Why does the mainstream media do this? Even the best news is cast in a way that the casual reader will mistake it for dreadful news. At some point, surely some news reporter should rebel and say, "we're here to report history, not rewrite it." Don't they at least feel a little uneasy, deliberately misleading the American people?

I often wonder about this. The journalist community is largely left-liberal, but it's certainly not 100%. And even among the left-liberals, there must be some, a handful, who really do feel some small obligation to the truth.

So where are they? I went looking for the "Moslem Methodists" some months ago; should we send out a searching party for the Justice Journalists, the ones who say "darn the party line, I'm going to tell it like it is!"

Those in the "new media" so called, Talk Radio, the Blogosphere etc., like to refer to the news media as the antique media, the mainstream  media culture (or MSM) and imply that it is waning in influence and maintain the optimistic assertion that people will see through the bias and dismiss it as party line blather and on some levels perhaps they do, but the constant, ceaseless hammering of bad news regarding the War on Terror (particularly Iraq) is perhaps a way of reasserting their dominance. I've observed that while there is a vigorous anti-war movement in this country today, it doesn't seem to be as influential as it was perhaps in the '60s. Maybe this is because many who were in the anti-war movement in the '60s are now the very journalists Mr. ab Hugh is excoriating in his post or at the very least, the children of these activists.

The United Nations (the organization that facilitated Oil for Food with Saddam and turned the entire country of the Democratic Republic of Congo into a systematic rape room) are clamoring for GITMO to be shut down because of the inhumanity of it all:

 A United Nations panel on torture called on the United States today to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and expressed concern over reports of secret detention centers and of a practice of sending terror suspects to countries with poor human rights records

No more rice pilaf for you Mr. Taliban. As far as poor human rights records,  the UN need look no further than themselves.

I happened to catch Rep. Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, on C-span last week and he rattled off some startling figures that demonstrate how off-base journalists are when it comes to reporting on the war in Iraq. According to Mr. King, the violent death rate in Iraq is 25.71 per 100,000. That may sound high, but not when you compare it to places like Colombia (61.7), South Africa (49.6), Jamaica (32.4), and Venezuela (31.6). How about the violent death rates in American cities? New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina was 53.1. FBI statistics for 2004-05 have Washington at 45.9, Baltimore at 37.7, and Atlanta at 34.9.

Hugo "Hank" Chavez accused of having terrorist ties.

The eight-seat Cessna Citation 550 plane lost all electrical power, including communications, and the pilot had to fly the plane manually, according to spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner. No one was hurt.

It's the thought that counts.

Irrelevent CNN Poll.

Clinton didn't have 9/11 happen while he was president, his entire presidency was designed not to rock the boat in any way so as to keep his poll numbers high. He did little or nothing about the emerging threat of Al-Queda, preferring to pass on several offers  from the Sudanese government of having Osama Bin Laden arrested and extradited to the US when he began issuing the very threats he eventually carried out, prefering to lecture us instead on child safety seats and socialized medicine. He, Carter and Madeline Albright helped arm North Korea by giving them modernized nuclear reactors in exchange for a promise not to use the technology for weapons (stupid, stupid, stupid, I say, nuclear blackmail anyone?) sold nuclear weapon secrets to the Chinese in exchange for campaign contributions, an impeachable offense that makes Watergate look like a Muppets, John Denver TV special. The economic expansion of the 1990's began in 1991, a full 2+ years before he became president and he was largely irrelevent after the 1994 midterm elections blunted his hopes for a  far more liberal agenda. He became a centrist republican-lite lap dog after '94 and rode it out for two terms. I remember seeing a poll at the time (late 90's) that said 9% of Americans believed he would be remembered as a great president. Everything is of the moment. We forget how hated Abraham Lincoln was when he was president and now he's on our money.

Troops on the Border? Bush may have finally pulled his head out of his darkened nether regions:

President Bush will push next week for a broad overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and plans to tighten security on the borders, possibly with a wider deployment of the National Guard, White House officials said yesterday.

The officials said Bush will use a prime-time television address Monday to outline his plans and then visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday to highlight the problem of illegal immigration.

Mike Sissons calls attention to the November, 2002, issue of Liberty magazine, in which scientists from Lowell University, MIT, the University of Paris, and NASA JPL report three bodies in the Solar System other than Earth -- Mars, Triton, and Pluto -- as exhibiting measurable warming in recent years. The January, 2002, issue of Science News describes the rate of erosion of the northern polar ice cap of Mars as "phenomenal." Imagine the panic if this had been observed on Earth. (Jim Locker says to add Neptune also: see Sky and Telescope, Neptune's Forecast: A Cloudy Summer, by J. Kelly Beatty - August 2003 issue, page 22)

The simplest explanation that applies to all would be an increase in the Sun's output.(Duh! Really? Imagine that.) The June 18, 2003, issue of Physics News Update (No. 642) reports a study by researchers at Duke University and the Army Research Office that finds evidence linking solar flare activity with changes in the Earth's temperature. Despite giving them plenty of time to think about it, there hasn't been a word -- as far as I'm aware -- about the possibility of such a connection from the Global Warming lobby.

The warming that Earth seems to have been experiencing for about the last 300 years represents a recovery from the "Little Ice Age" of the 17^th century and is part of a long natural cycle that goes back to include the "climatic optimum" of around 1100 AD, when Greenland was green and colonized by the Danes, and an even warmer period around 4,500 years ago. An interesting aspect is that these periods of warming appear to have preceded increases in carbon dioxide, suggesting that rising temperature triggers the release of carbon from such reservoirs as Arctic permafrost. The roughly one degree rise of the last century happened before 1940, whereas the CO₂ increase came later, raising the legitimate question of whether human activity had anything to do with it at all. So, the "connection" that the environmentalists claim is indeed real. But as usual, they get it the wrong way around.

Although the clearest correlation with these variations is solar activity, the seemingly obvious conclusion was resisted by the scientific establishment until the early 1990s because the idea that the Sun could vary went against prevailing theory. The astronomer William Herschel suspected it as early as 1801. In the absence of any means of direct measurement at the time, he suggested using the price of wheat as an indicator of sunspot activity. He was laughed at, of course. But the records in retrospect show him to have been absolutely right.

Al embodies H.L. Mencken's Quote regarding the Whole Aim of Practical Politics: Menacing society with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Waiting for Gore-doh... Since Al Gore was offered the opportunity to facilitate serious debate on the underlying science of global climate change, 4 months, 1 week, 20 hours, 17 minutes, and 0 seconds have elapsed. Despite milking lucrative speaking engagements and book deals with his global warming schtick he declines any such debate. Perhaps he's afraid of the Real Inconvenient Truth.

WASHINGTON, May 8 —In a Christian Broadcasting News segment aired today on The 700 Club concerning how Democrats are reaching out to evangelicals, Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Party, said, "The Democratic Party platform from 2004 says that marriage is between a man and a woman. That's what it says. I think where we may take exception with some religious leaders is that we believe in inclusion, that everybody deserves to live with dignity and respect, and that equal rights under the law are important."

IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) - Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility for years.

Visitor logs kept by the Secret Service showed that Abramoff visited the White House for about 26 minutes on March 6, 2001, and for about 47 minutes on January 20, 2004.

73 Minutes!! Holy Shit!

Democrats like to whistle and fart about the big bad GOP and the"Culture of Corruption":

For the past year, Democrats have been jockeying for the high ground on congressional ethics, hoping a largely Republican lobbying scandal would help propel them into the majority come November's elections.

But the issue is proving to be a two-edged sword, as Democrats themselves have come under scrutiny for allegations of bribery and conflicts of interest.

"You can attack one party for having a lack of ethics, but if any of your own members have problems, it dulls the message with the American people," said Leon Panetta, an ex-Democratic congressman from California and chief of staff under President Clinton. "They begin to put everybody in the same box. It clearly loses some of its impact as a clean campaign issue."

 



William Jefferson (D) Louisiana is of particular interest to me. It seems that amid the Katrina Aftermath our hero commandeered some National Guard units to escort him to his house to check on his belongings when they could have been out saving lives. A republican committing such an act would already have been guillotined and forgotten. Conyers is a fucking idiot without peer. Right out of The Onion: Shia ringtone causes scuffle in Iraqi parliament:

 The fragile state of the sectarian divide in Iraqi politics was exposed today when a fight broke out in parliament after a mobile phone ringtone played a Shia Muslim chant. A procedural session of the Iraqi parliament was suspended as Shia and Sunni leaders stormed out to protest the ringtone and the subsequent scuffle, which erupted between the armed bodyguards of the Sunni speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani and the hardline Shia politician, Gufran al-Saidi.

John Gibson discusses Mahmoud's letter to President Bush:

The nutjob running Iran, President Ahmadinejad, sent President Bush a letter, and if it weren't postmarked Tehran it might have been mistaken for a crank letter from an angry leftist in L.A. or Boulder or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Christians not acting Christian, says the Iranian president. Democrat talking point.

WMD lies, says the Iranian president. Democrat talking point.

Human rights abuses in Gitmo. Another Dem talking point.

The gap between haves and have-nots. The Iranian president and the Dems in lockstep on that one, too.The biggest difference? Ahmadinejad was actually nice about Jesus and Christians.

Nobody should believe him, but he said nice things about Jesus Christ, and he kept muttering after each mention, "Peace be upon him."I'm not saying the Iranian nutjob president who wants to wipe Israel off the map is a Democrat. He's anything but.

However, the loyal opposition in this country probably doesn't want to be sounding like him. And if he's borrowing their talking points, maybe they should adjust a bit.

This comes as authorities in Tehran are announcing the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran might soon become a park. It will be called the "Great Satan Park." "We would like to be able to show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park," said an Iranian general.That's nice. I'm sure Ramsey Clark and Hugo Chavez will want to go over for a stroll.

Right out of the Weekly World News or Darwin Awards:

150 lb. Catfish Murders Hungarian fisherman:



I wonder if the fish was a hybrid?

Note the casual yet no nonsense approach that says "I mean business."





Obscene Profits: Is thinking

Surely media loudmouths making millions of dollars a year and the multibillion dollar TV networks they work for can afford to get some statistics and buy a pocket calculator to do the arithmetic before spouting off nationwide.

In his final statement, Moussaoui declared: "God curse America, God save Osama Bin Laden. You'll never get him." But the judge, Leonie Brinkema, told him he would "die with a whimper". Moussaoui, 37, will serve his sentence in solitary confinement in a maximum security jail in Colorado....

...where he will recieve lemon pepper fish, rice pilaf etc. At least we won't have to listen to the whimperings of Mike Farell and Ed Asner should the day ever have arrived for Moussaoui to be executed.

Ms Sarandon, 59, said that she believed there should have been more debate before the war, but anyone who questioned US policy was labelled "un-American".