"Tangential" issues...

Stephen Spruiell, at The Corner:

A bunch of liberal journalists have written an open letter to ABC to whine about its handling of Wednesday night's debate. "We're at a crucial moment in our country's history," they write. "Large majorities of our fellow Americans tell pollsters they're deeply worried about the country's direction... Tough, probing questions on these issues clearly serve the public interest... excessive emphasis on tangential 'character' issues do not."

The signers include at least seven contributors to The Nation, whose editors never saw anything "tangential" about George W. Bush's Air National Guard service and what that said about his character. A Google search of The Nation's website for stories on that topic yields 72 stories — none of which called on the media to stop focusing on such a tangential character issue...

Do I ever remember how self-rightous the press and the Left was about the issue of Bush's service—even while insisting that we should ignore a few hundred vets who wanted to raise the issue of Lt Kerry's service and character back then.

And in both cases it is the Democrat whose character really needs to be scrutinized, simply because neither of them have ever accomplished anything of note. We need to guess at what sort of leaders Obama or Kerry will be, because they've never led. Whereas Bush had run businesses, a baseball team, the State of Texas, and served a term as President. And McCain at least has his name on major legislation, and has been fighting over big issues in the public eye for decades. Not to mention being a very open person, who wears his heart on his sleeve.

And the "journalists" know this perfectly well. Their job is always to slip the Democrat past the electorate. And most of them think the same about small-town Pennsylvanians as Obama does. They are just wishing his character was more adept at faking being American.

The “Fighting rages” dodge...

Nibras Kazimi is still, it seems to me, making sense of Maliki's offensive in Iraq...

...For how can one not pity those miserable journalists as they scramble to find new narratives to define the last 48 hours in Iraq?

Not only has Maliki not backed down, but newly emboldened with wide political backing he’s begun to smash through Sadr City itself and is threatening to banish the Sadrists to a political Siberia. Muqtada al-Sadr, the guy the media has us thinking had won, has prostrated himself at the feet of Grand Ayotallah Sistani, promising Maliki that he would indeed demobilize his militia if the wise old men of Shi’ism would have it so. Gone are the millenarian certainties of taking orders from the Mahdi, the messiah. Gone is all that bluster of al-Sadr’s virile, confident ‘Outspoken hawza’ contrasted with Sistani’s supposedly feeble and retro ‘Silent hawza’. And he sends out his plea for clemency from Iran. FROM IRAN?!! From a place of chosen exile with which he had often derided the Hakims for seeking sanctuary and shelter there after Saddam has nearly eradicated their lineage. The place too, towards which his father’s confidants still point their accusing fingers for the murder that had befallen the old man and that of Muqtada’s two older, more worthy brothers.

Sadr surrendering his fate to Sistani and submissively muttering, “Do as you please, Sir.” Who would have imagined?

It is almost as baffling as Maliki’s abrupt transformation from an incompetent administrator into a wartime commander-in-chief!....

and...

...Well, it now seems that the rumor is official according to this press report (Arabic): Muqtada al-Sadr has cancelled his 'March of the Millions' anti-American demonstration set for tomorrow to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the liberation of Baghdad.

In retaliation for whimping out, Code Pink has formally revoked al-Sadr's membership and expelled him from its ranks. Furthermore, Barack Obama has withdrawn his offer of a cabinet post that he had offered to Muqtada. Going yet further, Nancy Pelosi has cast off her Mahdi Army bandanna. Dozens of western journalists were seen protesting the cancellation outside Sadr's HQ in Sadr City, angry over the time and effort they had lavished while pre-writing tomorrow's story and the waste of all those flashy headlines and headcounts that they won't get to use. Ha!....

I like this guy! And this for our fraudulent journalists, is perfect:

...Yes, you miserable souls: keep writing in that passive tense, that “Fighting rages” dodge. Never mind that Maliki and the Iraqi Army are actively picking a fight with the outlaws, a fight that the government is winning, and that’s the reason why the bullets are whooshing by...

There are times when fighting is supposed to "rage." Like, uh, when you are attacking somebody! That's good. That's a good sign. It's a war, you dolts. (I don't actually think that "war" is the correct term to describe the "Global War on Terror," but it will have to do until I think of a better one.)

Alternate views...

Nibras Kazimi is a Visiting Scholar at the Hudson Institute, who writes a weekly column on the Middle East for the New York Sun, and a monthly column for the Prospect Magazine (UK).

His blog is Talisman Gate, and he's been writing fascinating posts on what's been happening in Basra. I don't know enough to judge his accuracy, but he's a lot more convincing than what we've been getting from the Western media, and Western bloggers.

A sample: Monday, March 31, 2008 The ‘Intifada’ That Wasn’t

...The western media operating in Iraq regurgitated the Mahdi Army’s bravado as fact thereby serving as useful propaganda tools for the criminal cartels. I’d single out the New York Times, the Associated Press, McClatchy and CNN as the worst transgressors. Many journalists were positively orgasmic in anticipation of another ‘intifada’ or uprising to crease Bush’s message of hope and regeneration. But as the dust began to clear and the real scope of the battle was revealed, these journalists were reduced to alarmism of the “What if Martians decide to invade Basra too?” variety. Understandably, some of these journalists wanted the Iraq scene to heat up so that the public back in America would pay attention to Iraq and consequently to the careers of those reporting on Iraq for their once-glamorous war zone beat that was sure to land one a book deal a couple of years back had gone dull and dreary.

What then did these journalists do when they didn’t get their ‘intifada’? They couldn’t further imperil their careers by admitting that they were wrong—hell no!—so they’ve decided to brand Maliki and the Iraqi Army as the losers....

...Operation Cavalry Charge was a reality warp for all those who’ve internalized the rhetoric that Iraq is a failed state. Instead of being dismissed as a ‘Green Zone politician’, Maliki took his war cabinet to Basra and went all Untouchables on the Al Capones of Iraq’s oil-rich south; plenty of journalists and ‘experts’ simply could not grasp these dramatic changes to the political topography of Iraq.

Maliki won, pure and simple. The western media invented the narrative that Maliki was at war with the Sadrist movement, even though no such declaration was ever made. No one was interested in turning the Sadrists into martyrs when their stocks are sinking faster than Bear Stearns' anyway. Why turn the Sadrists into desperadoes with nothing to loose? Maliki’s approach is piece-meal: he’s taken out the intimidation factor that kept much of the Sadrist sway in place and he’s done that by showing them that they are no armed match for a better-disciplined, better-supplied Iraqi Army with plenty of stamina. The Sadrists are left with some political gains that they’ve accrued from joining the political process, such as government posts and lucrative contracts that they’d be loathe to part with and that’s their collateral for good behavior from now on....

Some other posts to read: The Great Green Zone Freak-Out of ‘08, and As the haze clears, and More Media Distortions...

strangest health story in many years?

Hugh Hewitt, on another recall of possibly-contaminated Heparin from China....

This remains the strangest health story in many years because it is so under-reported....

...The questions I have yet to see answered in a newspaper account (or anywhere for that matter):

Where and when did the 19 fatalities occur?

During what time frame did the "hundreds" of allergic reactions occur?

Are there possible long-term consequences from use of the adulterated heparin which patients have to be vigilant about?

Have all patients who received potentially contaminated heparin been informed?

Why are there still possibly-contaminated Heparin products on the market?

Either the 19 deaths and "hundreds" of allergic reaction numbers are inflated or conjecture, or this story has been terribly handled by MSM.

It's certainly odd how little we've heard of this.

My guess is that it's mostly political. There's no domestic political angle. If An American firm were at fault, this would be a big story. If Mr McCain owned stock in that company, it would be a HUGE story. (If Mr Obama were involved, it would be a story about "Republican smear tactics.")

But mostly I would guess it's a non-story because the media's instincts are always Tranzi. They don't want you to notice that there are certain differences between countries...since they are hoping to kind of merrrrrge things, under the supervision of elite post-nationalist bureaucrats. A group that would have considerable overlap with elite post-nationalist journalists.

Are we at the "willing suspension of disbelief" stage?

Alan Sullivan writes:

...Today BBC has a new datum from Antarctica. A section of ice shelf is breaking away. You have to read the article closely to find amid the language of alarm that the chunk is question is a small piece of a small shelf on the Palmer Peninsula — the one part of Antarctica that has been warming. The rest of the continent has been getting markedly colder for many years. This is not mentioned in the article. BBC provides no balance in climate coverage, only propaganda.

The “unprecedented warming” of the peninsula is probably a direct consequence of the continent chilling. With colder air over the great icecap, ocean storms round the perimeter get stronger. Those storms drive maritime winds over the north-jutting peninsula, causing a local warming. It has nothing to do with global climate, which is not warming, and has not been for nearly a decade. Curiously enough, BBC has offered readers no story on the startling data from the Argo buoy program, announced last week. It covered the launch of the system with green enthusiasm in 2000. Now not a word. Why? Because Argo finds no warming in the oceans, and zealots can abide no contradiction....

We are in an interesting situation here, where those following certain subject via the Internet are aware of a growing disconnect between what you "read in the paper" and what's actually happening on the ground. And the fascination is in wondering when "they" are going to be forced to acknowledge the new reality.

This is starting to feel a lot like Iraq in early 2007, when blogs started to pick up on stories about sheikhs in al Anbar turning against al Qaeda, and about the shift in our tactics to counter-insurgency. And our question became not: "who's going to win," but instead: "When are our lefties going to be forced to admit that their side has lost?"

I'm wondering if the "global warming" debate is approaching a point similar to when Hillary greeted Gen. Petraeus' report with her "willing suspension of disbelief" wise-crack. (McCain recently suggested it was high time she apologized to a great American. I kinda hope she gets the nomination just so McCain can rub her nose in it.)

This is sort of like watching a movie, where the characters have decided to explore the spooky mysterious old house How long will it be before something jumps out at them?... This is going to be fun.

Great Satan ascendent...

NYT:

...Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet.

Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism...

That's because their side is loosing. Have some sympathy!

It must be crushing to be a "journalist" these days, and see your hopes and dreams crumble into ashes. Half a decade they've invested in Saddam, in al Qaeda, in Kerry, in the Ba'athists, in Cindy Sheehan, in Moqtada al Sadr, in Iran.......only to see evil triumph, and George W Bush's mercenaries swaggering the streets of Baghdad, laughing and smiling and handing out candy to all those horrid little pickininnies...

Heartbreaking.

Reporters no more?

From an interesting piece in PJ Media on whether reporters are an endangered species...

...This middleman function, with reporters serving as mere links in a news supply chain, was never needed until fairly recently. Before the printing press was invented, we were all receivers and transmitters of news, spreading it by word-of-mouth. Soon after its invention, multitudes of mostly one-man print-shops, as a sideline, printed newspapers to supplement this word-of-mouth process. These printers wrote their own articles blending facts with opinion, much like bloggers do today. Others also contributed, often without receiving compensation or attribution — citizens, gossips, letter-writing “correspondents” from other towns, and similarly-operating foreign and domestic newspapers whose stories were simply lifted.

Since this is what news looked like at the time of the Founding Fathers, they gave no particular mandate to reporters, a function that did not even exist at the time. The “freedom of the press” they cited in the First Amendment was not about “the press,” but about everyone’s right to freely use a printing press to express their views without government interference, supplementing the free speech clause that allowed everyone to express their views orally.

The first full-time reporter in America did not appear until the 1820’s, after steam engines were integrated into printing presses. Suddenly, newspapers had to be run like businesses to achieve consistently high circulation levels to pay for equipment and keep newsstand prices low. Reporters provided the needed constant flow of consistently well-written articles....

The term "reporter" usually means a generalist. His job is, for the most part, to find the person who has specific knowledge, and pass that knowledge on to the public. He's a middleman. If he is covering a fire, he will talk to witnesses and firefighters, and boil down their knowledge into a story. And he is a generalist, because the next day he may be covering a royal wedding or a prize fight.

The Internet tends to destroy middlemen. (Or actually it's a more general trend of the Information Age. When I was young, maybe in the late 50's or early 60's, my father was transitioning his nursery business from selling plants to wholesalers, to selling direct to retail nurseries and flower shops. This was probably a matter of easier flows of information. Freeways and better phone service meant that salesmen could cover more ground, and work directly with a lot of small businesses. So goodbye local wholesaler.)

If there is a big fire, the witnesses can now put information directly into the hands of consumers, say by posting it in a blog. So who needs reporters?

But a reporter can also be himself the person who has specific knowledge. If he covers a special beat, then he may have understanding that most people don't. So he is more than a middleman, he is able to create valuable information on his own. Which doesn't necessarily mean he will be able to sell it in an age that has torrents of free information "deflating the currency."
(Thanks to Rand)

Their job--slipping the Democrat past the electorate....

You know, it's the press that bugs me, much more than Mr Obama or Ms Clinton. Those two (& McCain) are politicians, they are mostly acting like politicians do. Since I have never for a moment thought that Mr Obama was really a "uniter," or had gone beyond partisanship, I'm only occasionally able to become outraged. The news-media, on the other hand, I despise from year's end to year's end.

Tim Graham at NewsBusters:

....Up until the Brian Ross report, CBS was the only network to do the barest shadow of a report that could make Obama's campaign a little more difficult. Even Reynolds left out a few details. Farrakhan won the "Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award" to a man who "truly epitomized greatness" -- in 2007. Where were the media on that? Doesn't this divisive minister of Obama's cause a serious problem for a candidate who's been sold as a uniter, not a divider?

Why, this late in the primary season, are we still discovering that they haven’t asked any of the hard questions? We are starting to see the same disturbing pattern we saw with John Kerry in 2004. The media didn’t see its job as vetting John Kerry as he told everyone he was the bravest of war heroes. When the men who fought with him on the swift boats told a different story, the media tried to ignore them.

The media was saying "print the legend," and suggested that when opponents try to vet the Democrat, when they try to do the job a supine media blatantly failed to do, it was then the media’s job to vet the opponents and question their sincerity, not vet the Democrat.

The news media doesn’t see its job as informing the electorate. They see their job as getting the Democrat past the electorate.

The real story about the Swift Boat Vets was that they had to pay to communicate with the electorate. Because the "journalists" had never bothered to ask them what they thought about their old comrade. And we are so used to their bias that we hardly notice that a big news story was simply ignored by the news-gatherers....

Turning over a rotting log...

OBAMA'S JEREMIAD. By Investor's Business Daily:

Election 2008: Imagine the uproar if John McCain's pastor used the "N"-word and asked God to "damn" blacks. Yet Barack Obama's pastor condemns whites, and liberal pundits bite their lip.

This newspaper was the first to draw attention to Obama's hate-mongering preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, and his black segregationist church in Chicago. Our January 2007 editorial, "Obama's Real Faith," exposed their preaching of a militantly anti-white and socialist doctrine called the "Black Value System," triggering a major story in the Chicago Tribune, which led to other stories.

Now comes the leaking of recently videotaped sermons by Wright angrily condemning whites as racists and America as evil. If you close your eyes, you'd swear you were listening to the hateful rantings of uber-bigot Louis Farrakhan. Like the Nation of Islam minister, Wright feeds his 8,500-member flock, including Obama and his family, legends about whites keeping blacks down by getting them hooked on crack and then locking them up. He even claims whites invented AIDS to destroy blacks.

Obama is not immune to such myths. Until recently, when he was informed it wasn't true, he repeated a favorite Wright line that "we've got more black men in prison than there are in college."

"The government gives (black men) drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," Wright thundered in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Locked in a Jim Crow time warp, he claims America — which he affectionately calls "the US-KKK-A" — is "controlled by and run by rich white people." Never mind that institutionalized racism is a distant memory. Or that the most popular candidate in the country right now, according to some polls, is his top acolyte.

In 2006, Wright said from the pulpit: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. And. And-and! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this sh*t!"....

If Mr Obama has been sitting in the pew for twenty years listening to this foul lying stuff, he not only does not deserve to be President, he does not deserve to be welcomed into the company of decent people. And if Democrats are not anti-American racists, they will repudiate him. Ha ha...I won't hold my breath on that one.

Of course in one sense he wasn't sitting in a pew, since this is not religion. It's politics. Mr Wright's church has been "hollowed-out," its faith replaced by politics, just as much as the many mushy white churches that have replaced salvation through the Lord Jesus with "peace 'n justice 'n the UN Millennium Goals."

And of course this is a perfect example of how the news-media hurts Democrats by trying to help them. Maybe, just maybe, certain Democrat Primary voters would have wanted to know this stuff. Hmmm? D'you think? Too late now, suckers. Maybe you Dems should think about telling the press to just report the damn news honestly, instead of trying to mold the country with their superior elite wisdom.

"When mystery no longer counts for anything, then politics necessarily becomes the religion"
      --Pope Benedict XVI, Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions, p. 126

"work together in pursuit of shared goals "

Here's the News Report from those foul lying traitors honest patriots you see on TV...

March 13, 2008 2:44 PM

ABC News has requested and obtained a copy of the Pentagon study which shows Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda.

It's government report the White House didn't want you to read: yesterday the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's availability and didn't make the report available via email or online.

Based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and thousands of hours of interrogations of former officials in Saddam's government now in US custody, the government report is the first official acknowledgment from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.....

And, here's the first paragraph of the Executive Summary of the actual report...(Thanks to Steven Hayes):

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a "de facto" link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime...(my emphasis)

That's all you need to know. Saddam's was a terror-supporting regime. We are engaged in a global struggle against terrorism. For that reason alone we were perfectly justified in taking out Iraq. In fact there was no need to ask permission of Congress, just as FDR needed no special permission to invade French Morocco, (or Iceland, for that matter). The President could have just picked up the phone and told Rumsfeld to do it. And informed the public after the fact.

Wars are to fight. In a war you attack your enemies. Duh.

It's jam to me, I must confess....

I must admit I'm taking a certain grim satisfaction in the way the NYT and the press are attacking John McCain with innuendo and zero facts. We conservatives have been gritting our teeth for so long watching a certain important Republican senator sucking-up to the Times and the news-media, who have been happy to pretend to like him as long as he attacks our president and his own party.

PowerLine writes:

.... the Times offered zero evidence of either the affair or the favors. That didn't bother the AP, though; if the Times "suggests" something, it's fit to print.

The AP next proceeds to place Cindy McCain in a long line of political wives whose husbands have been accused of sexual misdeeds: Larry Craig's wife Suzanne; Hillary Clinton; Dina McGreevy, whose husband publicly announced an affair with a gay lover; Carlita Kilpatrick, whose husband, the Mayor of Detroit, sent "sexually explicit text messages" to his top aide; Lee Hart, whose husband Gary frolicked with Donna Rice aboard the Monkey Business...you get the picture.

But wait! Those are all women whose husbands actually did something wrong. To put Cindy McCain in that group implies that the "rumor" that the Times "strongly suggested" might be true is actually a fact. I think that John and Cindy McCain belong in another group altogether: innocent people whose reputations have been slimed by irresponsible rags....

It's not only fun, it's going to be very interesting to watch how this works out, and how big John responds to his media pals turning on him. And it's also pleasing to think that McCain will be much harder for the Democrats to beat, since they will have much less ability to say that he's just part of the Bush administration, etc, after having reveled in him being the "maverick."

Lists of reasons...

Over the last few months serious bloggers and pundits have given us lists of reasons why conservatives oppose John McCain. But you would never haver guessed that there were such documents from listening to the mainstream media. Opposition to McCain was invariably portrayed as personal pique, or kooky right-wing extremism.

I caught a bit of Rush Limbaugh this morning, and he was quoting some media lefties who are coming up with........lists of reasons why conservatives oppose John McCain! Gee, I wonder why the shift?

"revenues declined 22.4%"

Charlene noticed this Bizzyblog post, about how the news media ignored or downplayed the fact that the two recent bombings in Baghdad we done using mentally retarded women. That's the sort of detail that might make almost anyone realize that surrendering to these monsters is madness. And realize also that al Qaeda is possibly scraping the bottom of the barrel for "single-use activists."

So of course the terrorist-allies in the news media slanted the story to “the new Baghdad feels a lot like the old Baghdad.”

The Bombings were not done to influence Iraqi opinion--it's long past obvious that the Iraqis are not going to be cowed by terror-bombings. Those women and children in the pet markets in Baghdad were killed for the New York Times. And CNN, and CBS, and the rest. They were killed BY our news-media, who have demonstrated a thousand times that they will spread the terrorist story-line. That they will reward al Qaeda for bloody slaughters.

Those poor people were slaughtered to give propaganda ammunition to our "anti-war" activists. They were killed for our "pacifists." They were killed for Barack and Hillary. They were killed for the Democrat Party. They were killed for Ron Paul. they were killed for the Quakers...

But there was a tiny crumb of comfort in the last line of the post:

...In totally related news, the New York Times Company (symbol NYT) reported Thursday that, though it turned a profit in its fourth quarter, December revenues declined a heart-stopping 22.4%.

"Hate-speech disguised as a public service"

Ralph Peters is excellently scathing today: The New Lepers: The Times' Trouble With Vets

...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)...

...Pretending to pity tormented veterans (vets don't want our pity - they want our respect), the Times' feature was an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service.The image we all were supposed to take away from that story was of hopelessly damaged, victimized, infected human beings who've become outcasts from civilized society. The Times cast our vets as freaks from a slasher flick.The hard left's hatred of our military has deteriorated from a political stance into a pathology: The only good soldier is a dead soldier who can be wielded as a statistic (out of context again). Or a deserter who complains bitterly that he didn't join the Army to fight...

...So let me suggest the best-possible revenge on the veteran-trashing jerks at The New York Times: Instead of fleeing in terror the next time you see a veteran you know, just thank him or her for their service.

And let's save the leper's bells for dishonest journalists.

If you subscribe to the NYT, you are "embedded" with the Father of Lies

John at PowerLine demolishes that vile NYT story about how returning vets are committing murders....

...Now put yourself in the place of a newspaper editor. Suppose you are asked to evaluate whether your paper should run a long article on a nationwide epidemic of murders committed by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan--a crime wave that, your reporter suggests, constitutes a "cross-country trail of death and heartbreak." Suppose that the reporter who proposes to write the article says it will be a searing indictment of the U.S. military's inadequate attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. Suppose further that you are not a complete idiot.

Given that last assumption, I'm pretty sure your first question will be: "How does the murder rate among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan compare to the murder rate for young American men generally?" Remarkably, this is a question the New York Times did not think to ask. Or, if the Times asked the question and figured out the answer, the paper preferred not to report it...

The evidence presented clearly says that the murder rate among returning vets is much lower than the national average for their age group!

But watch, this lie will not go away. It will probably become part of folklore. Like the despicable lie that Vietnam vets were more likely to have psychological problems than average.

The sort of people who work for the New York Times hate this country, and hate our military. They hate both for exactly the same reason--because both represent the idea that there are things worth fighting for. Things that are bigger and more important than "me." For nihilists, this is poison.

Digging in the muck...

John at PowerLine takes the trouble to demolish the deranged NYT editorial I mentioned yesterday. A dirty job, but someone has to do it....

...What is really "twisted beyond recognition" is the Times' account of America's interrogation practices. What the paper describes is simply a fantasy. In fact, President Bush issued an executive order directing that all prisoners be treated humanely. Torture is illegal, and there is no evidence that any executive agency has authorized the use of torture. Waterboarding is the most intense interrogation method that has been authorized, with respect to as few as two high-level terrorists. While opinions differ, I think it is obvious that waterboarding is not torture. It does no physical harm, and is a technique that we have used to train pilots. The Times' reference to the role of doctors is dishonest. What doctors actually do was described in the paper's own news story:

[I]n the spring of 2002, ... the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan.

In fact, as the Times itself reported, the CIA started videotaping interrogations in part to show how well the captured terrorists were being treated...

...Perhaps the editorial board has joined the countless millions of Americans who don't read the Times....

And John has the same opinion as my friend---this is a temper tantrum...

...In other words: Elect a Democrat in 2008, or we're going to stamp our feet and hold our breath until we turn blue!

One anticipates with fascinated horror how they will react to a President Romney....

One of our gals...

Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard Blog notes the top ten opinion pieces (by page views) of the WaPo for 2007. Who's number one?

Retreat Isn't an Option, By Liz Cheney, January 23, 2007

....We are at war. America faces an existential threat. This is not, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed, a "situation to be solved." It would be nice if we could wake up tomorrow and say, as Sen. Barack Obama suggested at a Jan. 11 hearing, "Enough is enough." Wishing doesn't make it so. We will have to fight these terrorists to the death somewhere, sometime. We can't negotiate with them or "solve" their jihad. If we quit in Iraq now, we must get ready for a harder, longer, more deadly struggle later....

Liz is Dick and Lynne Cheney's daughter. that's her on the right in the picture. (And who's number two in the WaPo? A guy named Kristol.)

Temper tantrum...

A friend sends a link to this NYT Editorial, Looking at America...

This amounts to a fists-pounding-on-the-floor temper tantrum. My favorite theory is that Pinch found himself alone in the editorial room last night and got this thing out before “cooler” heads (Andy Rosenthal??) arrived. This could only happen on a Monday before a major Tuesday holiday. They are probably hoping no one reads it.

Lordy, what a pile of crap. I'm tempted to refute all their points with facts and logic, but it would serve no purpose—it's been done a thousand times already, by far better writers than I, without any effect on the deranged....

Good news is bad news for certain people....

Michelle Malkin writes in NRO...

There should be no question what the top story of the year was: America’s counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, the Democrats’ hapless efforts to sabotage it, and the Western mainstream media’s stubborn refusal to own up to military progress.

What happened in January defined the rest of the year. We rang in 2007 with vehement liberal opposition to the “surge” of 21,000 added U.S. troops and tactical changes to secure Baghdad. In the ensuing 12 months, Democrats tried and failed repeatedly to undermine this military strategy and starve the war of funding. Their poisonously partisan allies at MoveOn.org attempted to smear surge architect and patriot Gen. David Petraeus as a traitor. The New York Times and Associated Press fought tooth and nail to obscure the successes of the surge with their relentless “grim milestone” drumbeat. But by year’s end, with Shiites and Sunnis marching and praying together for peace, even anti-war Democrats and adversarial media outlets alike were forced to acknowledge that undeniable military progress and security improvements had been made....


....There’s a reason the magazine and newspaper editors are naming everything but the surge as their top story of the year. (Putin? The Virginia Tech massacre? Come on.) Good news in the war on terror is bad news for those rooting for failure. Far easier to play up casualties and sectarian strife, sensationalize accusations of atrocities, and demonize the men and women in uniform to indulge Bush Derangement Syndrome, as Washington Post staffer and NBC military analyst William Arkin did on Jan. 30 when he lambasted troops for enjoying “obscene amenities” and serving as a “mercenary” force...

Nothing shows what frauds and worms our peaceniks are, than their utter indifference to the enormous drop in casualty rates in Iraq, both military and civilian. That kind of peace they don't like one little bit. You can bet that if America had blundered somehow in Iraq, that would be the "story of the year."

An abu Ghraib gets 10,000 headlines. But the countless acts of courage and decency that are the daily routine of our forces in Iraq, and their many successes--those the poisonous reptiles of our press are not interested in. We would know almost nothing of them if it were not for the Internet.

(Thanks to Ed)

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh...

Quote, from Media Research Center's The Best Notable Quotables of 2007...

“You know, I wanted to sit on a jury once and I was taken off the jury. And the judge said to me, ‘Can, you know, can you tell the truth and be fair?’ And I said, ‘That’s what journalists do.’ And everybody in the courtroom laughed. It was the most hurtful moment I think I’ve ever had.”
      — Co-host Diane Sawyer joking on ABC’s Good Morning America July 12, following a report on how some people try to avoid serving on a jury.

If only they'd had some rotten fruit to pelt her with....

Media start asking why?...No time soon

From Vin Suprynowic, How many more will die in 'gun-free' zones before the media start asking why? (Thanks to InstaPundit)

...The second question? Mr. Lott, author of "Freedomnomics" and a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland, put it very well in the Fox News column in question:

"A Google news search using the phrase 'Omaha Mall Shooting' finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide" in the first 24 hours alone, Mr. Lott notes. "But ... none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. (Dec. 6), mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone.

"Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn't one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises?" asks Mr. Lott, who posts the "No weapons allowed" sign from Salt Lake City's Trolley Square Mall (it's rule 10 at http://johnrlott.tripod.com/2007/02/proof-that-trolley-square-mall-in-utah.html )

"Oh come on, Vin," someone will protest at this point. "It wouldn't matter even if these places did allow people to carry guns. Hardly anyone goes armed, so how often would a plain old non-policeman with a gun really save lives?"

Pretty often, it turns out....

I bet that if your could examine the thought processes of the "journalists" who produced the 2,794 stories, not one of them would have consciously hidden an important fact. Rather, they have a certain mental picture of how the world works, and even if you had tapped them on the shoulder whilst they were writing the stories, and told them this important fact, they would not hear you. (Sort of like that Far Side cartoon, "What you say." "What your dog hears.")

And I would wager that not one of them could or would debate the issue. Even if you tied them to a chair and put a gun to their heads and said: "You've slanted a news story to fit your agenda. The penalty is death....unless you can support your position in debate using logic and facts." They couldn't do it to save their lives.

Reason 898 why I hate "the press"

I hate them, and I laugh with bitter pleasure each time I read of declining circulation for the nation's newspapers....

From NCR:

NEW YORK — When the Associated Press set out to investigate an apparent problem with sexual assault of children in public schools, the organization spared no expense. A congressionally mandated study by Hofstra University had already found school-based sexual abuse to be a big problem.

“It was one of our priorities for the year,” said John Affleck, editor of the AP’s national reporting team.

The result was a three-part series, available to editors throughout the country beginning Oct. 20, that revealed widespread and routine sexual assault of public school students throughout the country. The first story summarized: “Students in America’s schools are groped. They’re raped. They’re pursued, seduced and think they’re in love.”

The series told of an entrenched resistance to stopping abusers on the part of teachers, administrators and the National Education Association, a teacher’s union.

So why apparently have only a handful of newspapers nationwide run the series — in stark contrast to the avalanche of press received by the Catholic Church since 2002? Paul Colford, corporate communications director for the AP, said he was inundated with complaints from people wondering why their newspapers were not carrying the series...

And, a few figures for contrast...

...“The Boston Globe began publishing on Jan. 6, 2002, a series of reports regarding sexual abuse of children by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston,” Nussbaum wrote “In a flash, newspapers around the country began reprinting the Globe’s reports and developing their own. They published 728 stories in January; 1,095 in February, and 2,961 in March. By April, these papers were publishing a new story every nine minutes, 160 every day, 4,791 for the month. By year-end, American papers provided their readers over 21,000 stories of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”

Boston Globe editors contacted by the Register claimed only vague knowledge of the AP series, and could not answer as to whether part of it ran in their paper....

"forms of artistic expression"

Fascinatin' stuff at PJ Media on fraudulant video from Palestinians, and how Western media are happy to help out with the fraud, and the Jew bashing...

...So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded: These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.”

These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of “public secret” at work on the Arab “street”: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.

Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the “truth” is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years – Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes – continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?

Here the evidence provided by the Al Dura affair suggests that, in some sense, journalists are “in” on the public secret. When representatives of France2 were confronted with the pervasive evidence of staging in Talal’s footage, they both responded the same way. “Oh, they always do that, it’s a cultural thing,” said Enderlin to me in Jerusalem. “Yes Monsieur, but, you know, it’s always like that,” said Didier Eppelbaum to Denis Jeambar, Daniel Leconte, and Luc Rosenzweig in Paris....

"forms of artistic expression..." The sick thing is that they LEARN this foul postmodernist crap from us. We TEACH THEM to be liars and murderers.

"forms of artistic expression"

Fascinatin' stuff at PJ Media on fraudulant video from Palestinians, and how Western media are happy to help out with the fraud, and the Jew bashing...

...So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded: These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.”

These remarks serve as an important prelude to considering the France2 rushes that will be shown in court in Paris on November 14 in the Enderlin France2 vs. Philippe Karsenty defamation case. These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes. Indeed there seems to be a kind of “public secret” at work on the Arab “street”: people fake injury, others evacuate them hurriedly (and without stretchers) past Palestinian cameramen like Talal, who use Western video equipment to record these improvised scenes. Pallywood: the Palestinian movie industry.

Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the “truth” is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years – Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes – continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?

Here the evidence provided by the Al Dura affair suggests that, in some sense, journalists are “in” on the public secret. When representatives of France2 were confronted with the pervasive evidence of staging in Talal’s footage, they both responded the same way. “Oh, they always do that, it’s a cultural thing,” said Enderlin to me in Jerusalem. “Yes Monsieur, but, you know, it’s always like that,” said Didier Eppelbaum to Denis Jeambar, Daniel Leconte, and Luc Rosenzweig in Paris....

"forms of artistic expression..." The sick thing is that they LEARN this foul postmodernist crap from us. We TEACH THEM to be liars and murderers.

"It's like watching two guys you really despise get into a barfight..."

You are, no doubt, familiar with the blog of Fake Steve Jobs... He's got a great rant on the "Hollywood writers."

.....Obtain a clue, people. You're sitting there fighting over residuals and terms of this and that when what you should be doing is leaving the system altogether and helping to build the next one. But you can't do that because you can't get off the heroin of network money. You're hooked to a lifestyle. For all your groovy talk and hip little soul patch beards, you're the most risk-averse people in the world. You're lifers. I mean, you belong to a fucking union! How fucked up and 20th century is that?

Listen, Hollywood TV writers. For fifty years you've had a nice little gig going for yourselves. You've unionized and set up all these stupid rules and you've created a closed-off little club and you've done all you could to keep other people out of the club so you could make ridiculous amounts of money just for pumping out piles of shit content. Now guess what? The Internet blows that up. The Internet is anarchy. There's no writers guild. There's no limit on the number of channels. The writers and actors and directors who've been shut out of your club are creating their own alternate universe. They don't want to be in your club. Worse yet for you, they don't want you in their club, either. They don't need you. They don't give a shit about what you do. They view you as a bunch old, fat, stupid, overpaid hacks. Which you are....

Poor Iraqi's suffer in Bush's War...

UN ReliefWeb:

....Taxi driver Ahmed Khalil Baqir used to station himself outside Baghdad's main morgue, waiting for grieving families who went there to claim their relatives’ dead bodies.

"I was totally dependent on them for my living," Baqir, a 44-year-old father of four, said." I never thought about picking up people in the street as I was being hired five to eight times a day by these families. But now it is a waste of time to wait there and these days I wait only for about three hours in the morning and I continue my work picking up passengers in the street.” (Thanks to Belmont Club)

You'd think this stuff would be news, wouldn't you?

...."Violence-related deaths in September dropped remarkably to levels not seen in more than a year as the number [of violence-related deaths] stood at 290 while in September 2006 the number was about 1,400," Adel Muhsin, the health ministry's inspector-general, told IRIN in a phone interview.

According to the ministry’s statistics, between January and the end of September 2007, the number of violent deaths involving civilian, police and military in all of Iraq was about 7,100, against 27,000 in the same period of 2006.

According to Muhsin, the average number of dead bodies sent to Baghdad’s main morgue just over a year ago was between 100 and 150 a day. Now, it is no more than 10 bodies a day, and about 50 percent of them are dying in normal circumstances.

There have been days this year when no dead bodies were sent to the morgue and this gave the morgue employees a chance to refurbish it, something they couldn't do in the past....

In the old days of the Soviet Union, airplane crashes were not reported. People knew that an Aeroflot plane had gone down when they read in Pravda stories about air crashes in the United States! We have a remarkably similar situation with our news-media today. If there's no news about Iraq, you can guess that the news is good. (And if a Congressman is indicted for corruption, and there's no mention of party affiliation, you know he's a Democrat.)

There's one subject that's never in "all the news that's fit to print"

Bruce Kesler:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez’ speech and Q&A session at the Military Reporters & Editors convention has unleashed a whirl of major media coverage and commentary. (See Memeorandum, for examples.) All are focused on his criticism of the Bush administration for inadequate strategy and prosecution of the war.

However, neither the New York Times or Associated Press mention that over 40% of Sanchez’ speech severely took the major media to task. The Washington Post merely mentions it, and then underplays it at the end of its report, giving it 67 out of about 850 words in its coverage:....

What frauds...

At least they are honest about their dishonesty...

From NewsBusters.org, ‘Journalists’ Tell Howard Kurtz Why Good News from Iraq Shouldn’t Get Reported:

....KURTZ: Joining us now to put this into perspective, Robin Wright, who covers national security for The Washington Post. And CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.

Robin Wright, should that decline in Iraq casualties have gotten more media attention?

ROBIN WRIGHT, THE WASHINGTON POST: Not necessarily. The fact is we're at the beginning of a trend -- and it's not even sure that it is a trend yet. There is also an enormous dispute over how to count the numbers. There are different kinds of deaths in Iraq.

There are combat deaths. There are sectarian deaths. And there are the deaths of criminal -- from criminal acts. There are also a lot of numbers that the U.S. frankly is not counting. For example, in southern Iraq, there is Shiite upon Shiite violence, which is not sectarian in the Shiite versus Sunni. And the U.S. also doesn't have much of a capability in the south.

So the numbers themselves are tricky. Long-term, General Odierno, who was in town this week, said he is looking for irreversible momentum, and that, after two months, has not yet been reached.

KURTZ: Barbara Starr, CNN did mostly quick reads by anchors of these numbers. There was a taped report on "LOU DOBBS TONIGHT." Do you think this story deserved more attention? We don't know whether it is a trend or not but those are intriguing numbers.

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: But that's the problem, we don't know whether it is a trend about specifically the decline in the number of U.S. troops being killed in Iraq. This is not enduring progress. This is a very positive step on that potential road to progress.

KURTZ: But let's say that the figures had shown that casualties were going up for U.S. soldiers and going up for Iraqi civilians. I think that would have made some front pages.

STARR: Oh, I think inevitably it would have. I mean, that's certainly -- that, by any definition, is news. Look, nobody more than a Pentagon correspondent would like to stop reporting the number of deaths, interviewing grieving families, talking to soldiers who have lost their arms and their legs in the war. But, is this really enduring progress?

We've had five years of the Pentagon telling us there is progress, there is progress. Forgive me for being skeptical, I need to see a little bit more than one month before I get too excited about all of this....

It would be hopeless to try to argue with such people. We can only be thankful that the Internet routes around them...

Only Americans commit atrocities...

From Gateway Pundit..

From The New York Times October 6, 2007
Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children.

That's The New York Times special way of saying "I'm sorry" for condemning the Haditha Marines to hell for the "apparent" cold-blooded murder of innocents before their trial even started.

And, isn't it interesting how The New York Times is still searching for an atrocity to define the War in Iraq?

An Al-Qaeda atrocity like the Yazidi bombings, the murder of a brave young Sunni Sheik, torture chamber drawings, or dismembering and booby-trapping dead soldier's bodies just won't do.

It must be an American atrocity...

That's exactly right. An American war, especially when led by Republicans, must be "defined" by an atrocity. It cannot be "defined" by unimportant trifles, like, say, millions of people risking their lives to vote in free elections. That's worthless to the "Democrats" at the NYT. And worthless to (most at least) of the tens-of-thousands who subscribe to the NYT, or the many local papers and stations who let the NYT decide what's "news." And of those incidents like blowing up hundreds of people in a marketplace were not an atrocities at all...because they weren't done by Americans.

This is a very minor blog I have here, and so I really don't have to be tactful and pussy-foot around. I'll just say what I think: If you subscribe to the New York times, it's about 95% likely that you are anti-American. You hate this nation. Of course you won't admit it, but if I had you hooked up to some sort of emotion-detector, and I said: "I believe that this is the freest and best country ever, and when she is attacked YOU owe her a DUTY of generous warm-hearted loyalty and service, even at the risk of your life," the dial would go right over to "Oh Yecchhh!"

Hey, New York Times animals, how about a "defining moment" of courage or virtue or self-sacrifice? Hmmm? There have been thousands of candidates, though a person would never know it from reading the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record. Or how about thinking for a moment (That's not politically correct, but I won't tell anyone) about the implications of how you've been lusting after a "defining (American) atrocity" since March of 2003, and you haven't found one yet! What could that possibly mean?

More of "No news is good news"

This from Investor's Business Daily:

That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there. Instead, they're talking about the presidential campaign, or Burma, or global warming, or . . . whatever.

Why? Simply put, the news from Iraq has been quite positive, as Petraeus related in his report to Congress. Consider:

• On Monday came news that U.S. military deaths in Iraq fell to 64 in September, the fourth straight drop since peaking at 121 in May and driving the toll to a 14-month low.
• Civilian deaths also have plunged, dropping by more than half from August to 884. Remember just six months ago all the talk of an Iraqi "civil war"? That seems to be fading.
• The just-ended holy month of Ramadan in Iraq was accompanied by a 40% drop in violence, even though al-Qaida had vowed to step up attacks.
• Speaking of al-Qaida, the terrorist group appears to be on the run, and possibly on the verge of collapse — despite making Iraq the center of its war for global hegemony and a new world order based on precepts of fundamentalist Islam.....

They are Traitors. They are on the other side. The news media that is. Well, one of the pleasures of our time is enjoying the decline of the "press." Every month brings stories of falling circulation and declining revenues. Well deserved.

It is especially pleasant when I think of the frauds who weren't content to just be "reporters." Oh no, We are a "profession," not a trade. We are....Journalists! We go to a University to get an advanced degree in journalism, and thereby obtain mastery of a science that ordinary people can hardly understand, and should not be allowed to practice!

And we have, as befits a professsssionnn, ethics classes and "ethicists." Who occasionally tiptoe around the fact that journalism is about 95% liberal Democrat (and 90% trendy urbanite) and who could not report the news even-handedly if they tried, because they are not even interested in most of what makes up America. But the ethicists and "ombudsmen" never, to my knowledge, touch on the question of the duty an employee owes to his employer.

If I work for a company, I have a duty to the stockholders or owners to try to make that company profitable. If I worked for your company and I drove away your customers because they were not Republicans and I personally did not care for them, I would be stealing from you! I would be indulging a personal pleasure at your expense, just as much as if I took money from the till to buy ice cream. That's exactly what most "journalists" do.

Here's a good piece on the decline of, as Rand Simberg likes to put it, the Paper Formerly Know As The Paper Of Record,: Black and White and in the Red All Over...

....So, if the problem isn’t the global environment, the local environment, the labor environment, technology, the subscription model or regional conditions, perhaps it’s the newspaper. Could the problem be that the New York Times has a liberal bias? Perhaps. Circulation declines tend to support that idea. If I were an investor, I’d wonder whether general readers are nearly as interested in endless hyper-detailed reporting about Abu Grahib or the alleged Valerie Plame ‘outing’ as the editors seem to be. One wonders whether obsessing over such stories is the best way to separate Mr. and Mrs. America from their dollar and 25 cents Monday through Friday. Or a gusher of gushing praise over "Brokeback Mountain" the way to get four dollars from them every Sunday...

...The New York Times built its reputation by being America’s newspaper of record. If something big happened, it was in the Times. But that’s the Old New York Times. The new New York Times routinely ignores UN corruption stories and Democratic scandals far longer than other publications...

I feel an extra amount of venom for the NYT, because I grew up with the idea that they were the very acme and pinnacle of whatever it was that they were the acme and pinnacle of. It was all kind of vague, but the NYT was definitely tops, and was supposed to be looked upon with a special sort of reverence. In jr high and high school there were a couple of teachers I liked because they were bookish and intellectual (what a concept, an intellectual teacher!) and they always spoke highly of the Times.

The headline would be very different if their side had won...

This headline just struck me as coming from twisted thinking...

New York Times: Fighting Leads to Deaths in Southern Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 21 — About 40 Taliban fighters and at least four civilians have been killed in fierce clashes in southern Afghanistan, officials said today, while two NATO soldiers were killed in other attacks...(Thanks to Orrin)

So "fighting" does not normally lead to deaths? Is this analogous to "Teen Party Leads To Deaths"? Is it being implied that things have been bungled in some way? I suspect we are supposed to think: "Once those Americans invade a country, things go downhill and violence "appears."

And that word "fighters," what do they mean? Are these people combatants in a war? If so, they are committing war crimes, and have forfeited the right to certain niceties, like being taken prisoner rather than being shot out of hand. If they are NOT combatants, then they are terrorists. Which is it, NYT?

The headline ought to be: Taliban Attacks Thwarted; 40 Terrorists Killed by NATO Forces

Too bad they'll settle out of court...

Good post by Beldar on the Dan Rather suit..

...My glee is tempered by my realization that this case is almost certainly going to go away before it gets to any good stuff. But oh! it would be fun to watch CBS be forced to justify its putting of Rather out to pasture in a not-quite-firing by showing all of the grounds it had. Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here's a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned! (I continue to take pride in the high ranking of this post of mine from 2004 in search engine responses to the words "Dan Rather fired.")...

A scoundrel crew. How they deserve to be exposed! what a disgrace the whole episode was...I could go on at length if I had time.

The best of the jest right now is that Rather's lawyers are apparently part of the "reality-based community," and seem to be operating on the assumption that the forged documents were authentic! Hilarious.

Expanding ice caps...

John Hinderaker:

You've no doubt read about the shrinking ice cap at the North Pole, and the plight of the polar bears there. It's less likely that you've heard that in the meantime, the ice cap at the South Pole has been expanding, and just recently reached its largest extent since measurements began in 1979.

I compared Google News searches for "ice cap 'north pole'" and "ice cap 'south pole.'" The North Pole stories were all about the shrinking ice cap there as evidence of global warming. I couldn't find a single news story about the expanding ice cap at the South Pole. This strikes me as a pretty good illustration of how the conventional story line about Earth's climate drives news reporting...

Neither North nor South Poles are definitive evidence in themselves. Climate change would not be linear. But this is sure powerful evidence of what a bunch of frauds our news-media are.

The whole globo-warming debate is warped because a LOT of things are not being mentioned. Things that would cause the little people—you and me— to possibly fail to reach the conclusions deemed appropriate by our elite would-be masters. For instance, 99% of the Greenhouse Effect on Earth is caused by water vapor. And lucky we are that it is; we'd be pretty cold without it. We'd all be living in the "Antarctic."

Fact checking reveals no fact checking...

Pajamas Media: Army Checkmates The New Republic:

....PJM’s Bob Owens interviews Major John Cross, who led the U.S. Army’s investigation into Private Beauchamp’s shocking claims. Even more shocking is what Cross reveals below: Among other findings, there is no credible evidence that TNR [The New Republic] made any attempt at fact checking prior to publishing the articles. Furthermore, not one of the soldiers interviewed under oath in the investigation corroborated Beauchamp’s story....

Look, there's nothing too complicated here. The New Republic was, for many decades, the thoughtful responsible liberal mag. You could respect them even if you didn't agree with them. But that ecological niche doesn't exist any more. There just aren't many thoughtful responsible liberals these days. So TNR has to either die, or appeal to the moveon.org sickos. It's just business.

So the whole Oh-my-god-they've-been-caught-in-a-lie-they're-toast story line, seen in many conservative blogs, is absurd and anachronistic. They don't care that they've been caught in a lie, because they are not trying to appeal to people who give a damn about truth. The fact that they lied to smear the US military is a plus to the people they need as subscribers...

Too too rich!

from the Daily Mail...

If he didn't believe in karma before, Piers Morgan must surely do now.

The ex-newspaper editor, now a columnist for The Mail on Sunday's Live magazine, took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway - the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over.

His paper, the Daily Mirror, ran the headline in 2003: "You'd have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn't you Mr President." It added: "If anyone can make a pig's ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can." So, it seems, can Mr Morgan.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch our exclusive video of Piers's fall....

to as few as nine...

From Protein Wisdom:

....I cannot speak for everyone who supports the mission in Iraq, but I would submit that Beauchamp’s apparent fables and embellishments are not a “weak link” to be attacked, but simply an egregious example of the establishment media’s flawed coverage of the conflict. Accordingly, what follows is an over view of the establishment media coverage of the conflict in Iraq.

Though public opinion polls consistently show that Americans consider Iraq to be the most important issue facing the country, establishment media has slashed the resources and time devoted to Iraq. The number of embedded reporters plunged from somewhere between 570 and 750 when the invasion began in March 2003 to as few as nine by October 2006. The result was the rise of what journalists themselves call “hotel journalism” and “journalism by remote control.” Janet Reitman, reporting for Rolling Stone, described the state of the media in early 2004:

When I arrive in Baghdad in April, most American journalists are holed up in their rooms, reporting the war by remote: scanning the wires, working their cell phones, watching broadcasts of Al Jazeera. In many cases, they’ve been reduced to relying on sources available to anyone with an Internet connection… While Arabic and European media such as The Guardian and Le Monde manage to cover the war on the ground, American reporters seldom interview actual Iraqis. Instead, they talk to U.S. officials who are every bit as isolated as they are, or rely on local stringers and fixers, several of whom have been killed while working for Americans. “We live in a bubble,” grumbles one AP reporter. “If we know one percent of what’s going on in Iraq, we’re lucky.”

There are exceptions of course, though the number of establishment embeds shows they are literally exceptions. I do not discount the very real danger to Western journos in Iraq, though independent bloggers like Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, Bill Ardolino, and Michael J. Totten seem to have been able to embed outside Baghdad with nothing like the institutional support available to journalists from the establishment media… and that the number of such bloggers is growing. Moreover, I cannot ignore the consequences of “journalism by remote control.”

Noah D. Oppenheim, who visited Baghdad for MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” noted that “The consequence of this system is that, on television, the story in Iraq is no more than the sum of basic facts, like casualties, crashes, and official pronouncements.” The data back Oppenheim. The television airtime devoted to coverage of Iraq has plunged dramatically. Television networks devoted 4,162 minutes to Iraq in 2003, 3,053 minutes in 2004, 1,534 minutes in 2005 and 1,122 minutes in 2006. The amount of time and space devoted to Iraq coverage has continued to decline through the first half of 2007...

Bad news stories, especially the daily death tolls, consumed an ever-larger share of this dwindling coverage. In 2003, it consumed 38% of the networks’ Iraq newshole. In 2004 and 2005, it consumed 44%. In 2006, it rose to 56%....

One of the ironies of the situation is that the really interesting story is not the terrorist violence, which is repetitive, but the story of a democraic nation struggling to be born amidst frightful difficulties. Reading Michael Yon or the other independent bloggers in Iraq is especially fascinating because they put us in contact with ordinary Iraqis, good and bad.

If anyone who still believes that their TV is giving them the real Iraq is reading this post, read This as an example, one of many...

If your read the NYT or WaPo or LAT...

...you are drinking from poisoned wells. From Captain Ed:

Let's say we're at war, and we're waiting for some specific action to take place to show us that our efforts are succeeding. Add in that the war itself would be rather controversial and that our political class is split as to whether we will ever see that specific action take place. Imagine that Congress and the White House have scheduled a showdown in the next couple of weeks to determine how much longer we will wait for that development.

Now imagine that the specific action for which we've waited actually occurs. Where would you think that story appear in Washington's biggest newspaper? The front page, one might assume. Would you believe ... page 9?...

Unbelievable. And apparently the news was not even in the NYT or LAT!

The news of course, is the announcement of wide political agreement within Iraq's government for changes in the de-Baathification law. For our major "news"papers to ignore the story is a sign of desperation within the al Qaeda/Democrat alliance, and a really indicator of progress for the forces of freedom...

Update: And this certainly gives the lie to the claims of Leftists that they hate the Iraq Campaign BECAUSE it is not militarily winnable, or now, BECAUSE the Iraqi government can't make any political progress. Those are all lies.

They hate this campaign for the reason I explained here

How stupid can you be?

THE AUTONOMIST:

A caption to an AFP picture:

" An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her
house [emphasis added] following an early coalition forces raid in the
predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City."

The bullets in the picture have obviously not been fired!

What fascinates me is, should we add to the known fact that Political correctness lowers your effective IQ, the possibility that being a journalist lowers your effective IQ?

Of course if you are a "journalist" you hate America and want to show how horrid we are. But surely anyone who deals in news photos must have seen pictures of those little empty brass cylinders being ejected from firearms? Can even the most drugged-up of hippie pacifist morons imagine that the whole cartridge flies through the air? And can hit a house and remain shiny and un-dented?

Same lies over and over...

Michelle Malkin has a great round-up of "the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome."

The tale of Army Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the discredited “Baghdad Diarist” for the discredited New Republic magazine, is an old tale:

Self-aggrandizing soldier recounts war atrocities. Media outlets disseminate soldier’s tales uncritically. Military folks smell a rat and poke holes in tales too good (or rather, bad) to be true. Soldier’s ideological sponsors blame the messengers for exposing anti-war fraud.

Beauchamp belongs in the same ward as John F. Kerry, the original infectious agent of the toxic American disease known as Winter Soldier Syndrome. The ward is filling up....

Michelle has various others, with YouTube videos. There have been a lot of them. It's revealing to see them all listed together...

...Think Jimmy Massey, the unhinged Marine who falsely accused his unit of engaging in mass genocide against Iraqis...

...Think Jesse MacBeth and Micah Wright, anti-war Army Rangers who weren’t Army Rangers....

...Think Josh Lansdale, the anti-war Army medic who attacked former GOP Sen. Jim Talent by spinning a bogus health care tale swallowed whole by Dem Sen. Claire McCaskill, Gen. Wesley Clark and the far Left VoteVets.org crew....

..Think Amorita Randall, the NYTimes-championed former naval construction worker who told the Times magazine that she served in Iraq, was in a Humvee that blew up, and was raped twice while serving in the Navy–but, in fact, had never served in Iraq....

Good news is no news...

A good example, by Noel Sheppard, of how to dissect a bit of typical media bias. this one from—surprise—AP...

....In fact, in an article that, from the title, one would think would be about the declining death toll, and how things from a military standpoint might be improving in Iraq, the piece devoted seven of the first nine paragraphs, and more than 50 percent of the total print space, on political problems in the embattled nation.

And, when Salaheddin finally elaborated on the reduced death toll in July, it was curiously pessimistic....

—  —  —  —  —  —

....Hmmm. So, this was the lowest death toll since November, and since before the surge began. You couldn't find someone to quote who thought this was really good news, Sinan? Or that it was proof that the surge was working?

Oh. That's right. The surge wasn't even addressed in this piece. Instead, it was referred to as a "five-month-old security crackdown."

And, of course, Salaheddin nicely avoided any reference to President Bush having orchestrated this "five-month-old security crackdown" against the wishes of the left and their media minions.

I guess it's verboten at the AP to connect the president with good news in Iraq regardless of how much your article downplays it.....

"Five-month-old security crackdown." Sheeesh. Even if we had no other news about the shift in strategy and tactics labeled "the Surge," (which, by the way, started June 15) we would know it was working well just by the reluctance to name it. Sort of the opposite of news articles about politicians caught in wrong-doing: If the party affiliation is not mentioned, you know it's a Dem.

The 'Baghdad Diarist'?

Dean Barnett writes about how The New Republic's "Scott Thomas" has now revealed himself. Fascinating stuff. For one thing, he publishes a letter about himself in TNR, without a single answer to the specific criticisms that have been made!

That is like all the pro vs anti-war arguments of the last 6 years in a nutshell.

Also, the guy had a blog! Fool.

Also, Hugh notes that apparently TNR has a blog (who knew? Who cared?) and none of the "journalists" who post there are even mentioning the controversy! Ha ha ha.

There's lots more at Michell Malkin.

Update: When I started blogging, way back in 2001, I imagined that I was participating (in a very minor way) in a great debate. A debate between Left and Right, between pro and anti-war, between conservative and liberal. But it never happened! Debating leftists is like punching Jello. I thought there were two competing philosophies, but the big discovery I made is that there's nothing inside leftists. No core beliefs or ideas. Like Joyce Little put it, they are clothes with no emperor inside.

I predict that this "Scott Thomas" matter will never be cleanly resolved, that it will just fizzle out in vagueness and frustration, exactly like John Kerry's despicable Vietnam accusations. Defenders of our country and our military will continue to make factual and philosophical arguments, but it will be like trying to beat up a blob of Jello.

"gutless weasels possuming a ride"

I liked this bit of unalloyed scorn for some people who deserve it. Uncle Jimbo on the New Republic and their ilk...

...While the left makes noises that they think mean they support the troops, they don't really, and they do believe the dregs of society theory of military recruiting. Jon Carry didn't misspeak when he said those non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in his beloved cultural elite, will end up stuk in Irak. He was simply stating the common wisdom on the left, our troops are killers, sometimes under orders, sometimes just to satisfy their blood lust.

Well there is also a bit of assumed wisdom on our side as well. That is that most journalists are gutless weasels possuming a ride on the backs of better men and women than themselves. They are parasites whose sole function seems to be advancing a narrative of evil America, cause of all that is ill with this world. There is no problem they are unwilling to lay at the feet of greedy rapacious America, busy killing brown people all over the planet, and now even slaughtering Gaia herself. Damn us!

Well I for one am sick of it. I've had a bird's eye view of how our military operates and for an instrument of war it does one hell of a lot of good. Obviously it is a killing machine, but it is the most finely calibrated one ever deployed, and one that takes enormous steps to ensure that civilians are not harmed by it's actions. That alone distinguishes us from the rest of the world's armies. Look at the excremental record of UN "Peacekeepers" in comparison. The one thing the UN guarantees is a huge increase in child rape. Our forces on the other hand will likely be found giving vaccinations, digging wells or building schools. So Bite me Franklin Foer, not only are you a crap editor by even the low standards of journalism, but you are an ill-informed punk who allowed yourself and your rag to be used to smear a group of people who collectively and individually dwarf your moral and ethical stature. And as for Scott Thomas, I won't bother to do more than call you a liar and a remind you that eventually you will brag about this to someone and you will be unmasked. Just keep that in mind as you look over your shoulder for the rest of your miserable life. I sense some old school wall to wall counseling in your future troop.

Me, I'm predicting that "Scott Thomas" will never be unmasked, because he's a fiction, like a lot of "anonymous sources." Lefty journalists just make stuff up, and then they write, "Many are saying..." or "sources in the administration indicate...." Frauds.

We are at war. SOMEBODY is acting badly, and should be punished. Either we have some bad soldiers, or some traitor journalists. Mr Foer should be hauled in front of a Congressional committee and forced to up-chuck under penalty of perjury. It will never happen, alas.

fiskiting...

Once again, can't resist...

Bush's Cognitive Dissonance, By Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, Friday, July 20, 2007

One hopes the leader of the free world hasn't really, truly lost touch with objective reality. But one does have to wonder.

Last week, George W. Bush invited nine conservative pundits to the White House for what amounted to a pep talk, with the president providing the pep. Somehow I was left off the list -- must have been an oversight. But some columnists who attended have been writing about the meeting or describing it to colleagues, and their accounts are downright scary.

National Review's Kate O'Beirne, who joined the presidential chat in the Roosevelt Room, told me that the most striking thing was the president's incongruously sunny demeanor. Bush's approval ratings are well below freezing, the nation is sooooo finished with his foolish and tragic war, [Only if you think you and your lefty pals are "the nation"] many of his remaining allies in Congress have given notice that come September they plan to leave the Decider alone in his private Alamo -- and the president remains optimistic and upbeat. [It never enters your darkest dreams that Frodo might just toss the Ring into Mt Doom and then go home to Texas, content that he has done his duty, which is all any man can do. (You won't understand that, it's a Red State thing)]

Bush was "not at all weary or anguished" and in fact was "very energized," wrote Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report. He was "as confident and upbeat as ever," observed Rich Lowry of National Review. "Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored," according to David Brooks of the New York Times. [It's so FUNNY, the way leftists keep expecting Bush to be "anguished," and then feeling BEWILDERED because he isn't! It's a subset of their bewilderment that the country is no longer what it was when their world-view gelled, somewhere around 1973. Guess what, I'm not "anguished either. I laugh at you, and spit upon your ideas.]

Excuse me? I guess he must be in an even better mood since the feckless Iraqi government announced its decision to take the whole month of August off while U.S. troops continue fighting and dying in Baghdad's 130-degree summer heat. [Uh, make that "fighting and winning." You have read the latest reports, haven't you Mr Robinson? The Iraqi parliament might as well take some time off and see how things develop.]

It's almost as if Bush were trying to apply the principles of cognitive therapy, the system psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed in the 1960s. Beck found that getting patients to banish negative thoughts and develop patterns of positive thinking was helpful in pulling them out of depression. However, Beck was trying to get the patients to see themselves and the world realistically, whereas Bush has left realism far behind. [Do we see transference here?]

"He says the most useful argument to make in support of his policy is to show what failure would mean," Barone wrote of the president and Iraq. "It would mean an ascendant radicalism, among both Shia and Sunni Muslims, and it would embolden sponsors of terrorism such as Iran. Al-Qaeda would be emboldened and would be able to recruit forces."

Excuse me again? This is what Bush believes would happen? Hasn't he noticed that these catastrophes have already befallen us? And that they are the direct consequence of his decision to invade and occupy Iraq? [No, they are a direct consequence of your Iranian and al Queda buddies PROVOKING radicalism and violence, because they are shit-scared of the possibility of a democracy in the heart of the Caliphate. As are you. When my enemies react with desperation, it probably means I'm doing something right.]

At a news conference last week, someone tried to point this out. Bush replied with such a bizarre version of history that I hope he was being cynical and doesn't really believe what he said: "Actually, I was hoping to solve the Iraqi issue diplomatically. That's why I went to the United Nations and worked with the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. That was the message, the clear message to Saddam Hussein. He chose the course. . . . It was his decision to make."

Let's see, we have learned that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. That means Bush is claiming that Saddam Hussein "chose" the invasion -- and, ultimately, his own death -- by not showing us what he didn't have. [That is the simple truth. If the inspectors had had really free access, they would have found no WMD's and probably aborted the invasion. Of course it is likely that by then Saddam himself wasn't sure whether he had them or not! His generals thought Iraq did. And, to be precise, UN 1441 mandated that Iraq account for the weapons found in 1992, not show it had none. Funny how I've yet to see a single lefty mention that little fact.]

"Bush gives the impression that he is more steadfast on the war than many in his own administration and that, if need be, he'll be the last hawk standing," wrote Lowry. The president says the results of his recent troop escalation will be evaluated by Gen. David Petraeus, wrote Barone, and not by "the polls."

Translation: Everybody's out of step but me. [That's how great leaders are seen sometimes. But in fact he is in step with an enormous number of people. Wapo just doesn't want to admit we exist.]

One of the more unnerving reports out of the president's seminar with the pundits came from Brooks, who quoted Bush as saying: "It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist."

It's bad enough that Osama bin Laden is still out there plotting bloody acts of terrorism, convinced that God wants him to slay the infidels. Now we know that the president of the United States believes God has chosen him to bring freedom to the world, that he refuses to acknowledge setbacks in his crusade and that he flat-out doesn't care what "the polls" -- meaning the American people -- might think. I'm having trouble seeing the bright side. I think I need cognitive therapy. [OK bigshot, why don't you take a poll of Americans and find out how many of us believe that freedom is a "gift of the Almighty?" Oh, and while you are at it, ask how many agree with the Washington Post, that life is meaningless, and there is no god, and that fighting for a better world is equivalent to terrorism?]

Signs of desperation...

I just noticed that Penraker has a long string of posts on how the WaPo is spinning the news from Iraq. See here, here, here, here, here, and here. They are really getting desperate!

An example is this one: Iraqi Military's Readiness Slips. Report Says That Since January, Fewer Units Can Operate Independently. They make a headline and a big deal about a slight drop in the number of units that are at Level One, glossing over the fact that if you are rapidly expanding your forces that is to be expected. It is not a bad sign. Officers, NCO's, specialists and equipment are being spread over much larger forces, so it takes time to catch up.

And more importantly, Level One is not important right now. (We've been through this crap before.) What's important is the number of units at Level Two, and that is steadily expanding. Level Two units can can operate independently except for American logistical and air support. And that's fine for our purposes at this point.

The deal, when the Senate unanimously confirmed General Petraeus, was that the results of the "surge in operations" (which only started 4 weeks ago) would be evaluated in September. Yet we are seeing a relentless drumbeat to declare it a failure right now. A curious thing! I'd say that leftists are getting very sweaty about what September might bring. Which makes me feel good.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch...

One of the maddening, infuriating things about contemporary life is that in most ways this country is majority conservative, and leaning towards majority Republican. And yet liberals sit smugly in many legacy enclaves and act as if their ideas were not only the majority view, but the only sensible and "normal" and "modern" view---so much so that they need never engage in principled debate. (Which they would lose.)

I live in one of those enclaves, which adds to my ire. And another enclave is the "mainstream media," (MSM) which is almost entirely liberal and Democrat, and usually covers conservative or "Red State" or Christian matters like anthropologists visiting the Cannibal Isles. (The emblem of this was the decision at the NYT a couple of years ago to assign a reporter—one reporter—to cover all conservative matters. He was of course a liberal.)

The New York Times is the central spider of the MSM, in a very literal way, since all the local papers and TV news stations key off of the NYT, which gets to frame the stories and often decides what is "news" and what is not. When you watch the TV news (except perhaps Fox) you might imagine that all those glossy people study what is happening in the world and decide what is important. Nuh uh. Mostly the decisions are made by the NYT, and the WaPo and the AP. And none of them will never DEBATE, they just take it as read that they are at the the center of opinion, and have the intrinsic right to decide what we will know.

So it is with the utmost pleasure and pure delight that I read in Michelle Malkin that the NYT's credit rating has been lowered—yet again—and is barely above the level of junk bonds!!! It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of pompous frauds. Go boys, lead your whole vile treasonous industry down into the bone yard!

S&P Lowers New York Times Ratings To BBB/A-3; Off Watch 2007-07-11 12:18 (New York)
Rationale
On July 11, 2007, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services lowered its long-term corporate credit and senior unsecured debt ratings on The New York Times Co., to ‘BBB’ from ‘BBB+’. The short-term corporate credit and commercial paper ratings on the company were also lowered, to ‘A-3′ from ‘A-2′. All ratings were removed from CreditWatch, where they were placed with negative implications on March 23, 2007, following the company’s announced plan to increase its dividend to shareholders. The rating outlook is negative....

Among the many reasons the NYT gang deserves to suffer is that the NYT is a business. With shareholders. The editors of the NYT have decided that their ideology is more important than anything else, including profits, and is worth excluding at least 60% of the population from their potential readership. But they don't OWN the paper! They have a duty, a responsibility to the owners to try to make a profit. They are in effect stealing from their shareholders.

Just asking...

This LA Times editorial brought out the mischief in me:

A FAVORITE Washington fa