie it the dismissal of public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, roughly a decade later.

This is dishonest advocacy journalism at it's most naked, and ABC News owes Sarah Palin a retraction and an apology.

Accurate as Ever at the L.A. Times

Richard Serrano published a story in the Los Angeles on Sunday entitled U.S. guns arm Mexican drug cartels.

In a marked improvement in the accuracy of Times stories, Serrano did not utter a factual inaccuracy until the third word of the article's first sentence.

High-powered automatic weapons and ammunition are flowing virtually unchecked from border states into Mexico, fueling a war among drug traffickers, the army and police that has left thousands dead, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

The rifles being picked up along the border are of course not automatic weapons—machine guns—but are instead semi-automatic weapons which fire one bullet per trigger pull.

Further down in the article Serrano relates without question the claim that the FN Five-seveN pistol is armor-piercing, without bothering to see if armor-piercing ammunition is available for the pistols in the United States... and of course, it isn't, being barred for all but military and police sale by federal law.

Being ever helpful, I sent Mr. Serrano an email explaining where his story was wrong and needed corrections. Serrano has thus far neither responded, nor corrected his article.

In hopes of spurring some sort of interest in correcting the article, I emailed the National section editors of the Times, and made the radical suggestion that for future articles, they may want to consider interviewing actual gun experts instead of Mexican drug dealers when discussing the capabilities of firearms.

I doubt they'll listen to such suggestions, but we can always hope.

HuffPo: War in Georgia Engineered To Help McCain

Sadly, he appears to be serious:

In classic "Wag The Dog" scenario there is a neat little war brewing between American and Russian proxies, and real Russian troops, in the Caucacus Mountains on the Russian border.

It couldn't come at a better time for the Republicans.

McCain gets to act and talk tough against the Russians, while Obama is on vacation in Hawaii, issuing "can't we all get along statements."

It perfectly augments Republican campaign points: Obama is not ready. He is not tough, experienced enough to deal with a dangerous world.

Do you appreciate the power and planning that went into this? I don't think you do.

Not only did McCain engineer the build-up of Russian forces along the border of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, he also orchestrated the Georgian offer of a ceasefire last week, the South Ossetia separatist's response of shelling Georgia, and the Georgian counterstrike that triggered the pre-planned Russian invasion— all carefully timed to coincide with Barack Obama's vacation.

As it is obvious to see, thousands of people have been killed and a country invaded and ripped apart, just to give John McCain a chance to sound tough. But the plot is even more insidious than HuffPo author Blake Fleetwood suggests.

Not only did McCain carefully orchestrate three armed forces in two countries in such a way that it looked like they were acting selfishly in their own best interests instead of as agents of a U.S. Presidential campaign, he also managed to convince Barack Obama to give a spineless response that made McCain sound like a far more knowledgeable, experienced, and competent leader that OBama has ever pretended to be.

The kicker?

In the absolutely most fantabulous move of all, McCain then convinced Obama to flip-flop on his previous spineless position to poorly echo McCain's stance, reinforcing it as the correct one, while gutting his own credibility and showing himself to be hopelessly incapable of performing as a President.

John McCain. He bends steel and breaks candidates and countries with his mind.

Hiding the Body

It was bad enough yesterday when CNN and CBS-4 selectively edited the story about the arrest of Raymond Hunter Geisel, a man who had made threats again both Barack Obama and President George W. Bush.

Associated Press journalist Curt Anderson had one of the first accounts, if not the very first account of the arrest, posted online yesterday mid-afternoon, and it clearly noted both Obama and Bush had been threatened (my bold below).

A man is being held in Florida by federal authorities on charges of threatening to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Raymond Hunter Geisel was ordered held without bail Thursday at a brief court hearing.

The Secret Service says Geisel made the threat during a training class for bail bondsmen in Miami in late July. Another tipster said Geisel also threatened President Bush.

A search of Geisel's SUV and hotel room uncovered a loaded handgun, knives, dozens of rounds of ammunition, body armor and a machete. The SUV was wired with emergency lights.

Geisel told the Secret Service he was originally from Bangor, Maine. He contended he made no threat against either Obama or the president.

It was this story that CBS-4 doctored in their original report. They rewrote the lede sentence, but otherwise copied Anderson's account word-for-word, with the pointed removal of the key sentence in the middle paragraph, "Another tipster said Geisel also threatened President Bush."

CBS-4 removed that sentence, and moved the following paragraph up to cover the gap. Contacted this morning for comment, CBS-4 has thus far declined to provide a response explaining why they doctored the article.

CNN had the same information as the AP and CBS-4, and like CBS-4, they chose to edit out references to Bush, even though they were far more competent in their doctoring of the story, leaving behind no "tells." Their version of the doctored story stayed online for 2-4 hours before being updated, well after the damage was done.

But even after finally posting the full story after being called out by one of their commenters (and shutting down the comments section 2 minutes later), CNN wasn't quite done with their attempt to generate political and racial tensions. Now, they're now busily trying to cover their tracks.

This morning you can still access the original URL of the CNN story at:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/07/breaking-man-held-for-obama-assassination-threat/

You'll only likely to get there via a direct link from a blogger, however.

If you go to the CNN Political Ticker and scroll down, the exact same story (text and headline are identical, with a link to the SS affidavit now added in the third paragraph of the replacement) now has this URL:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/08/new-details-man-held-for-alleged-obama-assassination-threat/

Perhaps most telling however, is that all the comments associated from the previous story—the racially-tinged, politically motivated anger they helped generate with their selective editing—have not been ported over to the new URL.

CNN altered their original story to gin up outrage against someone they helped to portray as a "typical" racist right-winger, instead of the equal opportunity, anti-authority whackjob the more complete AP story and the very Secret Service affidavits CNN obtained seemed to indicate.

They doctored the story, and by swapping out the URLs and hiding the contents, they're attempting to play a very subtle game of hiding the evidence of the paranoia and anger they helped manufacture by shifting to a new, comment-free URL on the CNN Political Ticker Web site, while still maintaining the old URL with the comments, perhaps in hopes that those bloggers and journalists who have already linked to the primary URL won't catch up with their sleight of hand.

CNN edited out the threats against President Bush to help build on fears in the African American community and among the political left that an intolerant, racist white conservative may attempt to assassinate Barack Obama, and now they've attempted to cover up the fear they helped stoke by moving the comments generated out of public view, while attempting to deceive the bloggers who linked to the original story by leaving online, but hidden.

It didn't work, and CNN has a lot to answer for.

Advocacy Journalism Today: WaPo/Mosk Just Keeps Coming

After having Matthew Mosk's attack on John McCain discredited within hours yesterday, the Washington Post was forced into running this embarrassing correction to the A1 story.

Correction to This Article
An earlier version of this story about campaign donations that Florida businessman Harry Sargeant III raised for Sen. John McCain, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton incorrectly identified three individuals as being among the donors Sargeant solicited on behalf of McCain. Those donors -- Rite Aid manager Ibrahim Marabeh, and lounge owners Nadia and Shawn Abdalla -- wrote checks to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain. Also, the first name of Faisal Abdullah, a McCain donor, was misspelled in some versions of the story.

In other words, the premise of the entire article was fatally undermined because a Obama-supporting journalist and his editors didn't take the time to do the basic fact-checking Amanda Carpenter did in a matter of minutes.

The same "journalist", Mosk had attempted to smear McCain in a previous manufactured story about a land deal in May.

The Washington Post's editors, perhaps thinking they can save on the cost of paper and ink by adopting the editorial business practices of the New York Times, let Mosk go to print again today with another smear, one that amounted to stating that—gosh darn it!—there was nothing illegal going on with MCCain's fund-raising, but there should be:

Sargeant told The New York Times this morning that he at times left the task of collecting the checks to a longtime business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a. The problem with that is that Abu Naba'a is not an American citizen. According to court records, Abu Naba'a is a dual citizen of Jordan and the Dominican Republic.

The law on this question appears to be unclear, said Fred Wertheimer, a campaign finance expert who runs the advocacy group, Democracy 21.

"There's probably very little law on this," Wertheimer said. "If it is not illegal for a foreign national to bundle checks, it ought to be, since it's illegal for a foreign national to make contributions in the first place."

As even as Democracy 21 admits, there is nothing illegal about a legal foreign national collecting the legal contributions of law-abiding Americans for a Presidential candidate.

What is perhaps even more revealing that what they said, however, is Mosk's decision to use them as a source. Democracy 21 is a far left advocacy group, run by a former Democratic Senator Dick Clark, and is funded by both George Soros' Open Society Institute, and the Joyce Foundation—yes, where Barack Obama sat on the Board of Directors for eight years.

Mosk's choice of sources is only slightly more objective than contacting MoveOn.Org for their opinion.

Paul Ryan, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, said the Federal Election Commission has not explicitly addressed the question. Ryan said there appeared to be conflicting thoughts on this in a 2004 advisory opinion. For instance, in one opinion the FEC has advised that it is permissible for a foreign national to solicit a contribution, while in another it prohibits foreign nationals from playing any role in participation in a candidate's election activities, such as decisions concerning the making of contributions.

"There's a little bit of tension between these two different interpretations," Ryan said.

Matthew Mosk hasn't been able to find a way to smear John McCain, despite three abortive attempts. The questions isn't so much why Mosk is against McCain, but why the editors of the Washington Post keep letting themselves be used as a platform for his specious attacks.

Choose The Facts You Want...

...as there seem to be plenty of "facts" to choose from.

James Hider in the UK TimesOnline is just one journalist of many rushing to tell the tragic story of a young Palestinian ruthlessly gunned down by an Israeli soldier:

Israeli soldiers shot dead a young Palestinian boy today during heated protests in a West Bank village close to Israel's huge separation barrier.

Hammad Hossam Mussa, believed to be around nine years old, was mortally wounded by an Israeli bullet as protestors threw rocks near the West Bank close to the village of Nilin.

[snip]

Salah Al Khawaja, a member of Nilin's Committee Against the Wall, said Israeli troops fired live rounds at a group of protesters who ran into Nilin after security forces dispersed demonstrators using rubber-coated bullets.

"Protesters arrived at the wall's construction site outside the village and the soldiers started to open fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. This pushed the protesters back into the village where the boy was hit by a live bullet in his chest," he said.

It doesn't much look like a chest wound.

Other news accounts offer variations of the basic story that roughly corroborate the image, though the L.A. Times reports that the boy was in a crowd; the New York Times claims he was resting under a tree. Also, the boy's age ranges from 9, to 10, to 11, to 12 depending on the news outlet.

It's very sloppy journalism, but symptomatic of reporting from the region.

Interestingly, according to the New York Times, the Israeli Army "had no knowledge of the shooting."

The IHT states that Palestinian officials refused an Israeli request for a joint autopsy, which may cause some raised eyebrows considering the Palestinian history of faking deaths even on video. The Palestinian autopsy states that the bullet that killed the boy came from an M16, a weapon both sides have.

It will be interesting to see the results of the Israeli investigation into this case, even though judgement has already been passed in the eyes of the word's media.

SHOCKER: Media Gives Up On Losing Iraq; Transitions to Plan to Lose Afghanistan In Its Stead

We always knew they were unable to accept victory, so it perhaps shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a U.S. media unable to secure defeat in Iraq has given up on betraying that democracy, and is instead executing a pivot, beginning an attempt to lose the Afghan war instead.

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a startling 45 percent of Americans said they do not think the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting, despite the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which provoked the war in the first place.

The growing disenchantment with the Afghan deployment hasn't reached the level of national frustration with the Iraq war, but after more than six years with U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan and violence on the rise, Americans are becoming increasingly wary about the country's involvement.

As mentioned just yesterday, many of today's top writers, anchors, columnists, editors, producers and publishers cut their journalistic teeth during the Vietnam War era, and have never been able—nor is there evidence there there ever been a serious attempt—to shift away from covering wars through a Vietnam-era lens.

For them, wars are never worth fighting. Their editorial focus will always be:

• a push for withdrawal instead of resolving a conflict through victory;
• playing up U.S. casualties, while downplaying or ignoring enemy casualties;
• dramatic emphasis on unexpected U.S. setbacks, with a minimization of tactical and strategic successes;
• a one-sided focus on U.S. military-attributed civilian combat casualties, while largely ignoring civilian casualties caused by opposing military forces;
• an emphasis on finding Americans tired of or opposed to the conflict suffering low morale, with no attempt to present opposing populations as anything other than a stoic, unyielding monolith whose primitive will cannot be broken(so we might as well go home);
• a one-sided focus on indirect traumas suffered by the civilian population, while ignoring the poverty, healthcare, and human rights concerns caused by the opposing forces;
• an over-reliance and benefit of the doubt given to those alleging accounts detrimental to U.S. interests, where that means giving credence to allegations of civilians harmed by U.S. military operations without evidence of such harm (already commonplace in Afghan War reporting, where it seems U.S. bombs consistently hit only wedding parties made up of innocent women and children) while often ignoring direct atrocities performed by the opposing force against civilians;
• attempted moral equivalence—masked as "objectivity"— between U.S. forces and political and/or ideological movements famous for cruelty.

Journalists have been conditioned to report through such a distorted perspective that it is little wonder at all that even the "good" and "just" response of a war against the Taliban for their role in the attacks of 9/11 must now be twisted in such a way that it can be reported from the only perspective the media knows (or more accurately, cares to know) in viewing and covering wars fought by Americans. While the U.S. military has adapted to fighting new kinds of conflicts, the media is still using corrosive and corroded story templates older than much of their target audience.

"Modern" war coverage is an utterly self-defeating, self-loathing enterprise, and we bear much of the blame for what we see, for we still accept and still consume a defective news product. What motive do the media have to change, if we, the news consumers, don't clearly articulate to the industry why we are no longer buying failing newspapers, or believing that news outlets are acting without preconceived biases? We have let them stick to what is for them, a comfortable agenda.

ABC News is in no way alone in their tonal shift in Afghan coverage, as other outlets doubtlessly came before them, and certainly more news outlets will follow. They are still fighting the last war using the tactics and strategies they are most comfortable with. They are fighting to lose.

Will we let them?

Is The U.S. Media Ready to Concede an Iraqi Victory? Can the Democrats?

I don't think it is an exaggeration to claim that Michael Yon has spent more front-line time with combat forces in Iraq than any journalist for any media organization, so it bears noting when he claims that "...the Iraq War is over. We won."

When another well-traveled independent, Michael Totten, pens a post stating that he is "reluctant" to claim that the war is over—noting that insurgencies don't have official end points such as surrenders—but then provides evidence that it is certainly trending in that direction, it is time to pay attention.

Both Yon and Totten make very well be correct; what remains in Iraq is not a military action best described as a "war" in a conventional sense, and with violence continuing to abate and various militant factions increasingly unable to mount sustained operations of any intensity or duration, calling it even an unconventional war is something a stretch.

Whatever conflict remains it is not a "war," and we can let others quibble over whether the best description of what now remains is a peace-keeping mission, a police action, or something else.

The Sunni insurgency is finished. The sectarian civil war is over. The conflict against al Qaeda in Iraq has been reduced to intelligence-gathering and SWAT-like raids against surviving stragglers and fractured terrorists cells. The Madhi Army has been broken, its leaders killed, captured, or forced to flee to Iran, while the rank and file have faded away as their fellow Shia turned over their weapons caches and turned in militiamen that were often merely criminal thugs. Attrition among Iranian-backed "special groups" has also rendered them incapable of sustaining more than random attacks.

Barring an unforeseen and at this point unlikely and dramatic reversal, the Iraq War is over, and we—and more importantly, the Iraqi's—won.

The U.S. media is beginning to begrudgingly concede to a new reality, but only obliquely. CNN (and Fox News) ran an AP article this morning about bored young soldiers in Iraq seeking action in "the real war in Afghanistan," because they are not seeing any combat in Iraq. It isn't however, a concession of what should be increasingly obvious.

It will be hard—and for some U.S. media outlets that took an extreme position based more upon attempts to shape the politics of the war instead of reporting the news of the conflict, almost impossible—for the U.S. media to admit that the Iraq War ended in victory. The New York Times is one of these outlets that will have a very tough time, as will the McClatchy chain of newspapers, various magazines including TIME and Newsweek, cable news channel MSNBC, and all three networks. Various fringe outlets, particularly those with strong left-leaning politics such as The Nation or Mother Jones, or online outlets such as the Huffington Post or other liberal blogs, may attempt to somehow "redefine" their way into a "loss" by changing the definition of victory, or they may simply decide to never address the subject at all, and hope instead it fades away while they draw their readers elswhere.

For those outlets that made the conflict in Iraqi an editorial attempt to "fight the last war," it will be a bitter defeat. Many of today's top writers, anchors, columnists, editors, producers and publishers cut their editorial teeth and felt at the height of their power at a time when the media shaped a narrative that ended a war and brought down a president that indeed, was a crook. But despite five years of attempts to frame it as such, Iraq was never Vietnam in the desert. The U.S. media was never able to break out of that mindset to any degree, and indeed, relished in the comparisons.

So sure were they of a U.S. defeat that they even made using local propagandists as journalists and sources part of their standard reporting, with little or any probing, vetting, or serious questions asked. From repeatedly seeking comment from an Association of Muslim Scholars openly aligned with the Sunni insurgency (typically without disclosing those insurgent ties), to regularly citing phoned-in reports from anonymous police and military sources miles or even provinces away as they called in one fake massacre after another with reckless abandon, wire services ran fake news without an attempt to vet the stories, because it fit the narrative. It didn't matter that mosques weren't burned with people inside. It didn't matter that dozens of beheaded bodies reported in sectarian violence simply didn't exist. Such stories, real or fake, portrayed the war they wanted.

Reporters and editors who ran such stories were not only not fired by their news agencies for their continued incompetence. Some were instead promoted. There was no penalty for faked or exaggerated news, because it was the extreme, the diabolical, and the hopeless that these news agencies wanted to print, and they weren't all that concerned about where the stories came from.

Now, without another defeat to place on the mantle, U.S. media outlets are unsure of how to act. While even British and Australian newspapers were declaring victory almost a year ago, American outlets simply can't make the admission that they fought the last war, and that a Congress they pushed to help lose the war was unable to hand them the defeat they think we deserved.

Ah, Congress.

Though Democrats have controlled the House and Senate, had public option on their side (thanks to the cooperative shaping of the news), and fiercely antiwar leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, Congressional Democrats were shot down over 40 times (was it over 50? I lost count) in attempts to lose the war by defunding or underfunding it.

And while the media's own attempts to frame a lost war were horrific, it was duly elected Congressmen and Senators who attacked the Presidential Administration, the military commanders, and even the solders on the front lines with the most viciousness. To this day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Harry Reid refuse to admit that the war in Iraq is not lost, and is instead very close to being (or is already) won. John Murtha has not apologized to Marines he accused of cold-blooded murder, even as charges against all but one have been dismissed (the last has yet to come to trial).

And then there is Barack Obama.

A gifted speaker with the hardest of hard-left roots, the political neophyte and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee has refused to admit he was wrong on the war, and though unassailable facts overran his narrative of defeat, he clung and (continues to cling) to a plan for a panicked retreat designed to create a security vacuum and lose a war he thought should never have been fought.

The media, enamored with their Obama as their last best hope for defeat, will follow him in fawning praise as he make a superficial swing through the region to "talk" to military commanders—be assured, he has no intention of actually listening—about the war in Iraq. In the end, will no doubt still return with Dubya's bulldog tenacity to his predetermined plan of defeat. His storied, heavily self-promoted anti-war wishes and a determined cry abandon the conflict at all costs has been the root cause and defining issue his campaign. Obama will cling to it with the grim, fatalistic determination of a suicide bomber.

The U.S. media has pinned their hopes on Obama as their best and perhaps only hope of bringing about an end to the Iraq war that they can cast as a defeat. Are they ready to concede that the Iraq War was won?

Not as long as they have any hope at all that Democrats can salvage a defeat.

Update: Rick Moran has related thoughts on Obama's strange redefinition of "victory" through surrender at Right Wing Nut House.

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Ya-hooey!

Remember this picture from yesterday?

It is still on Yahoo's photostream with the (still active) caption:

US soldiers secure the area at a newly installed check-point at the Babadag training facility in Tulcea, Iraq. A string of suicide attacks against Iraqi security forces killed at least 37 people on Tuesday, including 28 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up among a crowd of army recruits, security officials said. (AFP/Daniel Mihailescu)

Sharp-eyed CY reader BohicaTwentyTwo pointed out the obvious visual clues that the photo and caption quite simply doesn't match up.

The soldiers in the photos were wearing MILES (Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System) training equipment, and the blank-firing adapters on the end of each weapon (more obvious on the bright red adapter on the M4 in the foreground, though the pull-ring on the MG's black-firing adapter in the turret in the background was also clearly visible).

As blank-firing MILES training gear makes it impossible to "secure" anything, it was obvious that the photo was mis-captioned. A second look at the photo also revealed that an obsolete BDU woodland camo pattern was mixed with the new ACU camo pattern used by the Army, and the HMMWV in the photo was an unarmored version also painted in woodland, whereas the HMMWV presently deployed to Iraq is the desert tan up-armored version. Even the foliage in the background seemed suspect. A quick scan of photographer Daniel Mihailescu's work also placed him in Romania less than five days earlier. How did he get to an obscure corner of Iraq so quickly?

I was quick to blame the AFP for this error (considering their history of photo captioning errors, it was a reasonable assumption), but as slublog first noted in the comments at Hot Air, the caption above was not the caption that ran with the original photo.

This was (click here for larger).

The caption sent out by AFP (as was the screen cap sent by AFP above as evidence) read:

ROMANIA, BABADAG : US soldiers secure the area at a new installed check-point at Babadag training facility in the county of Tulcea, during a joint task force-east rotation 2008 training exercise, on July 14, 2008. Over 900 US military personnel participates at the training exercise meant to train US and Romanian soldiers in simulated combat situations as well as improving the mixt [sic]team working capabilities on the war fields like Iraq and Afganistan. AFP PHOTO / DANIEL MIHAILESCU

The photo in question had nothing to do with the events in Iraq. As noted above, the Babadag training facility in the county of Tulcea is in the country of Romania.

This photo:

1. Was recaptioned by Yahoo;
2. Was recaptioned to associate it with events that occurred roughly 1,500 miles away, and a day later;
3. Did not be long in Yahoo's "Iraq" photostream at all.

We knew before that the originators and publishers/end users can fake photos and/or captions to create fauxtography.

Thanks to Yahoo's caption manipulation, we now know we have to worry about the middlemen as well.

AFP Blows it Again Maybe Not This Time [Updated]

[See the final update at the bottom -- ed.]

So I'd like AFP to explain one simple thing to me about this photo:

US soldiers secure the area at a newly installed check-point at the Babadag training facility in Tulcea, Iraq. At least 28 people were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowd of recruits on an Iraqi army base in an area known to be a stronghold of Al-Qaeda fighters. (AFP/Daniel Mihailescu)

Just how is it possible that U.S. combat forces are protecting the site of the Babadag training facility in Tulcea, Iraq when equipped with non-lethal MILES gear that fires nothing but blanks?

And do we even train with MILES gear in Iraq?

I call shenanigans.

Update: The vehicle in the photo a non-up-armored HMMWV, painted in an obsolete woodland camo pattern (as are the vests of both soldiers, and helmet cover of the solder in the HMMWV), a pattern no longer used by U.S. forces in Iraq.

This picture is probably several years old, and is probably taken somewhere other than Iraq.

The photographer, Daniel Mihailescu, was theoretically in Bucharest, Romania, just five days ago, in order to take this picture. Is it even a practical possibility that the sports photographer even get from Bucharest to Iraq in less than five days?

They have the details of the event completely wrong.. did AFP they credit the wrong photographer as well?

Update: Wrong Date, Wrong Country, Wrong Event. They did, however, credit the correct photographer. Thanks to slublog in the comments at Hot Air.

Final Update: After continued digging involving the help of the U.S miltary and AFP itself, the source of this screw-up has been confirmed, and it isn't the AFP.

Surprise!

Details tomorrow; even bloggers have to sleep.

(h/t CY-reader BohicaTwentyTwo)

Tony Snow, Dead at 53

A charming press secretary for President Bush, conservative pundit, and Fox News anchor, Tony Snow has lost a long battle with cancer. Ed Morrissey offers a personal reflection of a genuinely nice man at Hot Air.

More reflections will no doubt be captured throughout the day at Memeorandum.com.

Our prayers go out in support of his family.

Network News: If We Can't Lose The War, We'll Act Like It Doesn't Exist

Someone please tell CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan that her reaction is precisely the reaction her peers are shooting for:

"If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts," Ms. Logan said.

Logan admits here a common complaint about the kind of news reported out of Iraq for the duration of the war, which is a macabre focus on blood-soaked sensationalism to the near exclusion of any other sort of story.

The newsworks (to perhaps coin a phrase) have never been interesting in reporting all the news, a fact that far predates television. News outlets—both state-controlled and private—have had a propaganda role throughout history. What may be unique among western news organizations is an often obvious desire to present only one side of the story, even when they have the option of objectivity. They are guilty of providing propaganda just as state-run media often are, but are often blind to this, confusing the biased views they advocate with "truth."

This bias is often wrongly blamed upon the political leanings of a news outlets ownership. In days past (and perhaps in the New York Times present), family control over an outlet may have strongly influenced the focus and bias of news organizations, but the modern reality of corporate news ownership, with organizations and divisions of news organizations being bought, sold, fragmented, consolidated, and always for sale, has rendered that argument laughably simplistic and out of date.

No, in the modern era where news is viewed by "suits" as another potential revenue stream and not a public service, "news" is pushed to be shallow infotainment providing immediate gratification. It is under this pressure-cooker environment that producers, editors and journalists are forced to drop even the pretense of objectivity and produce news quickly, cheaply and sensationally. This pressure brings personal biases out in sharp relief. Journalists, which have self-defined themselves time and again as being left-of-center in their world views and based in bias-reinforcing left-of-center urban enclaves, pushed by business-oriented ownership focused on ratings, have succumbed to their baser instincts, leading us into situation where news is reduced to little more than a veneer of political advocacy attempting to guide the public on how they should think about current events. From global cooling global warming global cooling climate change, to views of conflicts, the proper application of diplomacy, and even the kind of lightbulbs we use, the media attempts to shape how we think by presenting the news they deem newsworthy from a perspective they deem correct.

Reality, however, does not have a leftward bias (neither does it have a rightward bias). Reality, like nature, seeks equilibrium... balance.

The reaction of the newsworks is simple when reality intrudes on the narrative: they dispute it, then they ignore it, and if they can no longer ignore it, they pretend that they never held a contrary position.

Presently, the falloff in news coverage in Iraq is the result of media attempting to ignore that the "quagmire in a failed state" narrative they've been promoting has been failing for over a year.

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been "massively scaled back this year." Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The "CBS Evening News" has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC's "World News" and 74 minutes on "NBC Nightly News." (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

I'm sure that psychologists have more precise terms to describe this collective behavior, but it comes down to this: the situation in Iraq is far better than the media have predicted it would be, and they aren't sure what to do. They don't want to report success, as success means having to explain why they've been wrong. They also morbidly hope—no doubt subconsciously—that things will once again turn worse, and vindicate their years of predicting doom and failure.

So coverage withers away. The war becomes a non-event, and thankfully, a Presidential campaign between a far left shape-shifter and an occasional Republican provides a welcome distraction.

The War in Iraq is plenty interesting to Americans. That has never faded in five years, and most would be heartened to hear what independent reporters have been indicating for months; that real progress has been made economically, diplomatically, and militarily.

But the newsworks doesn't want to admit they may have been wrong, and so their interests have now focused eslewhere. They don't want to undermine a political party that long ago made abandoning Iraq a key part of their party platform. They don't want to expose a shameful candidate who has made defeating his own military and abandoning a fledgling democracy his signature issue.

From their perspective, it is better to provide only the bad news, and when the bad news fails to live up to expectations, to ignore the uncomfortable.

Damn the news. Send in the clowns.

AP, Let's Do This Thing

Michelle Malkin's take is typical of bloggers who find the Associated Press' tiered excerpt pricing scheme targeted at bloggers to be farcical, but I think her response of charging the Associated Press for content they cite from bloggers doesn't go far enough.

I propose that in addition to charging AP for using blogger content, that AP be charged editorial fees when bloggers are forced to do the fact checking that in-house editors fail to do. For every blog entry proving than an Associated Press story is using false information or misleading, the Associated Press should pay that blogger the AP-supplied standard of $2.50/word. Just doing a quick check of my content from the present back until the beginning of May, the Associated Press owes me editorial services fees of $2,580 for 1,032 words correcting AP stories dating back to May 2. Some of that would be returned to AP (at $2.50/word) for the text examples I cited, but overall, it is a worthwhile enterprise. If I went back through all of my archives, I suspect that I could easily compile a fact-checking bill for the AP in the tens of thousands of dollars.

You'll not find me complaining about the Associated Press' new ideas of content fees. Their accountants, however, may feel otherwise.

McClatchy's Dying: Who's Got the Will?

You could have seen this coming a mile away:

McClatchy Co., which owns The News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, said Monday it will cut 10 percent of its work force in a move to save $70 million a year as the publisher continues to struggle to attract advertising dollars.

McClatchy, which also owns The Charlotte Observer, the Kansas City Star and Miami Herald, will trim about 1,400 employees. The staff reductions are part of a plan to reduce overall expenses by $95 million to $100 million over the next four quarters.

That is hardly surprising, considering we're in an environment where many print-based news outlets are fading, but perhaps McClatchy in particular wouldn't be fading as fast if they would try to address at least two points.

1. Make an attempt to remove obvious and pervasive left-leaning political biases in reporting;
2. find a less obnoxious and politically-charged slogan that the nutroots favorite, "Truth to Power."

The powers that be are not amused with the company's business sense, and many readers are immediately turned of by McClatchy's editorial stance. A flailing company should try to shore up a reader base, not alienate potential readers and advertisers, who will simply find a less-obviously biased competitor.

Enjoy "speaking truth to power" McClatchy, all the way to bankruptcy.

Tim Russert Dead at 58

I've written hundreds of posts critiquing journalism, but have never had anything but respect for Tim Russerts' professionalism. He was what a journalist should be, and he will be missed.

Go with God, Mr. Russert.

Getting it Right

As human beings, journalists make mistakes. We (I pretend at being one from time to time and actually get paid for it, so I have to include myself) sometimes make a lot of mistakes, or a string of mistakes.

People understand that. They get that we make mistakes—and get this—actually find us more credible when we admit just how badly we screwed up a story, as long as we explained how it happened, and make an honest effort to improve. when we bury our heads in the sand, and refuse to admit obvious mistakes or failures in our reporting, assumptions, editing, or conclusions, we hurt only ourselves.

Right, Dan?

I've been advocating that approach for quite a while now and hope I practice what I preach. At least one person believes I'm doing okay, though I know there is plenty of room for improvement.

Another person I know who constantly works to improve his work is Michael Yon. I don't think he needs much introduction to my readership, and his work as a combat journalist has always stood on its own. Yon is also big on focusing on integrity as a writer, and it is something he has harped on on his site, in interviews, on the phone, and he tells me in his book as well, which I will eventually read once somebody starts sleeping through the night.

Yon published a military memo on his site Wednesday which quickly got the attention of the online community. The sourcing was solid. It was authentic, no doubt about it.

Many bloggers, the military community, and their supporters were quickly outraged over the content of the memo, which alleged that military uniformed personnel we being targeted for verbal abuse by anti-war fanatics. Just as quickly, online anti-war activists claimed that this was false, even noting (though they phrased it differently) that they were too craven and cowardly to berate men and women that could easily beat them into pulp.

I was immediately interested by the report and posted on it, and thought it might be something interesting to follow up on in more detail.

As I did so, Yon pointed out via email that some in his comments were calling it a hoax, and asked me to pursue the story. You can ready about what I found in a post this morning at Pajamas Media.

Now, that may not sound like a big deal, but when was the last time that a journalist at one newspaper encouraged a journalist at another to follow up on his work and check for inconsistencies? How often does it even occur within the same news organization? It very well may happen. In fact, I hope it does... but we don't often see the results of such a check-up, and far to many times we see stories that are utterly false that go uncorrected—*cough*—Brian Ross—*cough*—and the same mistakes or falsehoods reiterated another day.

Yon is interested in getting it right. Perhaps if our journalistic class was more interested in getting it right instead of just getting it out while feigning perfection, the public's respect for them wouldn't be collapsing.

He Says, She Says: The Propaganda War Continues In Iraq

Associated Press reporter Bushra Juhi:

Two Iraqi officials said the shooting occurred about 5:30 a.m. in the Obeidi neighborhood after three roadside bombs targeted joint U.S.-Iraqi troops. But the U.S. military said its forces were not involved in any events in the area.

It was not clear who opened fire after the explosions. Eleven bystanders were killed and one person wounded, one of the police officials said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.

AP Television News footage showed the body of a man in a track suit covered by a blue blanket and another body in a blood-spattered wooden coffin nearby.

AFP offers a near identical account also claiming 11 bystanders (innocence implied) were killed, in accounts obviously coming from the same Iraqi police sources. Insurgents and their sympathizers have routinely masqueraded as police officers throughout the war, and news outlets have dutifully published their accounts, many of which we later determined to be entirely false.

SGT Brooke N. Murphy, MNF-I PAO, responded immediately to these claims via email:

We can definitely state there was no IED attack on a U.S.-Iraqi convoy in Obeidi at dawn this a.m. That's not talking about any particular area, we do not discuss ongoing operations. I can state we specifically target those committing a violent act or about to commit a violent act.

We would warn residents against moving toward any engagement, especially
when armed. We absolutely do not target law-abiding Iraqi citizens.

So there were not 11 (innocent) bystanders killed. Who died? Anyone? As a matter of fact, yes.

Murphy then sent a breaking MNF-I release that states that 11 Iranian-backed "Special Groups" forces were killed in New Baghdad:

Multi-National Division - Baghdad Soldiers have killed 11 Special Group (SG) criminals in an ongoing operation in the New Baghdad security district in eastern Baghdad, May 21.

MND-B Soldiers observed as a special groups militant, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, exited a sports utility vehicle. The individual scanned the area and motioned a suspicious truck forward. Then Soldiers then watched as the militants emplaced an improvised-explosive device.

They engaged the suspect with small-arms fire and killed him.

Nearby, MND-B Soldiers encountered four SG militants, who were armed with AK-47 and RPK rifles, travelling in a SUV. They engaged the vehicle and killed the four militants.

MND-B Soldiers engaged and killed another SG militant carrying a rocket-propelled grenade. At another location in New Baghdad, MND-B Soldiers noticed a SG militant armed with a modified AK-47, who was conducting reconnaissance from a vehicle in a suspicious manner. The Soldiers engaged the armed SG militant and killed him.

Nearby, MND-B Soldiers spotted a militant in an alley. The SG militant moved away from the alley, holding an AK-47 in a firing position. An MND-B Soldier engaged and killed him. Another SG militant, who was driving a tan SUV in New Baghdad, made several passes by MND-B Soldiers.

He stopped the vehicle and attempted to hand an AK-47 to his SG militant cohorts. An MND-B Soldier shot and killed him.

Who do you trust to have the story right, the anonymous media robo-calling police sources, or a named Army soldier issuing formal releases?

Michael Moore: Thief

Something else to his list of descriptors.

John McCain: Commander in Chief of the Israeli Military?

In a story on the L.A. Times blog Top of the Ticket about John McCain's new position that he thinks American combat troops will be out of Iraq by 2013, the Times includes this photo.

Pardon me for asking, but at what point did American Presidents command Israeli solders?

So When Will Chris Matthews Get Fired?

A Fox News staffer was fired this morning. Why? She told John McCain that she voted for him in a primary because her father was a Vietnam veteran.

I kid you not:

A 24-year-old Fox News Channel production assistant was fired this morning for something she said during the red carpet arrivals at the Time 100 Gala last night.

Insiders tell us the assistant, identified as Jennifer Locke, was on assignment with a camera crew to cover the entertainment angle of the event. When Sen. John McCain walked by, the assistant said, "I voted for you in the primary, you're going to win."

McCain was overheard saying to her, "You're not supposed to reveal that." Locke apparently continued to explain that she is the daughter of Vietnam veteran.

McCain is correct. Such disclosures are journalistically unacceptable, and Fox was right to release the staffer on those grounds.

So when is MSNBC going to step up to those same standards and dismiss Chris Matthews for his on-air announcement that Barack Obama caused a"thrill" up his leg? Is telling a candidate that you voted for him unacceptable, but blurting out a homo-erotic reaction to a candidate's speech not a level of disclosure that is forbidden, even if that disclosure is merely hyperbole making the journalist's personal attraction to the candidate equally strong? Should it matter that this is the second time Matthews has related his "man-crush" on the air?

Yes, I know better... MSNBC doesn't have journalistic standards. It would be nice, however, if they'd fake it every one in a while.

Once More Unto the Breach: More Biased AP Reporting in Iraq

It seems to matter little whether the location is Gaza or Baghdad. If there is a way to spin a story, Associated Press reporters will find it.

Today, American forces called in an AC-130 for support when they came under fire in the Kazimiyah district of Baghdad.

The Associated Press editorializes:

The AC-130, a lethal tool used by the military since the Vietnam War, can slowly circle over a target for long periods.

Human rights groups have criticized their use in urban settings where militants may be among crowded populations of noncombatants. The four-engine gunships were also used to support the U.S. attack that took the western city of Fallujah from insurgents in November 2004.

What the Associated Press does not mention is that the modern AC-130U is the most complex aircraft weapons system on the planet, and the reason for its complexity is that the aircraft's sensors, navigation, and fire control systems are calibrated to conduct exceedingly accurate surgical strikes. It is likely because of their precision strike capabilities that the AC-130U was chosen for this mission over other available means of attack.

The Associated Press reporter attempts to recall the image of the 40-year-old Vietnam-era AC-130A and it's ability to saturate large area targets, portraying it as an indiscriminate and careless weapons system to use in an urban area... and so it is good we haven't fielded that particular model in decades.

It's a dishonest conflation of aircraft using technologies developed decades apart, but sadly emblematic of the kind of reporting we've come to expect where creating imagery is as important as reporting facts.

Another Gaza Media Moment

Three days ago, I contacted Associated Press Director of Media Relations Paul Colford, asking him about photos taken by AP photographer Khalil Hamra, in Beit Lahiya, a town in the northern Gaza Strip, on Monday, April 28, 2008.

The caption for one Hamra photo read as follows, without a hint of uncertainty:

A Palestinian woman reacts as she stands next to a house hit by an Israeli shell that killed a mother and her four children, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, April 28, 2008. An Israeli tank shell slammed into a tiny Gaza Strip home on Monday, killing a Palestinian woman and four of her children as they prepared to sit down for breakfast, officials and relatives said.

I asked Mr. Colford to "please acquire the other photos Mr. Hamra shot outside that home and send them to me... I should be able to tell which account is true by the simple differences between blast signatures of HEAT rounds used by Israel tanks impacting buildings, and the kind of blast that would be consistent with the Israeli account of a gunman carrying explosives that detonated." Responding via email, Mr Colford suggested I should acquire the images somewhere else. It was a polite brush-off.

But the story told with such apparent certainty by Associated Press photographer Hamra and apparently deemed insignificant by Colford was never as certain as the media tried to make it sound.

An Israeli military inquiry into the incident has concluded that the family was indeed killed by a Palestinian militant's explosives detonating. Tank shells were not fired into the home, a fact neither side now alledges. According to the IDF, a single airborne missile was fired from a drone at a cluster of four armed militants. How small was the missile? According to these video stills from an al Jazeera story, showing the missile's impact point, quite small.

The "crater" according to al Jazeera.
A bemused civilian inspects the same missile "crater" as the reporter moves away.

Al Jazeera repeats Palestianian claims a that second missile was fired by the Israelis, but the visual evidence of the missile strike is not very convincing.

An alleged second missile "crater" outside the family home, estimated to be four inches deep.

As Noah Pollak pointed out in his Commentary story Factless in Gaza, "There is a deeper problem here:the manner in which news is gathered from Gaza, which has been inhospitable territory for western journalists for quite some time (remember what happened to Alan Johnston?). News organizations like the AP and Reuters rely, for their on-the-ground Gaza coverage, on Palestinian reporters and stringers whose objectivity and professionalism, to put it charitably, are in doubt."

Adnan Hajj was by far the most obvious example of dishonest journalism by the Palestianian media as he manipulated images he sold to Reuters, but the facts are that very essence of news reporting in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon are conducted primarily by reporters with a deep and personal interest in the stories they are reporting, often under the direction of terrorist groups that are not above "suggesting" stories and guiding media coverage with the barrel of a gun.

Internationally respected news organizations such as Reuters, AFP the Associated Press, and the BBC have proven themselves time and again to be very susceptible to being manipulated by agenda-driven journalists and photographers. Moreover, they seem not to care very much about passing along staged photos and biased information as long as it allows them to publish something. They the news organizations will likely never admit it, hating Israel is big media business, and stories alleging that Israeli military forces are killing innocent Palestinians sell very well in the global media market.

As a result, initial reporting of this incident squarely places the blame for the blast on the Israeli military, without seriously looking for any other possible cause. It is both a business decision (these kinds of stories sell) and a practical one (unbiased reporting is not allowed by militant media handlers that guide and spy upon reporters and photographers).

That armed militants were moving among civilian homes for cover is never mentioned, and their argument that "it couldn't have been our explosives, because I have some pictures of some explosives that didn't blow up right over here" is readily digested with a degree of acceptance because there is no viable alternative.

Truly, truth is not an option.

Iraq Steps Forward, and the Media Slinks Away

Ed Morrissey notes that Iraq is continuing down the path to political reconciliation even as the media choses to largely ignore these developments in favor of more pressing stories, like the present cost of Barak Obama's half-eaten waffle on eBay.

One of those points of political reconciliation in Iraq is amnesty for some classes of detainees after determining they no longer present a threat of resuming insurgent activities.

Among those detainees released due to Iraq's amnesty law in recent weeks was Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who was arrested with a known al Qaeda terrorist leader in his home and in possession of bomb-making materials and terrorist propaganda that he presumably helped make. Part of the reason he was released is that he was no longer considered a threat; the insurgents he had (allegedly) provided propaganda for in Fallujah are long dead or dispersed.

I find it somewhat amusing the amount of time and legal expense the Associated Press incurred trying to free their photographer—and their reputation—to no avail, despite mounting the most deceptive, ethically-challenged of media campaigns on his behalf. It was only through the political progress of the Iraqi government that Hussein was released.

Perhaps tellingly, the Iraqi government advances that led to Hussein's release was down-played by the news organization, as it stretched the shaky boundaries of their credibility by implying his release was conditioned on innocence instead of amnesty.

Increasingly, proof of progress in Iraq is measured by how little the media talks about the nation's successes.

Enjoy the silence.

Without Ethics

Did you read the article in the New York Times today implying that John McCain sold political favors to an Arizona real estate developer that is also big campaign donor?

I'm no McCain fan, but after reading all four pages, I'm left still waiting for some substance, some sort of bombshell, that legitimizes this story as news.

Real estate developers try to make money from land deals? They're willing to trade for properties that they feel may be more profitable to them, and discard those properties they feel aren't going to be as profitable? Real estate developers try to attract and keep the attention of politicians by raising money for them?

Shocking. I'm sure such things have never before happened in the history of earth.

For the story to have merit and legitimacy it needs a "gotcha," an impropriety, some sort of ethical or legal breach on behalf of the businessman by the politician. This story runs on for four long pages, but the authors never present anything approaching unethical conduct on the part of the candidate.

To the contrary, instead of making a solid case based upon evidence, the article editorializes, it speculates and implies, but provides nothing to support the implied thesis of McCain's corruption.

In fact, the only evidence the story supplies are specific instances where McCain rejected inappropriate interventions, including one instance where McCain allegedly stopped speaking to the developer for a year over behavior—hiring a personal lobbyist—that was self-serving but entirely legal.

This Times story sought to create a furor over shady, unethical behavior, and it has done that in spades.

Jim Rutenberg is one author of the article, and a man who has apparently discarded his integrity as a reporter to write political hit pieces. This is the second Rutenberg article attacking John McCain in the Times in recent months, neither of which has provided any actual evidence of impropriety. The first alleged an affair with a female lobbyist that was remarkably evidence free, a trait that today's article also seems to share.

Rutenberg has now twice attempted to smear McCain with charges unsupported by evidence, and twice his editors have not only elected to run the hit pieces, but gave them prominent placement in print editions.

We've been fortunate in knowing for some years now that we don't have to wonder about the editorial biases in play at the New York Times, and now because of these articles and others like them we have no reason to question their ethics... they have none.

In the end, Rutenberg and other newsroom editorialists at the Times are hastening their own demise with this kind of journalism.

I'm not sure who will miss them when they're gone.

Another Vet Snaps Under Pressure

As David Burge noted in Bylines of Brutality, the emotional toll on media veterans is becoming ever more pronounced, leading to all sorts of radicalized, anti-social, and occasionally violent behavior.

Today, another media victim has apparently cracked under the pressure in my own backyard. Well, not literally my backyard, but close:

Eric Ralph Watson, 34, of 201 Old Grove Lane in Apex, was charged with one count of secret peeping. He was arrested shortly after 6 a.m. in the Brittany Trace subdivision, about a mile from his home.

Apex Police Capt. Ann Stephens said a neighbor saw a man matching Watson's description Thursday afternoon on top of an air-conditioning unit peeping into the bathroom of a female neighbor.

The witness called police and alerted the residents who live at the house.

Early Friday morning, Stephens said, the woman's husband confronted a man believed to be Watson, who approached the house again. The husband called 911, and an Apex police officer arrested Watson nearby.

Stephens said Watson and the woman do not know each other but that they might have attended the same gym.

Watson, a reporter for NBC affiliate WNCN-TV in Raleigh, was released from police custody with a promise to appear in court.

Hopefully, one day, there will be a cure for such behavior. Until then, as long-time media observer Treacher noted, it is important to treat journalists with not just revulsion and contempt, but with revulsion, contempt, and pity.

HEY HOLLYWOOD! This Book's Success Should Tell You Something

The movie industry has released one box-office flop after another regarding our modern wars against Islamic extremists, leading the dim and the dull in studio boardrooms and backlots to assume that Americans don't want to see or know about those conflicts.

But if the American people want to ignore those wars,then why is Michael Yon's Moment of Truth in Iraq currently #12 #10 in Amazon's sales rank? The obvious answer is that we aren't tired of content about the war, we're just tired of movies portraying our soldiers and Marines as psychopaths, murderers, or victims.

Show us a film that respects our troops, portraying their honor, their sacrifice, their dignity, and exceptional humanity under the most trying of combat conditions. Show us a film that portrays Islamic terrorists as the callous, torturing, murderous and irreligious thugs they really are. Show us that film, and I'll show you a film that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and could actually contribute to winning hearts and minds around the world.

Oddly enough, that very project is waiting in the wings. A smart producer could build upon Yon's growing popularity, and his stories based upon the exploits of Deuce Four, the Stryker Brigade known as the Punishers, already made legendary in Yon's dispatches like Gates of Fire.

That might mean setting aside the community's general anti-war feelings for money, but somehow, I think they have the moral flexibility to make that happen.

MSNBC Games McCain Speech with Irrelevant "Breaking News"

As has sadly become commonplace, Amanda at Think Progress missed another story today, even though this one slapped her right between the eyes.

Her post, McCain's Speech On Progress In Iraq Interrupted By News Of Mortars Hitting The Green Zone, notes that MSNBC interrupted a John McCain speech about progress being made in the Iraq War with the breaking news story that four mortar shells hit Baghdad's Green Zone, an unremarkable development as Sadrists and insurgents have used mortars for harassment and interdiction (H&I) fires frequently throughout the war, usually to little effect.

There were no known casualties at the time the story was reported, and there was no known targets of importance hit. What Amanda did not grasp is the utter lack of a legitimate reason for MSNBC producers to break into McCain's speech, other than to try to undermine his message.

MSNBC needs to justify this "breaking news" event by proving that they have broken into other live events on their network to cover minor Green Zone mortar attacks during the campaign season.

Somehow, I doubt they can.

The "New Math" of Fox News

Here is the screencap of a link from an extremely misleading link on FoxNews.com this morning.

The link to "U.S. Warplane Launches Massive Airstrike in Basra" goes to the following story where you would presumably expect to read abut a serious escalation in U.S. bombings in Basra against Mahdi Army targets, which would likely prompt attacks by followers of al Sadr against U.S. military targets around Iraq.

What you learn from clicking the link, however, is that just two bombs were dropped in Basra, and they were small munitions that targeted militants hiding in specific houses.

Massive = 2.

It's nice to know.

Kettle Lectured by Kettle Over Pot Relationship

Over at Patterico's, Mary Mapes rips into the L.A. Times for falling for forged documents.

Yikes.

Is Anderson Cooper Roland S. Martin Simply Making Things Up?

On Anderson Cooper's CNN blog this morning, Roland S. Martin claims that Barack Obama's radical minister Jeremiah Wright got his "chickens coming home to roost" commentary from a former Ronald Reagan official.

One of the most controversial statements in this sermon was when he mentioned "chickens coming home to roost." He was actually quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX News. That's what he told the congregation.

He was quoting Peck as saying that America's foreign policy has put the nation in peril:

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

"We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

"We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

"We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

"We bombed Qaddafi's home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock.

"We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home.

"We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

"Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

Martin's claim is shall we say, interesting.

The most famous single citation of "The Chickens Coming Home to Roost" was as an alternate title of the Malcolm X speech, God's Judgement of White America, where X attributed the assassination death of John F. Kennedy to the historical evils of white America at that time.

I suspect that is a far more likely source for Wright's invocation of that particular phrase, especially when we consider the historical contexts of both Wright's speech after 9/11, and X's speech after Kennedy was killed.

At best, Jeremiah Wright credits here a "A white ambassador" for saying "Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism."

There is no support provided by Martin for the claim that Peck said anything about "chickens coming home to roost," or any of the rest of what he cited.

Interestingly enough, I can't find any evidence of Peck saying anything Martin attributes to him, and the only references on Google to this are liberal blog posts that uncritically link back to Martin's article, taking him at face value.

There is no doubt at all that Peck was and has been a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq, but I'd ask you to hunt through Google yourself, and see if you can find any of what Martin claims Wright quotes from Peck.

I can't find it, and like Ace, I think Martin just might be making this up as he goes.

I will be more than happy to apologize if wrong, but Martin has not "shown his work," and until he back his claim with a direct quote, and can prove that Wright was citing Pecks' lesser known comment instead of X's infamous speech, then I have no reason to trust him.

Update: First, while this was Cooper's blog, Roland S. Martin (not this guy) wrote the post, so I was wrong in attributing it to Cooper. I've updated the text and title to reflect that.

A special thanks to PG (in the comments, who also pointed out the name flub) for providing the link this illuminating video of Wright's speech:

It is over 9 minutes long, but if you'd like to get to the portion relevant to just this claim by Roland S. Martin, pay special attention to what is said by Wright from 3:14-3:46.

Wright does indeed invoke Peck, and in particular, where Peck invokes the specific Malcolm X speech cited above.

In short, Martin is being duplicitous when he claims that Wright was citing Peck, he was instead citing Malcom X through Peck.

You wouldn't get that from Martin's blog entry, but then, I don't think you were supposed to.

Manufactured Destruction

CAMERA has the goods on the BBC, which claimed in a video report that the family home of the terrorist that murdered eight students and wounded nine more last week was destroyed in retaliation by the Israelis.

It never happened.

For now, the house still stands, prompting CAMERA to wonder why BBC reporter Nick Miles would report a false demolition in a voiceover, and why the BBC would air a videoclip without properly vetting it.

This should be a career-ender for someone (or someones) if the BBC cares about their reputation as a legitimate news source.

Wishful Thinking

The most incompetent CBS News headline in recent memory, or the result of too much wishful thinking?

Via HotAir Headlines.

Barack Obama/Deval Patrick could not immediately be reached for comment.

AP Lawyers Down Snapped Shot

Snapped Shot a photojournalism criticism site run by Brian Ledbetter, has gone dark due to legal threats from the Associated Press for copyright infringement for reproducing their images in order to critique them:

It's Been Fun We have been informed that the Associated Press takes issue with our use of their images on this website, and until I'm able to resolve this matter with them amicably, I'm going to have to take the site offline.

Please feel free to e-mail me if you know more about this kinda thing. I'm posting a copy of the AP's letter below, for full disclosure.

Background
Snapped Shot is a site that deals with the criticism of photojournalism. The industry is inaccurate in its reporting, it falls for terrorist propaganda too easily, and in general, the photos that you see presented as "news" on a daily basis are nothing more than fluff. This site has, from the beginning, intended to correct that by presenting specific instances of bias or inaccuracy along with commentary as to why said photographs are inaccurate. I have never drawn a profit from this website, and have never received compensation for any of the "copyrighted" works that are owned by the AP. Furthermore, I have always been careful to give full credit to the wire photographers who have taken the pictures, and have even interacted cordially with a handful of them.

What The?
So why is the AP seeking action against me? I am not making any money off of their work. I am not a mainstream "news" site ala Yahoo, Google, or Breitbart. So what's the deal? Is the Associated Press uncomfortable with the content of this website? Have I struck a nerve too close to home? No idea, but if you're a lawyer that deals in intellectual property, I'm ready to become your new best friend...

Ledbetter includes a scanned copy of the letter from the Associated Press at the link above.

I've long been under the impression—perhaps wrongly—that reproducing photographs for the purpose of criticism was within "fair use" guidelines.

I am familiar with Snapped Shot and have worked with Mr. Ledbetter on occasion and his site, the best I can recall, did seem to satisfy the general guidelines of fair use as many of us understand them.

If the Associated Press has determined that it is in their best interests to sue to keep from being criticized by bloggers, this will be a very unsettling development. I certainly hope that is not the case.

I've just sent an email to Paul Colford of the Associated Press asking for specifics of why Ledbetter's site came to their attention, and hopefully he can shed some light on their motivations as this story develops.

Update:

Colford responds:

I have nothing to add beyond the letter from AP, except to underscore that this is a copyright matter.

60 Minutes At It Again?

Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft shares the news of another possible election year meltdown at CBS News.

60 Minutes recently aired the claim that former Alabama governor Don Siegelman went to jail not for corruption, but because he belong to the wrong political party, and that the investigations that landed him in jail for bribery were politically motivated.

One of the most explosive claims made was that Karl Rove was involved in an attempt to entrap Siegelman:

Now a Republican lawyer from Alabama, Jill Simpson, has come forward to claim that the Siegelman prosecution was part of a five-year secret campaign to ruin the governor. Simpson told 60 Minutes she did what's called "opposition research" for the Republican party. She says during a meeting in 2001, Karl Rove, President Bush's senior political advisor, asked her to try to catch Siegelman cheating on his wife.

"Karl Rove asked you to take pictures of Siegelman?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Simpson replies.

"In a compromising, sexual position with one of his aides," Pelley clarifies.

"Yes, if I could," Simpson says.

She says she spied on Siegelman for months but saw nothing. Even though she was working as a Republican campaign operative, Simpson says she wanted to talk to 60 Minutes because Siegelman's prison sentence bothers her conscience.

Simpson says she wasn't surprised that Rove made this request. Asked why not, she tells Pelley, "I had had other requests for intelligence before."

"From Karl Rove?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Simpson says.

Today's Birmingham News has Rep. Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, asking CBS News to either provide evidence of the charges, or publish a retraction.

"Only the most committed anti-Rove/Bush activist could swallow such a tale," party chairman Rep. Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, wrote in the letter to "60 Minutes."

"If you are unable to publicly produce hard and convincing evidence that backs the outrageous charges you aired to millions of viewers across the nation, I ask that you publicly retract the story on your next broadcast."

Gateway Pundit has posted the full contents of Hubbard's letter.

Rove has specifically denied the story, stating:

"It never happened," Rove said in a telephone interview. "Seeing where I was working at the time, a reasonable person could ask why I would even take an interest in that case."

CBS News seems to have a lot to prove in this case to avoid a retraction, including:

• Proof that Jill Simpson ever worked with the Alabama Republican Party beyond simply being a volunteer, seemingly the easiest fact to verify or disprove.
• Proof that Simpson ever did "opposition research" for the Alabama Republican Party and Karl Rove.
• Proof that Simpson had been in contact with Rove.
• Proof that Rove asked Simpson to take compromising photographs of Don Siegelman

If CBS News can substantiate these charges, then the long-held liberal dream of bring Karl Rove up on charges for something could possibly occur.

If CBS News and 60 Minutes cannot substantiate the claim, then they are in the position of now having published a second false presidential election year story (Rathergate's forged documents prior to the 2004 election being the first), and the network's reputation in general and 60 Minutes reputation in specific will be heavily tarnished.

Frankly, I doubt that 60 Minutes would risk running this story without having vetted Simpson to the best of their ability, so I would be surprised if they cannot quickly prove some sort of involvement by Simpson in the Alabama Republican Party beyond volunteer level. If they can't do that, they are toast—fully discredited as a news organization, in my opinion.

The stickier point is proving her explosive charge that Rove told her that he wanted her to catch Siegelman having an affair. That seems like it will be very difficult to prove, and if she cannot prove it, then the 60 Minutes story never should have run.

Stay tuned, folks... however it breaks it promise to be very interesting.

Uh, No

Photo caption incompetence from the Associated Press (and here and here):

A Turkish army Super Cobra helicopter flies over an artillery unit and its crew after taking off from a military base in Cukurca in Hakkari province at the Turkey-Iraq border, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008, Turkish F-16 fighters and helicopters flew into northern Iraq on Sunday as elite commandos shake Kurdish rebels in a major ground operation across the border that has drawn criticism from the U.S.-backed-Iraqi government and Iraqi Kurdish leaders. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Not even close. The helicopter in the photo is a unmistakably a variation of the UH-60 transport helicopter, with a four-bladed rotor and slick sides. That any self-respecting photo editor covering a military beat could mistake that helicopter for the distinctive, menacing shape of the twin-seater Super Cobra attack helicopter boggles the imagination.

Bonus: Soldier, hold your fire and clear your muzzle. Kabooms are not fun, however they are caused.

Update from the Associated Press: Paul Colford, Director of Media Relations for the Associated Press writes via email:

The photo captions you have challenged on your site were corrected (to Black Hawk) at 5:21 p.m. yesterday, such as this one:

Caption

** CORRECTS HELICOPTER TYPE ** A Turkish army Black Hawk helicopter flies over an artillery unit and its crew after taking off from a military base in Cukurca in Hakkari province at the Turkey-Iraq border, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008, Turkish F-16 fighters and helicopters flew into northern Iraq on Sunday as elite commandos shake Kurdish rebels in a major ground operation across the border that has drawn criticism from the U.S.-backed-Iraqi government and Iraqi Kurdish leaders. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

Credit where credit is due, the erroneous captions were replaced later the same afternoon, though it still boggles the mind that such a mistake was made in the first place.

Unappreciated Innovation

Something is missing from this CNN story.

The story now begins:

A man in a wheelchair blew himself up Monday in a northern Iraqi police station, killing three National Police officers, including a commander, police said.

The attack also wounded nine officers on the police force, which the Iraqi Interior Ministry operates.

The bombing in Samarra raises concern about the recent tactics employed by insurgents in Iraq. Bombs have been placed inside dead animals and hidden in carts. And in recent days, vagrants have been involved in bombings.

"As a sign of desperation, some of those terrorists resorted to some new methods and techniques," said Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for Baghdad's security plan.

The lede as it now reads is one of how desperate the terrorists in Iraq are becoming, and the lengths to which they must now go to stage a successful attack.

An earlier version of the story had a slightly different take, but now seems to only exist as a ghost in Google's cache.

"Innovative tactics " versus "signs of desperation."

A journalist's point of view can be quite illuminating from time to time, can't it?

Not Even Blog-Worthy

It seems like everyone is talking this morning about this New York Times article about John McCain.

The heart of the Times article states only:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client's corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

Why were these staffers "convinced the relationship had become romantic"?

Did they see McCain and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, in a sexually-suggestive or compromising position?

Was there any physical evidence of a "romantic" relationship?

Did either McCain or Iseman tell anyone that they were involved in such a relationship?

The four NY Times journalists that share the byline on this story—Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick, and Stephen Lebaton— do not provide answers to any of these basic journalistic questions. They failed to do their jobs.

This is not a news story, it is an extended insinuation. At best, it is half-formed journalism. At worst, it is naked, partisan advocacy.

If presented with the thin claims published in this Times story, many of the more credible bloggers, regardless of political affiliation, would have passed on publishing this story. They've worked too hard and too long to build their reader base and establish their credibility as citizen-journalists.

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, publisher of the Times, apparently has no such qualms about risking the reputation of the newspaper grown to prominence by previous generations of his family. It is easy for him to squander what he himself did not earn, but then, we knew that a MoveOn.org discount ago.

AFP: Something Old is New Again

Agence France-Presse (AFP) the oldest news agency in the world and the largest French news agency, has been caught recycling two-year-old Congressional subcommittee testimony as current news.

On Sunday, AFP released an article, "US Qaeda strategy fatally flawed; analysts," which opened:

In its ideological struggle against Al-Qaeda, American anti-terrorist strategy too often overlooks the basic tenets of the infamous Chinese warlord Sun Tzu, namely: know your enemy.

That is the fixed view of leading analysts, who conclude that through ignorance of the enemy it faces, ignorance of its nature, its goals, its strengths and its weaknesses, the United States is condemned to failure.

"The attention of the US military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly towards hunting down militant leaders or protecting US forces, (and) not towards understanding the enemy we now face," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

"This is a monumental failing not only because decapitation strategies have rarely worked in countering mass-mobilisation terrorist or insurgent campaigns, but also because Al-Qaeda's ability to continue this struggle is based absolutely on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources.

"Without knowing our enemy, we cannot fulfill the most basic requirements of an effective counter-terrorist strategy: pre-empting and preventing terrorist operations and deterring their attacks," Hoffman added.

What AFP neglected to mention is that the quotes from Professor Hoffman were issued in written testimony to The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities in February of 2006. The testimony can be found in a PDF document published at the RAND Corporation web site on page 5 and a "dowdified" quote from the bottom of page 5 and the top of page 6.

This written testimony was issued eleven months before President Bush proposed the "surge" of American troops into Iraq, almost eleven months before General David Petraeus was confirmed as the new Commanding General, Multi-National Force - Iraq, and a full year prior to the beginning of the buildup of American forces beginning in February of 2007 as part of the new Strategy for Iraq.

The AFP article, written in present tense, in no way indicated that it was citing obsolete information as current news.

The information is so obsolete as to render the article itself as fraudulent in nature. Agence France-Presse should immediately retract this article, and explain how such "journalism" ever made it to press.

Thanks to CY reader Cameron Gilchrist for the tip.

Update: I updated with the correct page numbers from the RAND PDF. I had originally pulled the page numbers 21 and 22 from this version of the testimony.

It's Your Fault That You Hate Us

Via Ace and a sarcastic review by Kevin D. Williamson on NRO's Media Blog, comes an article by Poynter Institute Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark, entitled The Public Bias against the Press.

And yes, he's quite sincere.

He begins:

The public bias against the press is a more serious problem for American democracy that the bias (real or perceived) of the press itself.

This is a fascinating claim. Clark argues that a healthy degree of skepticism in the American public for (real or perceived) media bias is greater than the actual damage caused by biases held by journalists and promulgated in their reporting.

Let's look at a hypothetical example to test Clark's theory.

The War in Iraq is very much a divisive subject in our culture, and is ripe for the introduction of bias by both those reporting a given story on the war, and those reading it.

Featured on Google News this afternoon is an article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Thom Shanker of the New York Times, entitled, White House Shows Signs of Rethinking Cut in Troops. The lede of the article begins:

Four months after announcing troop reductions in Iraq, President Bush is now sending signals that the cuts may not continue past this summer, a development likely to infuriate Democrats and renew concerns among military planners about strains on the force.

In that one sentence there are two examples of unsupported editorializing caused by the bias of the reporters:

• that if the cuts don't continue past this summer, that Democrats are likely to be "infuriated," and;
• that concerns among military planners would be "renewed."

Neither author supports the contention that a further reduction in force beyond pre-surge levels would cause Democrats to be "infuriated," and an objective accounting would have noted that, time and again, civilian and military leadership have stated that they would determine troops levels in Iraq based upon conditions on the ground. All Senators and Congressmen, knew this from the very beginning of the troops build-up. Quite simply, there s nothing for them to be infuriated about [note: For a more honest look at what this actually means, William Arkin has a much more even-keeled entry on the subject at the Washington Post blog, Early Warning.

Second, there is no evidence that concerns would be "renewed" among military planners, as they knew before the first surge soldier's boots hit Iraqi sand that the size of the force on the ground after the surge was contingent upon conditions. There concerns are no doubt real, but the biased lede and the implicated that this something "renewed" or unexpected, is rank editorialism featured in a news outlet that has, by the way, taken a quite public editorial stance against the war.

According to Clark, my long-held distrust of the media—honed over years of finding factual inaccuracies and demonstrable hidden biases in their reporting, and doing so again here—is a serious threat to American democracy.

He would have you think that an informed public is a threat to democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. What he is actually lamenting—and is either (amusingly) too biased, too inarticulate, or too dishonest to share—is the demise of the media's role as gatekeeper.

It has become increasingly difficult for a self-selected group (in this case, journalists) to alter or shape public discourse by the selective filtering and dissemination of knowledge. We live in a newly wired world, with a much wider flow of information to be be shared, compared, and analyzed by almost anyone, not just editors and journalists.

Mr. Clark does not lament a threat to democracy.

He resents that his profession must now take part in it.

AFP Revises History

In an article previewing the possible damage to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as a result of the Winograd Report into Israel's 34-day war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, AFP's Ron Bousso echoes a questionable claim about the 2006 Israeli War against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon:

It is expected to focus on Olmert's controversial decision to order a massive ground offensive in south Lebanon 60 hours before a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement was due to take effect on August 14.

Thirty-three Israeli soldiers were killed in the offensive launched just one hour after the final version of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was presented to Israel.

Major Tomer Buhadana was one of those wounded during the last 48 hours of war, which in all killed 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The Lebanese killed were "mostly civilians?"

The Daily Telegraph noted during the conflict:

Although Hizbollah has refused to make public the extent of the casualties it has suffered, Lebanese officials estimate that up to 500 fighters have been killed in the past three weeks of hostilities with Israel, and another 1,500 injured.

Lebanese officials have also disclosed that many of Hizbollah's wounded are being treated in hospitals in Syria to conceal the true extent of the casualties. They are said to have been taken through al-Arissa border crossing with the help of Syrian security forces.

A UPI account noted that:

Israel failed to kill Hezbollah's top members, and the organization continued to function throughout the war.

But Hezbollah lost more than 500 men, even though it confirmed only some 60-odd killed. Israel identified 440 dead guerrillas by name and address, and experience shows that Israeli figures are half to two-thirds of the enemy's real casualties. Therefore, Amidror estimated, Hezbollah's death toll might be as high as 700.

Both of those links were pulled from a media analysis by Steven Stotsky of The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) which sought to provide an actual account of the Hezbollah and civilan dead, arriving at a rough estimate of 500-600 Hezbollah fighters among the roughly 1,000-1,200 Lebanese killed—roughly half of the total.

A December 2006 review of the July 12-August 14 conflict by the Boston Globe cited a total of "More than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and combatants" killed, and of those, Hezbollah fighters comprised between 250 and 600 of that figure, depending on the source. The same Globe account also notes that the Lebanese government does not differentiate between civilians and Hezbollah fighters in their official toll of 1,086 dead, as it "can be difficult to tell a Hezbollah fighter because many do not wear military uniforms."

StrategyPage reported:

Hizbollah suffered a defeat. Their rocket attacks on Israel, while appearing spectacular (nearly 4,000 rockets launched), were unimpressive (39 Israelis killed, half of them Arabs). On the ground, Hizbollah lost nearly 600 of its own personnel, and billions of dollars worth of assets and weapons. Israeli losses were far less.

Instead of "mostly civilians," the conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 created roughly 1,000-1,200 fatalities in Lebanon, and clearly a significant number of them, roughly half, were Hezbollah fighters.

Bousso's claim for AFP that "mostly civilians" perished as a result of the war is both technically inaccurate and editorially deceptive.

Update: Reports indicate that Bousso was wrong on the main contention of his article as well, that the report was likely to be "a damning indictment of his [Prime Minister's Olmert's] role in the 2006 war in Lebanon."

AP:

The final report into Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon concluded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not fail in his handling of a key battle and that his decisions were reasonable, defense officials said Wednesday.

It doesn't seem that AFP gets much of anything right, does it?

Tears for Johnny

You can almost hear the tears hitting Nedra Pickler's keyboard:

Democrat John Edwards is exiting the presidential race Wednesday, ending a scrappy underdog bid in which he steered his rivals toward progressive ideals while grappling with family hardship that roused voter's sympathies but never diverted his campaign, The Associated Press has learned.

Be strong, Nedra. You've still got Barack, even if his hair isn't nearly as pretty. That said, I wonder to which of the two Americas Edwards will retire...

Will his chose his $6 million, 102-acre estate in Chapel Hill, or his million-dollar beach estate on gated Figure Eight Island?

Courage, Johnny.

Courage.

Media Still Trying to Martyr Obama

We've covered this ground before. For reasons they will not openly disclose, media worldwide are hooked on the possibility that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama will be assassinated.

As noted by Mark Finkelstein this morning on Newsbusters, Early Show anchor Harry Smith broached the subject again in a conversation with Senator Ted Kennedy:

HARRY SMITH: When you see that enthusiasm [for Obama] though, and when you see the generational change that seems to be taking place before our eyes, does it make you at all fearful?

Kennedy understandably had no idea what Smith was driving at, and gave an innocuous answer about people's desire for "a new day and a new generation." But Smith's follow-up left no real doubt as to what he had in mind.

SMITH: I just, I think what I was trying to say is, sometimes agents of change end of being targets, as you well know, and that was why I was asking if you were at all fearful of that.

When you tell a man with Ted Kennedy's family history that "you well know" about politicians becoming "targets," the implication is unmistakable.

I'll send you over to the Newsbusters post to see how Kennedy responded, but after you read that, ask yourself this: What basis did Harry Smith have for making his remarks?

Such vague media assertions of a possible targeting of Obama have been occurring for over a year, and yet, when we actually look for evidence of such claims, they seem to have little or no merit other than other media accounts.

I've no doubt that somewhere in the world there are those that would rather see Barack Obama dead than President, but the media has failed, in each an every instance, to provide support for this apparently evergreen claim. They recycle the charge, again and again, merely by "knowing" that someone must hate him.

I know that I am certainly getting tired of their attempts to assert a mortal threat against one of the more likable people (politics aside) in this race, and wonder why more bloggers have not yet castigated the media for recycling the possibility of a threat again and again, perhaps goading an unstable person to act upon them.

This needs to stop.

You Get What You Pay For?

There is quite the buzz being generated in the blogosphere about a web report issued by The Center for Public Integrity and its sister organization, The Fund for Independence in Journalism.

It is entitled Iraq: The War Card—Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War.

As you may imagine, bloggers on the political left (and the media) are claiming the report is evidence of the long-running meme, "Bush lied, people died."

Critics on the right have been quick to point out that The Center for Public Integrity and The Fund for Independence in Journalism draw their financing heavily, if not exclusively, from left-leaning foundations and individuals, and that the criteria established for the study seems to indicate that the data is loaded and crafted to achieve a desired result.

I've not yet had a chance to read the report and get any sense of the validity of the claims made, but it promises to be an interesting read.

Homeland Under Fire From Raging Veterans

David Burge is typically known for his satirical efforts at Iowahawk, but like many great satirists before him, his work is often merely a cover for a razor-sharp wit addressing pressing social ills in a more palatable form.

In light of recent developments in the media, I've broken cover regarding my day job, which I've rarely discussed until this point, in an in-depth interview with Mr. Burge featured in his latest article, Bylines of Brutality.

Read it all, and wonder how we've allowed the problem to go on for as long as it has without getting these veterans the psychological care they so desperately need.

One Rag To Smear Them All

Ralph Peters of the NY Post has dropped his second editor bomb on the New York Times for their smear of American veterans in a column titled "The New 'Lepers.'"

A taste:

The purpose of Sunday's instantly notorious feature "alerting" the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as "unclean" - as the new lepers who can't be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who've served our country - those who've won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor).

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the "sensational" story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder . . . ).

Well, a quick statistics check let the air out of the Times' bid to make us dread the veteran down the block - who the Times implies has a machine gun under his bathrobe when he steps out front to fetch the morning paper. In fact, the capital-crimes rate ballyhooed by the Gray Lady demonstrates that our returning troops are far less likely to commit such an offense.

His previous editorial on the subject generated a huge response as well.

Why?

The Times article—the first in a series of vet-bashing articles that the Times has prepped to smear our soldiers—is fundamentally dishonest.

Out of all veterans that have been to Iraq and Afghanistan—estimates are that there are 1.5 million them, with roughly half still serving and half (749,932) discharged—the Times was able to compile just 121 deaths.

Read the Times article, and you are treated to five vignettes culled from those 121. The first four encompassing the majority of the article, telling the stories of Matthew Sepi, Archie O'Neil, Stephen Sherwood, and Seth Strasburg, are all about men who "snapped" and shot people to death.

What the Times did not print were those stories that didn't fit their template, and indeed, perhaps should not have been included in their count of 121 at all.

As I noted in my Pajamas Media article published yesterday:

Of those 121 summaries, 40 do not show direct ties between the stresses of deploying to combat zones and the homicides for which these veterans were charged, and of those, 14 were of highly dubious nature.

• The appropriately named Travis D. Beer, an Army reservist deployed to Iraq, pleaded no contest to motor vehicle homicide, and had two prior arrests for driving under the influence. The Times does not note if those prior arrests occurred before he deployed to Iraq.
• Jonathan Braham, a Marine veteran of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, shot a man whom he thought had sexually abused his stepson. According to the Times’ own reporting, he was adamant that his service in Iraq did not play a role in his decision to shoot the alleged abuser.
• Brian Epting was sentenced to six years for vehicular homicide when he lost control of his car while drag racing in 2005 and killed Robert Duffy, a World War II veteran. Is the Times seriously implying that his deployment to Iraq in 2003 is to blame for a drag racing death?
• Michael Gwinn Jr. has a history of domestic violence.
• Robert G. Jackson was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, as was Johnny Williams Jr., which cannot readily be tied to military deployments. Likewise, James Pitts has psychiatric problems predating his deployment to Iraq.
• Michael Antonio Jordan had a juvenile criminal record and was involved in gang activity.
• Christian Mariano was acquitted for acting in self-defense, and yet the Times still included him on this list.
• Jason R. Smith, a National Guard veteran and Atlanta narcotics officer, shot elderly Kathryn Johnston in an infamous no-knock raid, and is currently being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, but his attorney cannot say what the proximate cause of his PTSD may have been.
• Aaron Stanley's sideline occupation as an alleged methamphetamine and marijuana dealer may have had more to do with his homicides than his deployment to Iraq. Vernon Walker killed two fellow soldiers while dealing drugs.
• Larry Jaimall West was a member of the Crips street gang.
• Jared Terrasas had a conviction for misdemeanor spousal abuse prior to his deployment to Iraq
• Jessie L. Ullom had already been charged with abusing his infant son before he saw combat.

The only criteria the Times seems to have followed was to list all veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who have killed someone upon returning to the United States, and they included those with mental illnesses that could not be attributed to military service (schizophrenia), vehicular homicides involving alcohol or drugs (manslaughter, not murder), cases where the veterans have not even had trials, and even one case where a soldier was tried and acquitted on the grounds of self defense.

Obviously, the would have preferred that this veteran, Christian Mariano, had not gone to picked up a female friend that had been beaten up by her boyfriend. They would have preferred that when he was attacked by a group, that he had not defended himself with his pocketknife. The would have rather that Khyle Dittrich had succeeded in strangling Mariano.

Then he would have been a veteran that they could support in death, the only kind of veteran the Times seems to like, other than those that join their favorite discount customer, MoveOn.Org, and similar groups.

Bu the New York Times has no interest in telling the true tale of a veteran who only wanted to help a battered woman.

Better to make him part of a dishonest statistic.

They have no interest in telling the story of the 1.5 million veterans of this nation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who lead productive lives, and save lives, and contribute to our communities, and freedom. Instead, they highlight four atypical veterans out of 1.5 million to smear the all.

Once again, the New York Times engages in the vilest kind of yellow journalism.

Walter Duranty would be proud.

Harper's Defaults on Horton's Credibility

It appears that Roger Hodge, Editor of Harper's, Ellen Rosenbush, Managing Editor of Harper's, and Vice President of Public Relations Giulia Melluci, will not support claims made by Harper's contributor Scott Horton, who made the claim on August 24, 2007 that an unnamed "thuggish neocon" journalist fabricated a story while Horton was in Iraq.

Horton has refused to provide evidence of the story in question, as have his editors and Harper's Public Relations. We can only conclude at this time that such a story never existed, and that Horton's claim was fraudulent.

Mr. Hodge, Ms. Rosenbush, and Ms. Melucci were contacted to provide support for Horton's article on August 29 and December 29, 2007, in addition to previous docuemented attempts to Mr. Hodge and Ms. Rosenbush on August 27 and Ms. Melucci in a separate August 27 email, with a follow-up email to Ms. Rosenbush and Ms. Melucci on August 28. All of these followed an unsuccessful attempt to get Scott Horton to provide support for his claim on August 24.

This apparently fraudulent claim is not Horton's only ethical lapse; in a Pajama's Media article posted on January 4, I revealed that Horton's clear conflict of interest in writing about Associated Press photographer and terrorism suspect Bilal Hussein. Horton had been a member of Hussein's defense team, and his former legal partner is Hussein's present counsel.

Ironically, Horton's most recent post quotes Nietzsche:

He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you.

If Harper's had any remaining pride, ethics, or editorial judgment, that quote would be his epitaph.

Send in the Emoting Clown

Oh, Erica Jong, could you be any more of an argument against Hillary Clinton if you tried?

I am so tired of pink men bombing brown children and rationalizing it as fighting terrorism. I am so tired of pink men telling women (of all colors) what to do with their wombs--which connect with their brains--in case you forgot. I am so tired of pink men telling us we should stay in Iraq for generations. I am so tired of pink men buying bombs and cheating schools. I am so tired of pink men having wives who stand behind them and nod sagely on television. I am so tired of pink men expecting that someone--a brown, black, yellow or white woman--will trail behind them changing light bulbs, taking out garbage, washing laundry, keeping food in the house, taking care of kids of all ages, of parents of all ages. I am so tired of pink men whose wives double or triple the family income thinking they can spend it without doing a damn thing at home. I am so tired...

This not so-subtle plaintive wail in support of Hillary Clinton, full of high drama and lacking in substance, is perhaps precisely the reason we shouldn't elect a feminist of Jong's generation President. Unable to rationally argue from an intellectual position on why the former First Lady has the experience, integrity, or policy positions to warrant her ascension, Jong instead insists that merely being female is reason enough to be President.

Is this the best argument that she can put forth, that a woman should be elected because of her gender, not because she has superior talents or ideas?

Too Little, Too Late: Scotland Yard to Probe Bhutto Assassination

For what little it is worth:

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Wednesday that British investigators are heading to Pakistan to help clear up the confusion surrounding Thursday's assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

"I am very thankful to [British] Prime Minister Gordon Brown that when I made this request he accepted that," Musharraf said in a nationally televised address.

The Scotland Yard team, he said, "will solve all the confusion" surrounding how Bhutto died last week.

Musharraf expressed his condolences about the killing of Bhutto, who he said "has been martyred by terrorists."

Frankly, I have my doubts on what good this investigation will do, and that is not meant as a slight against Scotland Yard, but instead against what little evidence they will have on hand.

The crime scene where Bhutto was apparently shot and a suicide bomber detonated had been cleared within hours; the debris, blood, and any remaining evidence washed away. Benazir Bhutto has been interred, as have the bodies of the victims of the suicide blast, and it remains to be seen if Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari, will allow Scotland Yard to exume Bhutto's remains for an autopsy.

The remaining evidence seems to include:

• part of the head of the suicide bomber
• forensic evidence in the two vehicles that transported Bhutto
• the assassin's pistol, tentatively identified as a Steyr M
• several video tapes of the attack
• still photos
• eyewitness accounts
• X-rays
• doctor's notes

The documentary evidence will presumably add little to the investigation. The media-provided X-rays seem to show little, and a formal autopsy was never performed. Both pundits and professionals have examined the video, and it would be surprising if they hold much in the way of substantial new information, outside of audio recorded on the videotapes which may prove or disprove the theory of additional gunshots being fired. The eyewitness accounts are very conflicted, and as a rule, are typically unreliable.

If positively identified, the suicide bomber may provide some clues as to his associations, but that is far from a certainty.

Then there are the two vehicles in the attack, if they have not been compromised.

The first was the vehicle that Bhutto was riding in at the time of the attack, and it could presumably tell us quite a bit about the blast itself, and may account for any bullets fired low that hit the vehicle. An examination of the right rear sunroof lever may be able to account for the blood on the lever, and if bent or stressed, may give some insight into how hard Bhutto hit the lever, if at all. Bhutto's supporters transferred the former prime minster to a second vehicle on the way to the hospital as the first had suffered significant damage as a result of the blast, but I would expect it to have less useful forensic evidence.

The pistol's serial number should give investigators an idea of the firearm's origins, and if bullets or shell casings are recovered from the crime scene or the vehicle (or less likely, Bhutto) that match those cartridges presumably still in the recovered pistol's magazine, it could verify that the weapon was that used in the assassination attempt.

Scotland Yard's entry will provide the appearance of something being done, but it comes long after the most useful evidence has been literally washed away.

There They Go Again

Stop me if you've heard this before, but the Associated Press has run yet another exaggerated massacre story in Iraq based upon questionable sources they claim are Iraqi police officers.

On Monday, AP ran the claim:

A suicide bomber attacked a checkpoint manned by a group fighting against al-Qaida in Iraq, killing 12 people in one of a series of strikes Monday against the largely Sunni movement singled out by Osama bin Laden as a "disgrace and shame."

[snip]

In the most serious attack against one of the groups Monday, a suicide bomber drove a minibus rigged with explosives into a checkpoint in Tarmiyah, 30 miles north of Baghdad, police and a member of the local awakening council said.

The explosion killed 12 people, said Adil al-Mishhadani, a member of the council. The council commander, who gave his name only as Abu Arkan for security reasons, said later that the dead included three children on their way to school and nine council members.

Three people were missing, Abu Arkan said.

Not so fast. MNC-I states that only two civilians (not 12) were killed in the attack, two were injured, and two civilians (not three) were missing.

Once again in this article, the Associated Press used anonymous Iraqi Police officers of dubious credibility to make up the bulk of their sourcing, with journalists apparently being nowhere near the scene.

As a result, the number of false reports of massacres and exaggerated reports of attacks in Iraq by the media seems to be on the rise.

Perhaps we should consider this trend the media's "surge?"

Harper's Credibility Issues Return

Over at Powerline yesterday, John Hinderaker stated that Scott Horton of Harper's libeled the U.S. Army with an anonymous smear on behalf of Iraqi terrorism suspect and Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein.

It's as incredible an attempt at libel as I've ever seen. No one with any common sense could believe a word of it. That qualification, though, excludes Editor and Publisher, which yesterday republished Horton's libel admiringly, under the headline "Harper's Probes Case of Jailed AP Photog in Iraq. " Some "probe! " Editor and Publisher begins by saying that Horton is "the latest to look at the purported evidence" against Hussein, but that is false. Horton never discusses the evidence, of which he is, as far as his article discloses, entirely ignorant. Beyond that, E & P's crack "staff, " which is credited with its piece, fails to mention that Horton's column is based entirely on an anonymous and highly dubious "source, " and simply quotes Horton's hit-job with evident approval.

Of course, no one expects the left-wing E & P to do any critical thinking, let alone investigation. But it would have taken very little research for them to discover that Scott Horton was, until January, a partner in the law firm that represents Bilal Hussein--a fact that Horton did not find it necessary to disclose to his readers. There is indeed a story here, and one that relates directly to journalism--the kind of thing in which E & P might be expected to take an interest. But political loyalty trumps journalistic standards at E & P.

To sum up: Scott Horton claims to have an anonymous "source" inside the Pentagon, who relayed to him the contents of a DOD briefing on the Hussein case. I think this is plainly false. I believe that Horton has a source, but is it a source inside the Pentagon, or inside Hussein's defense team, headed by Horton's former law partner? If Horton has a "source" inside the Pentagon, who is it? Is this purported source someone with knowledge of the Hussein case, as Horton claims, or is it just another left-winger regurgitating anti-American talking points?

These questions are easily answerable. All Scott Horton has to do is identify his alleged source inside the Pentagon, and give us the details on the "briefing" that his column supposedly summarized. Unless and until this happens, it is reasonable to conclude that Horton, or his source, is lying.

If the name Scott Horton seems familiar to readers of Confederate Yankee, it should; On August 25 of this year, I called him out for a claim he made in a August 24 blog entry he wrote at Harper's called Those Thuggish Neocons, in which he claimed:

I have no idea whether Beauchamp's story was accurate. But at this point I have seen enough of the Neocon corner's war fables to immediately discount anything that emerges from it. One example: back last spring, when I was living in Baghdad, on Haifa Street, I sat in the evening reading a report by one of the core Neocon pack. He was reporting from Baghdad, and recounted a day he had spent out on a patrol with U.S. troops on Haifa Street. He described a peaceful, pleasant, upscale community. Children were out playing on the street. Men and women were out going about their daily business. Well, in fact I had been forced to spend the day "in the submarine," as they say, missing appointments I had in town. Why? This bucolic, marvelous Haifa Street that he described had erupted in gun battles the entire day. In the view of my security guards, with which I readily concurred, it was too unsafe. And yes, I could hear the gunfire and watch some of the exchanges from my position. No American patrol had passed by and there were certainly no children playing in the street. This was the point when I realized that many of these accounts were pure fabrications.

I challenged Horton to produce the "Neocon's" article he claimed to have read in a August 24 email, stating:

can't claim that Harper's is one of my normal stops, but I was very intrigued by your post today "Those Thuggish Neocons, " particularly the paragraph about the reporter who fabricated the Haifa Street report you read.

If you are familiar with my small blog at all (and I'm sure you probably aren't); I often run down false or inaccurate media claims, typically hitting the wire service reporting the hardest, though I've also captured fraud and inaccuracies in newspapers and magazines as well. And yes, I'd readily admit that I have a conservative perspective, but that does not make me so biased that I approach the world with ideological blinders, as this post burning a false pro-Iranian War argument should show.

I was hoping that you would provide me with the date of the story you related as specifically as you can recall, along with the news organization and individual reporter you said was making up this report.

This is pretty obviously unethical and possibly illegal, and I want this resolved quickly.

Horton never responded, prompting my subsequent blog entry to next day.

I repeatedly attempted to get a response from Harper's and emailed Harper's Editor Roger D. Hodge and Managing Editor Ellen Rosenbush on August 27, and again sent email to them, Horton, and Vice President of Public Relations Giulia Melucci on August 29, once more pressing for Horton to produce the report and reporter he claimed to have read during his time in Baghdad.

Again, they refused to respond.

I did not pursue Horton's claims further at that point as I was immersed in the Scott Beauchamp story at the time, but with Beauchamp's stories now retracted by The New Republic and Powerline once again poking holes in Horton's credibility, it seems time to return to the issue once more.

Harper's should come clean on Horton's sourcing for both of these stories, and quickly. If they do not, they seem doomed to wander down the same humiliating path as Franklin Foer and The New Republic.

Update: Chris Muir weighs in:

12/30 Update: I sent another email to Harper's editors and PR person yesterday, and it seems Editor Roger Hodge and Managing Editor Ellen Rosenbush will be out of the office on holiday until they return until January 2. Here's the "meat" of it:

I ask you yet again to compel Mr. Horton to produce the specific article he claims to have read. I think it a quite reasonable request to have a magazine produce source material for a disputed claim, especially when that claim is neither an anonymous source nor classified information, but what Horton himself claims to be a public print media report.

I ask that you please complete this very simple request by Friday, January 4th, 2008, which seems a very reasonable amount of time to produce the article in question, even considering the holiday season.

We'll see how they respond.

Roger Simon's Hit-Job On Fred Thompson At The Politico

I thought I'd said all I was going to say about Roger Simon's article in The Politico yesterday afternoon in the comments at Hot Air, but as more comes out about the article, I think it is worthy of a dedicated post.

Simon (not the Roger L.Simon of Pajamas Media with whom I interviewed Fred Thompson in November) put up a post called Fred Thompson: Lazy as charged (bad link earlier, now fixed -ed).

The article was damning—brutal, even—and highlighted what appeared to be a huge gaffe in his bus tour through Waverly, Iowa:

...Thompson rode four blocks to the local fire station. Local fire stations always have captive audiences (unless there is a fire).

Inside, Thompson shook a few hands — there were only about 15 people there — and then Chief Dan McKenzie handed Thompson the chief's fire hat so Thompson could put it on.

Thompson looked at it with a sour expression on his face.

"I've got a silly hat rule," Thompson said.

In point of fact, the "silly" hat was the one Chief McKenzie wore to fires and I am guessing none of the firefighters in attendance considered it particularly silly, but Thompson was not going to put it on. He just stood there holding it and staring at it.

To save the moment, Jeri Thompson took the hat from her husband’s hands and put it on her head.

"You look cute," Thompson said to her. She did.

Within the context of the rest of the article, Simon's snide editorial reference to the firemen being a "captive audience" would almost go unnoticed.

His description of what happened next, however, used an unambiguously doctored quote. We know this because the events were captured in a video shown at CBS News (click image to watch):

Simon quoted Thompson as stating that "I've got a silly hat rule."

As the CBS video clearly showed, that was only part of Thompson's statement.

What Thompson actually said was, "I've got a silly hat rule that I'm about to violate."

Thompson then takes the Chief's helmet and starts to raise it if he is going to put it on, and then says, while laughing, "I ain't gonna do it... I ain't gonna do it."

At this point Jeri Thompson steps in and Fred puts the helmet on her. Throughout the video, you can hear those assembled laughing, including Chief Dan McKenzie, who handed Thompson the helmet to begin with. McKenzie is shown smiling widely at the end of the clip.

We don't know if the entire Politico article is grossly unfair in the way it characterized Senator Thompson's swing through Waverly, Iowa, but we do know, thanks to the CBS News video, that not only was Simon's editorializing of what occurred in the Waverly Fire Department mischaracterized, but that he doctored a quote to make his article appear all the more damning.

Simon is the Chief Political Columnist for The Politico—one that they tout as one of "Washington's most visible and experienced journalists."— and should know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that doctoring quotes is highly unethical by any journalistic standard.

In their mission statement, The Politico brags about those journalist they would empower:

Today, many of the reporters having the most impact are those whose work carries a unique signature, who add a distinct voice to the public conversation. Their work, in other words, matters more than where they work.

Reporters stand out from the crowd in a number of ways. Some regularly break news before their competitors. Some have a gift for interpretation, for connecting the dots in illuminating ways. Still others stand out through their eloquence and original storytelling.

Politico will promote and celebrate journalists who have a unique signature. That's why we've been able to attract reporters and editors who have worked at such places as Time magazine and The New York Times, National Public Radio, Roll Call and The Hill, Bloomberg News Service, the Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today and The Washington Post.

There is a difference, however, between voice and advocacy. That's one traditional journalism ideal we fully embrace. There is more need than ever for reporting that presents the news fairly, not through an ideological prism. One of the most distressing features of public life recently has been the demise of shared facts. Warring partisans -- many of whom take their news from sources that cater to and amplify their existing opinions -- live in separate zones of reality. In such a climate, every news story is viewed as either weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Our answer to this will be journalism that insists on the primacy of facts over ideology.

Though a doctored quote and a misrepresentation of events captured on camera, Roger Simon seems to have violated that difference between voice and advocacy that The Politico claims to represent.

It remains to be seen if the senior editorial staff of The Politico will take this clear evidence of journalistic malpractice seriously.

Update: I just sent the following to The Politico via their contact form:

Roger Simon's "Fred Thompson: Lazy as charged" included a doctored quote.

Simon states:

"'I've got a silly hat rule,' Thompson said."

That is factually incorrect.

What Thompson said is "I've got a silly hat rule that I'm about to violate."

Simon left off the entire second half of the quote, which was captured, in full, in the CBS News video that captured the event.

You owe it it your readers to correct the record in Simon's story.

I would ask you further what remedy you feel is worthy for a reporter that doctors quotes.

Thank you.

I've also left voicemail for Chief Dan McKenzie at the Waverly, Iowa Fire Department, asking for his view of what occurred yesterday.

I'd be very interested in seeing what both The Politico and Chief McKenzie have to say, and hope they take the time to respond.

Update: Over at A Second Hand Conjecture, Michael W. notes that this is not the first time that Roger Simon of The Politico may have been caught using partial or non-existent quotes.

If this is indeed the case, it seems a resignation, and not a retraction, is in order from Mr. Simon.

Time's Submission of The Year

Time Magazine has declared Russian strongman Vladimir Putin as their 2007 Person of the Year. It should come as little surprise. Time's award has become increasingly irrelevant over the years, and I say that as a past winner who was equally deserving of the award.

Time selected a man that lorded over a Russian security service that apparently murdered a former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko in London and refused to extradite his accused murderer, Andrei Lugovoi, which led to the expulsion of four Russian envoys by the British government in protest. That Putin obliquely compared the United States to Nazi Germany earleir this year also probably scored Putin points among Time's editors.

The fact that Putin's critics in the Russian media tend to wind up dead somehow escaped their glowing review—or perhaps inspired it.

17 Russian journalists have been killed since Putin came to power, 14 of which are described as contract murders. None of the 14 murders have ever been solved, including the murders of three journalists—Marina Pisareva, Konstantin Brovko, and Ivan Safronov—in 2007.

Perhaps Time selected their Person of the Year for 2007 not for political or editorial reasons, but for that most basic human desire... survival.

Sad But True

The difference between the New York Times defense of Associated Press photographer/terrorist suspect Bilal Hussein and the John Edwards love child scandal in The National Enquirer is that there is little reason to suspect that predisposed biases may play a role in the Enquirer story.

The Times coverage of Hussein's incarceration—which like the eerily similar Associated Press coverage before it, skips over the fact that Hussein attempted to hide his identity after being captured, and tries to make the normal workings of the Iraqi justice system appear biased against Hussein—is hardly objective.

But then, we didn't expect it to be.

You Gotta Be Kidding Me...

On Drudge:

There is nothing presently on National Enquirer web site right now, but even if there was... would it matter?

Even if true—and I don't think that it is—Edwards is something of a non-factor as a candidate polling well behind Clinton's 42% and Obama's 26% in the RCP poll average of Democratic candidates with just 13% of the vote.

This is stupid news, and more than likely non-news... pretty much like the Edwards campaign thus far.

Journalism is Hard

Babak Dehghanpisheh has an article posted in Newsweek today that once again shows just how careless the media is in its Iraq reporting in an article called, "The "Body Contractors.'"

The article itself is interesting, in that it notes that both violence is down and that those killing Iraqis are taking greater care to hide the bodies of those they kill. As a result of the recent trend of hiding bodies, mutahid al juthath—body contractors—charges clients between $300-$500 to hunt down missing relatives whether they are alive, or as the title of the article implies, dead.

The problem with Dehghanpisheh's reporting, however, is that he cites as examples of on-going massacres at least one event that simply never took place.

He writes:

In the past two months, more than half a dozen mass graves have been found in Iraq, at least half of them in Baghdad. At one site discovered in late November, in a yard in Baghdad's Saydiya neighborhood, bodies and their severed heads were buried in two separate holes, according to a source at the Ministry of Interior who isn't authorized to speak on the record. An additional 16 bodies were found buried in a ditch north of Baghdad last Thursday.

The 16 bodies "found buried in a ditch north of Baghdad last Thursday" never existed, according to American forces in the area that state:

This appears to false reporting. We currently have no information to confirm this. Neither the Brigade on the ground, or out teams that work with the IA or IPs can confirm this.

It is too much to ask reporters to ask anonymous sources for proof of their claims?

When it comes to reporting the dead in Iraq, apparently so.

Questionable Numbers

A USA Today article earlier this week noted the increasing confirmed or suspected suicides among members of the armed forces, but provided questionable figure for civilian suicides for comparison. The military suicide rate was pushed to USA Today by Senator Patty Murray, (D-WA). Murray was just one of 21 Democrats to vote against the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq.

According to the USA Today article:

A record number of soldiers — 109 — have killed themselves this year, according to Army statistics showing confirmed or suspected suicides.

The deaths occur as soldiers serve longer combat deployments and the Army spends $100 million on support programs.

...

Those numbers show 77 confirmed suicides Army-wide this year through Nov. 27 and 32 other deaths pending final determination as suicides.

The Army updated those statistics Wednesday, confirming 85 suicides, including 27 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan.

The highest number of Army suicides recorded since 1990 was 102 in 1992 — a period when the service was 20% larger than today.

A total of 109 suicides this year would equal a rate of 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate was 11 per 100,000 in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The discrepancy between military and civilian suicide rates—18.4/100,000 for the military, and 11/100,000 for civilians—is certainly shocking.

But it isn't necessarily accurate in an oranges-to-oranges comparison.

For example, an Associated Press account published today states that the civilian suicide rate for one segment of the population, middle-aged Americans 45-54, has risen dramatically, and that it isn't as far from the military rate as the USA Today article states.

The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S. residents ages 45 through 54 — far outpacing increases among younger adults, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in that age group. That's the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982.

Experts said they don't know why the suicide rates are rising so dramatically in that age group, but believe it is an unrecognized tragedy.

The general public and government prevention programs tend to focus on suicide among teenagers, and many suicide researchers concentrate on the elderly, said Mark Kaplan, a suicide researcher at Portland State University.

"The middle-aged are often overlooked. These statistics should serve as a wake-up call," Kaplan said.

For a like comparison to be made, one can—and perhaps should— try to compare the military suicide rate against the most demographically-comparable civilian group, and not the entire U.S. population.

When this is done, the CDC figures show that the 2004 age-adjusted suicide rate for civilian men—which would most closely correlate to the mostly male military population—is at 15.2 per 100,000, just 1.4/100,000 different than the military figure. This isn't an oranges-to-oranges comparison with military deaths, but at least we're closer to talking citrus in both instances.

The highest overall suicide rate among the groups studied was among males 65 or older, at 28.9 per 100,000.

For men, getting old seems to be a far greater risk factor for suicide than going to war, but then, I'm not a statistician.

AP'S Conflict of Interest

There is one current story in Iraq that has attracted the full attention of the Associated Press, and that is the case of Bilal Hussein, an AP photographer and terrorism suspect. The AP report on Hussein's hearing yesterday leaves out the fact that Hussein was arrested with a known al Qaeda terrorist... one of but many troubling aspects of the news organization's decision to forego objective news reporting in favor of self-serving advocacy in a clear and pervasive conflict of interest.

The Associated Press, as an involved party in this case, should recuse themselves from reporting on Hussein's trial.

According to The Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles:

In the 21st century, that news is transmitted in more ways than ever before – in print, on the air and on the Web, with words, images, graphics, sounds and video. But always and in all media, we insist on the highest standards of integrity and ethical behavior when we gather and deliver the news.

That means we abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions. It means we will not knowingly introduce false information into material intended for publication or broadcast; nor will we alter photo or image content. Quotations must be accurate, and precise.

It means we always strive to identify all the sources of our information, shielding them with anonymity only when they insist upon it and when they provide vital information – not opinion or speculation; when there is no other way to obtain that information; and when we know the source is knowledgeable and reliable.

It means we don't plagiarize.

It means we avoid behavior or activities that create a conflict of interest and compromise our ability to report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action.

It means we don't misidentify or misrepresent ourselves to get a story. When we seek an interview, we identify ourselves as AP journalists.

It means we don’t pay newsmakers for interviews, to take their photographs or to film or record them.

It means we must be fair. Whenever we portray someone in a negative light, we must make a real effort to obtain a response from that person. When mistakes are made, they must be corrected – fully, quickly and ungrudgingly.

And ultimately, it means it is the responsibility of every one of us to ensure that these standards are upheld. Any time a question is raised about any aspect of our work, it should be taken seriously.

AP editor Kim Gamel cannot claim to be avoiding bias and a conflict of interest when interviewing AP spokesman Paul Colford about the trial of AP employee Bilal Hussein.

In what alternate universe is it acceptable for a journalist to interview a senior staffer in the same news organization about a fellow employee?

Gamel cannot claim to be objective and retain the ability to "report the news fairly and accurately, uninfluenced by any person or action" when Gamel is reporting upon the Associated Press.

Whether or not Bilal Hussein is guilty of terrorism-related charges is a matter for the Iraqi criminal justice system to decide.

That the Associated Press is in violation of their own stated values and principles is readily apparent.

Just don't expect them to admit it.

When Dinosaurs Attack

Dan Riehl points to this gem from a Huffington Post interview with Helen Thomas:

HP:Do you think technology is changing [journalism]? That a good reporter will always find a venue because there are so many media outlets now?

Thomas: No, but I do think it is kind of sad when everybody who owns a laptop thinks they're a journalist and doesn't understand the ethics. We do have to have some sense of what's right and wrong in this job. Of how far we can go. We don't make accusations without absolute proof. We're not prosecutors. We don't assume.

HP: So if there's this amateur league of journalists out there, trying to do what you do...

Thomas: It's dangerous.

To a certain extent, I agree with Thomas that blogging is dangerous... for journalists. The gatekeeper isn't dead, but he is ailing.

Blogging software now makes it easy for subject matter experts and enthusiasts to provide the insights and critical review that most journalists simply don't have the background to report thoroughly, or accurately.

I'd hasten to add that this isn't always the fault of journalists. Many if not most journalists are generalists, who may be assigned to whatever the "hot" story of the day may be, across a wide range of topics. We've less tolerance for the siloed journalists who cover a specific beat and refuse to become subject matter experts in the area that they are assigned.

But no matter where journalists come from, must are always still primarily journalists, with a communications/journalism background, and they simply cannot compile the depth or breadth of knowledge that someone who has the academic and practical professional experience that many bloggers have developed.

It is for these reasons that science blogs, milblogs, tech blogs and law blogs almost always have better commentary than the journalists merely assigned to cover the same areas, even though these bloggers will rarely break as many new news stories. Where bloggers typically excel is with providing content and corrections to news stories that journalist simply don't have the expertise to give.

Now, it is a fair criticism that with tens of millions of blogs that many, if not most of them, are junk. It is a fair assessment that most blogs merely exist to echo opinions, but provide very little in the way of news in their content. But it is equally true that in blogging the cream rises to the top. What we increasing find in journalism, however, is that what floats to the top assuredly isn't cream.

Bloggers have removed the mystique of the profession of journalism. It isn't rocket science.

It never was.

Though taught on the undergraduate and graduate level, some of the best journalists lack a college degree. Good reporting is craft or a trade reliant on a thirst for knowledge, dilligence, insight, ethics, and an ability to communicate—personality traits that no journalism school in the country can provide. The best a journalism program can do is polish the skills and technique of someone who already has these traits, but specific pedigrees are irrelevant when it comes the long-term quality of the work. A degree from Columbia may get your foot in the newsroom, but it won't keep you there. The quality of your work determines your future... or should.

I can think of a half dozen bloggers covering politics that have done more original reporting than Helen Thomas over the past few years and certainly deserve a seat in the White House Press Corps more than Thomas, who only seem to exist now as an irritant for the White House Press office, and as an amusement for her peers.

In the end perhaps it is her own current irrelevance that makes Thomas regard bloggers as dangerous, as a new breed of information providers devours the old.

Another Fabulist

This time, W. Thomas Smith, Jr., a former Marine writing at NRO blog The Tank.

On Friday, Smith admitted that he:

• turned two AK-pattern rifles he witnessed in a tent city into "200-plus heavily armed Hezbollah militiamen," and then;
• turned a tip from an informant and men he saw at intersections with radios into "between 4,000 and 5,000 HezB gunmen deployed to the Christian areas of Beirut in an unsettling 'show of force,' positioning themselves at road intersections and other key points throughout the city."

Shortly after Smith posted his comments, NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez posted a comment of her own, stating in part:

Bottom line: NRO strives to bring you reliable analysis and reporting — whether in presenting articles, essays, or blog posts. Smith did commendable work in Lebanon earlier this year, as he does from S.C. where he is based, as he has done from Iraq, where he has been twice. But rereading some of the posts (see "The Tank" for more detail) and after doing a thorough investigation of some of the points made in some of those posts, I've come to the conclusion that NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall. And so I apologize to you, our readers.

It is good that Lopez and Smith admitted to these falsehoods without prompting, but I do not think that adding "context and caveats" to Smith's comments would have been enough to justify them.

At the very least, Smith has earned a suspension from NRO, but considering the magnitude of his fabrications, termination seems warranted.

Another Media Account Disputed

Hala Jaber's American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq has been challenged by an American soldier on the ground.

1LT Brendan Griswold, 1-5 CAV in Ameriyah writes:

I do not know how long Ms. Hala Jaber's trip to Ameriya lasted or where exactly she visited inside the city, but the events that she describes in her recent article ("American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq," November 25), totally contradict the progress I have personally witnessed in the past 13 months here in Ameriya.

I have spent the last 13 months as a Platoon Leader in the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, stationed in western Baghdad and responsible for securing the population of Ameriya—a Sunni dominant and once-upscale portion of the Iraqi capital. My time here has allowed me to become close to many of the citizens inside Ameriya who live in my various areas of responsibility.