Catching Fireballs

The U.N. press pool includes reporters from papers that don't even bother pretending to be sources of objective news, which results in some interesting questions at the daily press briefing at Turtle Bay. When the subject turns to Israel, the questions can be quite enlightening, as seen during today’s UN press daily briefing:

Question: Does the Secretary-General subscribe to the point of view of Mr. ElBaradei that any threat by Israel to Iran could really bring about a fireball in the whole region?

Spokesperson: I don’t have any information about that. The Secretary-General is certainly aware of what Mr. ElBaradei has been saying, but I don’t have any specific statement to make at this point.

The spokesperson might want to consider this alternative response:

Fantasy Spokesperson: Please explain what you mean by “a fireball.” My understanding is that Iran has threatened to place nuclear fireballs throughout Israel so as to, in Mr. Ahmedinejad’s own words, wipe Israel off the map. Are you talking about those threatened fireballs or some other fireballs?

We continue with the Q&A from the briefing:

Question: Why is the Secretary-General always slow to react to any threats by Israel?

Spokesperson: Well, we don’t react to threats; there are so many of them all around the world and all over the planet. If we reacted to threats and not to actual, physical, proven danger, I think the Secretary-General would be busy 24 hours a day issuing statements.

You know, I think ol' Spokesperson could have done better. How about:

Fantasy Spokesperson: It could be because then, in all fairness, he would have to respond to threats to Israel. Do you really want him to get into all the surrounding nations and entities that have called for the elimination of Israel’s right to exist? Would you like him to discuss the threat of the proposed genocide of the Israeli people?

OK now, last question! Let's see if Spokesperson learned from the valued free coaching:

Question: But here you have a situation that is really escalating, especially on the vocal level. And the Middle East is not just any area. It is a very inflammable area, as we all know. Does that not concern Mr. Ban Ki-moon?

Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. Several times he has appealed for calm and for people to refrain from threats.

Will the need for coaching ever end?

Fantasy Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. He would particularly like to see the day when the inflammatory anti-Israel media decide to cool down the rhetoric, stop running every trumped-up Palestinian charge verbatim, and also stop ignoring Israel’s position in its entirety. But Mr. Ki-moon is a realist and he understand there’s about as much a chance of that as there is a free and fair election under Robert Mugabe or the free practice of religion in China.

I remain, as always, available to the U.N. staff to help them with their messaging and media training.

Media Bias 2008

The campaign is officially on, and MSM coverage is officially favoring Obama. Media Bias 2008 will cover that bias all the way up to the election.

Items are listed from most recent to oldest; the numbering only reflects this and is not a ranking. Send Media Bias 2008 examples via "comments"' below, or to email2laer [@] yahoo [dot] com.

9. The End (Not Of Media Bias) Is Near!

In a truly awful piece by AP writers Alan Fram and Eileen Putnam titled Everything is Seemingly Spinning out of Control that wails about "wars without end" and "polar bears ... adrift," we see that all this ubber-angst is leading up to this:

The sense of helplessness is even reflected in this year's presidential election. Each contender offers a sense of order — and hope. Republican John McCain promises an experienced hand in a frightening time. Democrat Barack Obama promises bright and shiny change, and his large crowds believe his exhortation, "Yes, we can."

Do you get the sense that to AP, McCain is alone, without a supporter in sight, but the Mighty O is surrounded ... as Christ was ... by multitudes? McCain is for a mere "sense" of order, but large crowds believe Obama; he's bright and shiny! Yes, we can! Yes we can bias this election!

8. 100 Years of Bias

Ever since John McCain said in January it was all right with him if troops stayed in Iraq for 100 years as long as they weren't suffering casualties, the media have pandered to Dem operatives who equate this to "100 years of war." Now it's back with McCain's statement that it's "not important" when the troops come home.

For over-the-top misinterpretation of this statement look no further than that Pillar of Objectivity, MSNBC and Keith Olbermann. After giving the full quote to provide "full context," Olbermann said:

And there is the context of what Sen. McCain said. Well, not quite, Senator.

The full context is that the Iraq you see, is a figment of your imagination. This is not a war about "honor and victory," Sir. This is a war you, and the President you support and seek to succeed, conned this nation into.

Of course, Olbermann is a commentator and is welcome to dish out all the thick-headed bias he wants. Another way of saying that is this: Olbermann gets to say what others in the MSM want to say; otherwise they would see the correct context -- that it's good for American security to have troops overseas -- and not report this story at all.

7. GOP Self-Loathing

Eagle-eyed reader Elvis Julip spotted this item in the SacBee:

"Three passions seem to be dominant so far this year, and all offer advantages
to Obama: ending the Iraq war, restoring a sense of economic security and
ousting the Republican Party from the White House."

"Forgive me," Elvis writes, "if I don't quite believe that Republicans share that third passion on the level that the Sac Bee writer would have us believe."

6. Cunning With Cunningham

The LA Times was looking for some quotes to fill in the blanks on a story they wanted to write: That John McCain was going to have trouble with conservatives in the critical swing state of Ohio. Rather than talk to, say the chair of the Ohio Republican party, they did this:

If McCain tried to gather his volunteers in Ohio, "you could meet in a phone booth," said radio host Bill Cunningham, who attacks the Arizona senator regularly on his talk show. "There's no sense in this part of Ohio that John McCain is a conservative or that his election would have a material benefit to conservatism."

You remember Cunningham. He's the former warm-up speaker for McCain who got drubbed by the candidate for his vicious attacks on Clinton and Obama. When McCain apologized to the two Dem candidates, Cunningham went ballistic in a temper tantrum worthy of a four year old:

A conservative radio talk-show host said that "he's had it up to here" with Sen. John McCain after the GOP presidential candidate repudiated the commentator's remarks about Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at a campaign event.

"John McCain threw me under a bus -- under the 'Straight Talk Express,' " Bill Cunningham told CNN on Tuesday, referring to McCain's campaign bus. (CNN)

Want a negative story? Interview psycho-negative sources. It's five months before the election and no one knows how Ohio will go -- but it's not too early for the LAT to try to do its part.

5. Anger vs. Inexperience

On the surface, the Washington Post appears objective on two big questions of the campaign: McCain's age (29 hits on a WaPo content search) and Obama's experience (26 hits). But numbers can be deceiving, particularly since the McCain search turned up this dog: McCain, A Matter of Temperment.

It ran on page A1, and the Internet version rambles on for five clicks of tales (some tall) of McCain's "legendary" temper. McCain speechwriter Mark Salter said of the story, “In sum, this is one of the more shoddy examples of journalism I've ever encountered. But for the infamous [NYTimes] story, I'd say it was the worst smear job on McCain I'd ever seen.”

In contrast, WaPo offers up no A1 story on Obama's inexperience. The 26 hits are mostly on op/ed pieces, on McCain's statements about Obama, and WaPo blog posts. Even so, none rose higher than page A6.

4. Ignoring Rezko

Nexis, compiler extraordinaire of news stories in mostly major MSM outlets, conjured up 114 stories matching a "Rezko AND convicted" sort between the day the story broke, June 4, and the next day. I re-ran the sort for today's date and there were ... Ta Da! ... six, count 'em six, stories.

Imagine if the GOP nominee had a longstanding relationship with a major contributor who had just been convicted of 16 felony counts of, basically, taking money from the poor for his purposes. Do you think there just might have been more than six stories a couple days later?

3. Global Bias

AP had to go out of its way -- very far out of its way -- to tell us Obama is a "great man."

Indonesians were rooting for the man they consider to be a hometown hero. Obama lived in the predominantly Muslim nation from age 6 to 10 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather and was fondly remembered by former teachers and classmates.

"He was an average student, but very active," said Widianto Hendro Cahyono, 48, who was in the same third-grade class as Obama at SDN Menteng elementary school in Jakarta. "He would play ball during recess until he was dripping with sweat.

"I never imagined he would become a great man."

In Mexico City, hairdresser Susan Mendoza's eyes lit up when she learned Obama had clinched the nomination.

"Bush was for the elite. Obama is of the people," she said. (hat-tip: LGF)

Indonesia? Yeah, OK, we'll give you that. But Mexico? AP apparently didn't ask the Vietnamese community in Little Saigon, OC, what they think of McCain.

2. NYT Expose ... Or Not

The NY Times didn't have a problem running a smarmy and unprovable story about a supposed McCain affair with a lobbyist. No similar bag o' crapola hit piece has run in the NYT.

Women swoon over Obama, but apparently there's never been an allegation of drop-trou, no matter how specious, that has caught the NYT's attention. This fact is not bias per se -- but the fact that only one crummy secondary hit comes up up on an NYT search of "Obama William Ayres" sure is.

1. Votin' Racist

An AP story that moved right after the announcement that Obama had sealed the deal compared the candidates in a biased way:

_Will McCain be able to overcome the country's intense desire for change by separating himself from the unpopular Bush while sticking close on issues of war and taxes?

_Will Obama be able to overcome the country's unsavory history of slavery andlingering bigotry that deeply divides the public to be elected the first black president?

Think about it: Don't vote for McCain and you're anti-Bush (a popular sentiment). Don't vote for Obama and you're a racist (a not-so-popular attribute).

That Ol' Time Bush-Bashing

Some things never change.

Stuck in the middle of Reuter's slide show on President Bush's trip to Europe -- during which he accomplished a broad set of foreign policy goals despite his lame duck status, a pretty neat feat -- was this photo of our pres.

With fast-shooting digital cameras frame-by-framing every moment of his trip, these sort of images turn up. You can have fun at home while watching Obama or Oldermann by regularly pausing the TV. Within two or three pauses, you'll get a frame like this, or worse.

Of course, we never see pictures like this of Obama or Bill (Hillary maybe ...) or Gore or Kennedy or any other heroes of the left. But even after eight years, the adolescents of the left never tire of a good goof-ball Bush photo.

Sunday Scan

Triple Crown

Jockey Kent Desormeaux summed up yesterday's Belmont Stakes pretty well, saying of Triple Crown contender Big Brown, "I had no horse." Big Brown finished a distant, distant last, and another year goes by without a Triple Crown winner.

I didn't even watch the race because I've soured on all forms of gambling, but it reminded me of 1977 and Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew, who I saw very up-close at the Kentucky Derby.

The not so incredible ex-wife was a photographer at the Louisville Courier Journal and I was her Derby photo assistant. She buried an auto-drive Nikon so the lens was at dirt level under the rail about 10 yards past the finish line. She focused it on the finish line, and handed me a cable remote.

"Push it when they reach the last pole before the finish and hold it down until the last horse is past you," she said. And that's what I did.

As the pack tore past me, I heard the jockeys yelling and the leather creaking and the whips slapping, I felt a hot rush of air, and was spattered with horse sweat. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. After they blew past, I let the shutter button go and remembered to start breathing again.

In the process, I took an image of Seattle Slew crossing the finish line, all four feet in the air. It became somewhat famous; in fact, when a commemorative plate company selected one image of Seattle Slew for a series of plates on Triple Crown winners, they selected my Derby picture. Here it is:

I can't claim it as mine; it's credited to my ex-wife. But it's a heck of a lot better than the crummy one of the Belmont at the top of the post, isn't it?

Those Racist Clintons

"Sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign," lamented Hillary's campaign chief Mark Penn in an NYT op/ed today.

I thought you paid geniuses like Penn millions of dollars, as Hillary did, so that your candidate would run a better campaign.

Penn raises many excuses for Hillary's failure, boiling it down mostly to money -- another responsibility of the campaign chief -- but the most interesting paragraph in the piece is this one:

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

All in all, I have to agree with him, even though I can't stand it, and even with the famous Bill-ism about the only reason why Obama is running a fairy-tale campaign is because he's black, and the famously misinterpreted Hil-ism about Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled In A PC Nation, How Will The GOP Run? that raised the issue of hyper-sensitivity on race issues:

Even if there were a line fine enough to appease the keepers of political correctness in the black, feminist and media communities, and there's not, the GOP will be charged with crossing it. There is no way the GOP can get to November without being called every "ist" in the book.

Still true, more true, today. As it turns out, even the Clintons couldn't pass this test in the face of the Obamaniacs who are found in high positions in the media and the DNC. The challenge for that old white guy with his blond cutie-pie of a wife has not gotten any easier.

China, The Nation That Keeps On Giving

Toys with lead paint, tainted dog food, and of course who can forget bird flu? China is such a generous nation! So giving! And since bird flu was such a hit last time around, it's now time for bird flu redux:

HONG KONG (WSJ) -- Hong Kong authorities slaughtered 2,700 birds and banned live poultry imports from mainland China for up to 21 days, after a routine inspection Saturday found chickens in one of the city's poultry markets infected with the dangerous H5N1 bird-flu virus.

While there's little immediate threat to humans from the infected birds, the discovery revives fears that the disease could still be a problem with poultry flocks in southern China -- although it isn't yet clear whether the infected birds came from local or mainland Chinese farms."

And what does the generous, giving People's Republic have to say about all this? Ever the humble gift-giver, they deferred:

An official with the General Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the agency needed to consider questions about the matter before responding.

Can you say "chicken?"

Those Pesky Thermometers

Yesterday I wrote about NASA cooking the books on its US temperature data, a story Warmie cultists would no doubt reject as tales of denial by Warmie heretics. Well, if they had pipes and if they burned those little bowls of carbon-based plant material, I'd tell them to put this in their pipes and smoke it:

A perfect illustration is found when comparing the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) temperature records from Central Park in New York City to those taken a mere 55 miles away at West Point. Readings in Central Park have been regularly measured since 1835 when the city's population had just surpassed 200,000. Today, surrounded by a metropolis of eight million people filled with some of the world's tallest buildings, a massive underground subway system, an extensive sewer system, power generation facilities, and millions of cars, buses, and taxis, the Central Park temperatures have been greatly altered by urbanization. And, as one might expect, the Central Park historical temperature plot illustrates an incredible warming increase of nearly 4øF.

The West Point readings have also been meticulously maintained since 1835, but the environment surrounding the thermometer shelter has experienced significantly less manmade interference then the one in Central Park. The West Point readings illustrate a significantly lower warming increase of only about 0.6øF over the same 170-year period. This is remarkable given that the year 1835 is considered to be the last gasp of the Little Ice Age -- a significant period of global cooling that stretched back several hundred years.

Cries of out of control global warming become more dubious when one looks at the hottest decade in modern history, the 1930s. The summer of 1930 marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th Century. From June 1 to August 3, Washington, D.C. experienced twenty-one days of high temperatures of at least 100ø. During that record-shattering heat wave, there were maximum temperatures set on nine different days that remain unbroken more than three-quarters-of-a-century later. (emphasis added; source)

How long can the global warming myth stand up to the temperature facts? It's an unanswerable question because global warming is the science of hysterics and hypnotism, and is therefore outside the realm of rational deduction.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Forever Reuters

No one can slip subjectivity into journalistic objectivity like Reuters. Here they are again, reporting on the meeting of G8 energy chiefs in Japan:

Japan, the United States, China, India and South Korea -- who together guzzle nearly half the world's oil -- said that they had agreed on the need for greater transparency in energy markets and more investment by consumers and producers both, while stopping short of calling on OPEC to pump more crude today. (source)

"Guzzle" is defined as "to drink especially liquor greedily, continually, or habitually." The U.S. and Japan should not be included with the guzzlers; we are more and more merely consumers. Greed simply isn't a part of our oil consumption; efficient output is. We consume ever more efficiently, investing billions in ways to make our automotive fleet, our homes and our industrial operations more efficient.

An objective Reuters (oxymoron) would have used the word consume. If it wants to look for oil-guzzling whipping boys, it should have stopped the list at China and Inda, which have put economic growth far ahead of environmental protection, and have put the acquisition of oil ahead of the efficient consumption of oil. In fact, both countries still subsidize the price of fuel to their populations, and refused reasoned calls to stop the practice in the name of greater fuel conservation.

Excitable Electrons

Confession time: I never understood this Mohamed ElBardei guy, and could no see the top UN nuke monitoring guy as a Nobel Prize winner than ... say ... Al Gore.

His mini-interview in Spiegel (the full interview publishes on Tuesday) gives me no further insights.

On Iran:

"The readiness on Iran's side to cooperate leaves a lot to be desired," he said. "We have pressing questions." Iran's leadership, he said, is sending "a message to the entire world: We can build a bomb in relatively short time."

On Syria:

But the general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency also said he expected "absolute transparency" from Syria.

On stopping proliferation by military action:

"With unilateral military actions, countries are undermining international agreements, and we are at a historic turning point."

What's difference between Iran and Syria might explain why ElBardei expects complete transparency from Syria, but not Iran? The only thing that comes to my mind is that there's been military action against Syria's nukes but not Iran's.

Hyper-Hysteria

Fear is rising with a bullet on the list of global motivators. Plastic baby bottles, genetically engineered food, cell phones ... all feed the hysteria machine, ultimately producing stories like this:

South Korean politics are on the brink of meltdown after spiralling public hysteria over “mad cow” disease in American beef unleashed a weekend of mass protests and pitched battles between demonstrators and riot police.

Police vehicles were today attacked by angry mobs armed with sticks and police lines were reportedly charged after the 40,000-strong crowd of peaceful protesters thinned-out to leave a smaller group of activists.

With the violence threatening to continue for another week, and the calls for his resignation being screamed by students on the streets of Seoul, President Lee Myung Bak now faces a series of potentially crippling departures from his immediate circle of allies. (Times of London)

How many recent cases of BSE have there been in the US? One.

How many recent cases of BSE in the US were discovered before the cow was slaughtered for beef? One.

How many humans have been infected from BSE in US beef? None.

Frankly, being in that crowd of angry Koreans looks far more dangerous to one's health than eating U.S. beef.

Sunday Scan

A Memorial Day Miracle

This Memorial Day weekend, it would not be right if tears did not well up at least once over a memory or a story of a brave warrior who fell in battle defending our freedoms.

The story of Marine Sgt. Merlin German isn't really such a story. After all, he fell three years after the IED explosion that starts this story. Sgt. German was, no doubt, a great Marine. But the public story of his greatness began after Iraq, as he was treated for the burns and injuries he sustained in that explosion. His true heroics were found in his will to survive, and to help others survive, and to lift up everyone around him.

Like this:

But he was closest to his mother. When the hospital's Holiday Ball approached in 2006, German told Norma Guerra [a hospital worker and mother of a serviceman in Iraq] he wanted to surprise his mother by taking her for a twirl on the dance floor.

Guerra thought he was kidding. She knew it could be agony for him just to take a short walk or raise a scarred arm.

But she agreed to help, and they rehearsed for months, without his mother knowing. He chose a love song to be played for the dance: "Have I Told You Lately?" by Rod Stewart.

That night he donned his Marine dress blues and shiny black shoes — even though it hurt to wear them. When the time came, he took his mother in his arms and they glided across the dance floor.

Everyone stood and applauded. And everyone cried.

AP reporter Sharon Cohen writes a wonderful tribute to Sgt. Germany today, 'Miracle' Marine refused to surrender will to live. It is a must-read for this Memorial Day weekend.

Many must be reading it, because the web site for the foundation Sgt. Germany set up to help children with burns, Merlin's Miracles, has crashed. Make a point of going back when it's up, and if it looks worthy, make a contribution in his memory.

Meanwhile, In Iraq

Sgt. Miracle would have been pleased with this report:

BAGHDAD (AP) - ... Rear Adm. Patrick Driscoll, a military spokesman, said violence has dropped some 70 percent since a U.S. troop buildup began nearly a year ago. ...

"You are not going to hear me say that al-Qaida is defeated, but they've never been closer to defeat than they are now," Crocker said, speaking in Arabic to reporters during a visit to the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Driscoll said the number of attacks in the past week had "decreased to the level not seen since March 2004," due to recent military operations against Shiite militias in Baghdad's Sadr City and the southern city of Basra, as well as Sunni insurgents in the northern city of Mosul.

Did you catch that last bit? Iraqi military actions (with our support) against both Shi'ites and Sunnis. How can the Left say we're not making progress in Iraq?

Governor Romney ... Of California?

Mitt Romney has an oceanfront house in escrow in San Diego's toniest seaside town, La Jolla. San Diego Union Tribune columnist Diane Bell asks:

The question of the day: Could Romney be planning to establish residency in California with an eye on the governor's seat? Gov. Schwarzenegger is forced out by term limits in 2010. Stay tuned . .

The Death Of Global Warming?

Skeptics haven't been able to kill it. Ten consecutive years of cooler weather since the last hotest year hasn't been able to kill it. But politics just might kill global warming.

In England Warmie fanatic and premier Gordon Brown is being counseled to drop extremely unpopular taxes to discourage car use:

Gordon Brown is being urged by ministers to scrap rises in car taxes and petrol duty as he struggles to regain popularity after a humiliating by-election defeat. ...

Cabinet colleagues are privately urging him to tackle the issue of motoring costs as a way of helping households struggling with rising fuel, energy and food bills. (Guardian)

And in Japan:

These rugged green mountains, once home to one of Asia's most productive coal regions, are littered with abandoned mines and decaying towns - backwaters of an economy of bullet trains and hybrid cars. But after decades of seemingly terminal decline, Japan's coal country is stirring again. With energy prices reaching record highs - oil settled above $135 a barrel on Thursday - Japan's high-cost mines are suddenly competitive again, and demand for their coal is booming.

That's from the NYT that also tells us:

In recent months, South Korea has experienced calls to create a domestic coal industry in order to reduce dependence on imports. In the United Kingdom, where coal’s decline became a symbol of withered industrial might, companies are increasing production and considering reopening at least one closed mine as demand for British coal rises.

This is getting good! Just as Greenie politics are getting successful enough to actually impact the economy, politicians are trying to figure out how to bring government facilitation of Warmie fanaticism to an end.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Dead Revolutionary

Ah, the romance of the revolutionary life!

The leader of Latin America’s largest and longest- surviving insurgency group, Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, died from a heart attack at the weekend, raising hopes in Colombia that a 44-year-old civil war which has claimed 200,000 lives may finally be drawing to an end. (Times of London)

Let's recap. Marulanda spent his early life trying to try to overthrow a government so he could be another Castro. He failed miserably in that effort, but continued the obviously failed effort for no other reason than to stay employed, bringing death to thousands in the process.

Were the people made better by his life? Was the world? Of course not. The revolution was nothing more than a means to his ends, and how he's ended, a failure, an evil that is no more. Now can the rest of FARC join him?

Hysterical Mommies At The NYT

Nervous, nail-biting mommies most have overtaken the NYT editorial board. Here's what they had to say last week:

Anybody worried about the potential danger from plastic bottles and cups, especially for the very young, should take note. The Canadian government has announced plans to restrict the use of bisphenol-a, or BPA, a chemical used to make hardened plastics. The government would prohibit the sale of baby bottles made with BPA. (Those are the ones with the numeral 7 in the triangle stamp on the bottom).

The editorial goes on to call on Congress to push for a ban of BPA in baby bottles or cups, and to authorize investigations into the use of BPA in bike helmets and baby seats.

I'm sorry, but moms are already too worried about far too many things that don't deserve their worry, and the NYT should be more careful ... more reportorial ... before they heap another worry on them. Here's the Stats Blog on just how unfounded the NYT hysteria is:

There are moments when you wonder whether the world is going insane over the wrong health risks. Take BPA. There is no study showing that BPA harms humans or that BPA leaching from baby bottles poses an actual, measurable risk.

The European Union’s Food Safety Authority conducted a risk assessment focusing on the threat to infants in 2006; it was carried out by 21 independent scientists; it raised the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) by a factor of five; in other words, it found BPA considerably safer than it first thought - so safe a mother could give her baby four times the normal number of bottles per day before reaching the threshold of safe consumption (which has an additional safety factor of 100).

The Japanese government also conducted a risk assessment: no risk; a non-profit international consumer safety organization NSF did a risk assessment under the guidance of Calvin Willhite of the California EPA which was published a couple of months ago: again, no risk. The Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction did a risk analysis last year, and dismissed most of the risks activists had been complaining about for years; but they did have some concern over certain animal studies. Oddly, these studies and the effects were not the one’s commonly touted by anti-BPA activists. The National Toxicology Program agreed with the CERHR, but said there was no cause for alarm.

One common thread in these risk assessments is that some of the scientific research has been rejected. In fact, the same scientific research keeps getting rejected no matter which country is doing the risk assessment.

The Stats Blog, from George Mason University, receives no industry funding. It's just dedicated to trying to get people to report on statistical analyses more accurately.

Surely, readers deserve editorial writers that do a little bit more in the way of reporting, that are a bit more scientifically savvy, that have the nerve to exercise the journalistic equivalent of the precautionary principle, before igniting panic and telling Congress what it should be doing?

Amen.

Incredible Wife says it's all well and good, but that glass bottles are better in any case, and if BPA makes them more available again, so much the better. But that's another story.

Did Obama Really Draw 72,000?

The NYT headline made it clear: Obama Draws Huge Crowd in Portland. So the South Chicago phenom really is a phenom, eh? Whoever heard of a politician drawing 72,000 people to hear a stump speech?

Who indeed? Let's see what the local rag has to say about it.

Obama was the biggest star at Sunday's gathering -- though a popular Portland band, The Decemberists, provided the warmup act. With blue skies and temperatures in the 80s, many in the crowd said Waterfront Park was simply the place to be.

Weekly Standard ed Michael Goldfarb thinks we've been had:

I don't listen to that kind of noise pollution, but I know that on a gorgeous, unseasonably mild day in Portland, a free performance by a hugely successful local band is likely to draw a huge crowd, and it seems that's precisely what happened. Nobody denies that Obama is a phenomenon, drawing enormous crowds wherever he goes, but this was reported like all of Oregon showed up to see Obama. New information has come to light.

Hugh also notes that The Decemberists typically open their shows with what I'm sure is a stirring rendition of the Soviet national anthem. No word on whether they opened the Obama rally with such a performance, but I'm certain our trusted media would have reported it if they did.

Oh, yeah. Most certainly.

White House Takes On The Obama Network

The general rule of thumb of not picking fights with guys who buy their ink (or electrons) by the barrel doesn't really hold if you're counselor to the most powerful man in the world, so Ed Gillespie has taken on NBC.

In his letter attacking NBC's editing of a presidential interview, Gillespie's request is straightforward:

This e-mail is to formally request that NBC Nightly News and The Today Show air for their viewers President Bush's actual answer to correspondent Richard Engel's question about Iran policy and "appeasement," rather than the deceptively edited version of the President's answer that was aired last night on the Nightly News and this morning on The Today Show.

Should NBC fold? Let's look at the evidence, the two questions and answers Gillespie said were unfair. I'll present the edited interview in italics followed by the actual transcript:

RICHARD ENGEL: You said that negotiating with Iran is pointless and then you went further. You're saying, you said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama? He certainly thought you were.

GEORGE W. BUSH: You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently, the political calendar has. And when a leader of Iran says they want to destroy Israel, you've to take those words seriously.

Full transcript: "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolf Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon. But I also talked about what's possible in the Middle East."

NBC, in a manner typical of the media, cut out the part of the quote that challenges the media's veracity. The mighty MSM has a glass jaw. The subsequent snipping resulted in considerable detail being left out, including remarks that made it clear Bush set no new policy in his Knesset speech, and gave context to his Hitler comments. But did it mischaracterize Bush? I'll get back to that.

Gillespie then points out that the question immediately following illuminated the subject more, but was not included in the aired version of the interview. Here is that passage:

ENGEL: Repeatedly you've talked about Iran and that you don't want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. How far away do you think Iran is from developing a nuclear capability?

BUSH: "You know, Richard, I don't want to speculate – and there's a lot of speculation. But one thing is for certain – we need to prevent them from learning how to enrich uranium. And I have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they would verifiably suspend their enrichment. And if not, we'll continue to rally the world to isolate them."

Says Gillespie:

This response reiterates another long-standing policy, which is that if Iran verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment program the U.S. government would engage in talks with the Iranian government.

NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement."

It's true, this passage does define why Bush is not talking to Iran and what conditions he requires before he would talk to them. As such, it defines why he thinks talking to them without these conditions amounts to appeasement. NBC would have had time to air this bit if it hadn't introduced the piece with the same moral equivalency we saw on AP's story on the same subject.

Much is being made of this letter today -- just check out the links to the two stories posted on memeorandum (here, here). My thoughts?

Gillespie picked the wrong target, for three reasons.

First, the editing is not that egregious. I don't think Gillespie is right when he claims that the editing gave the impression Bush agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks, and I don't think the follow-up question moved the ball very far down the field. If you're going to take on a network, you should have a better case than the one Gillespie chose to argue, and Lord knows, there are plenty of better cases out there.

A White House edit of the interview would have been very different ... but it would have been editing nonetheless. Egregious editing is defined as putting words into someone's mouth that weren't stated, not leaving out further illumination on points you've put into the interview. I would have preferred to not hear the chiding of Bush in the intro -- the Arabs he was speaking to in Egypt deserved a lecture on democracy, and who cares if the minions of despots were cool to it? -- but NBC's editorial position is clearly anti-Bush, and within that context, the editing was more typical than outrageous.

Second, coverage of the Knesset remarks was going extremely well for the White House and the GOP. Obama was coming off as weak and naive; Bush, the GOP and McCain were coming off as more seasoned and more protective of America. There was no reason to give the opposition the opportunity to position Bush as a crybaby. As one leftyblogger responded to the matter:

Now it's clear that the White House is so invested in this phony war, so convinced of its usefulness, that Ed Gillespie is desperately trying to keep it going far past its expiration date with this message to NBC.

When the opposition is rallying, it's wise not to give them rallying points.

Finally, and most obviously, the nasty little NBC piece was weak and not terribly damaging to US policy, the war or the president, and it had already slipped off to the dustbin of history. Gillespie's letter awoke the dog -- not just the sleeping dog, but the very dead dog.

In the furor that is ensuing, those of us who are convinced the MSM has staked out a position damaging to the war effort and America will too easily jump on Gillespie's bandwagon, not seeing that the whole exercise was a mistake. And those on the left will happily attack Gillespie and Bush and praise NBC for standing up to the administration's arrogance and warmongering.

Gillespie did Bush, the GOP and McCain no favors. This was yet another mistake in the gargantuan chronicles of Bush administration media mistakes.

Great Moments In Global Warming

Another expedition to draw attention to the horror of global warming has ended in frozen failure:

South African snow adventurer Correne Erasmus-Coetzer has been forced to abandon her dream of becoming the first African woman to cross the icy continent of Greenland on foot. The dream came to an end this week when the expedition of nine men and women came up against a ferocious wind and snow storm, and rapidly dwindling food supplies, as they approached the quarter-way mark of their 550km slog from the east to west coast of Greenland, across the Arctic Circle. Erasmus-Coetzer was hoping to create awareness about global warming and raise money for the Durban-based Wilderness Leadership School.

Keep 'em coming! I just with the MSM would give us a nice fat list of all these failed global warming propaganda jaunts. And speaking of poor performance by MSM, closer to home, the media's pro-global warming bias is actually threatening the safety of the readers they serve. William Tate tells the story in American Thinker:

When Maine officials tried to warn residents of the dangers of this winter’s near-record snowpack, Big Media slanted the story, hampering efforts to warn folks of the danger. “This winters [sic] near-record snowfall has created a flood potential that is above normal,” began a news advisory released by the Maine River Flow Advisor Commission on March 6th.

“Statewide water content readings from this week’s snow survey are some of the highest since 1969, the ‘snow season’ of record, and in some locations higher than the record.” In case there was any doubt, the banner headline on the release reads: “Spring Flood Potential Elevated Due to Near-Record Snowfall.”

However, the lead in the Associated Press story in the next day’s edition of the major regional daily, the Boston Globe, downplayed the threat posed by the snowpack, referring to it as just “above-average,” and shifting the emphasis to concern about an approaching storm. “The National Weather Service says weekend rain could cause some flooding of streets and small streams.”

Shying away from reporting record snowfall just to keep the global warming myth alive? Really? How could that be?

The Globe is owned by the New York Times Company. Both the Times and the Associated Press are heavily invested in the myth of Global Warming, or—as I like to call it—Global Warning. Record snowpack means higher than normal amounts of snow, colder than usual temperatures, or both. None of which readily fits into the MSM’s chosen story line that mankind is giving Mother Nature a fever. Big Media’s Global Warning bias has largely remained in the realm of theory; now it has begun to endanger people’s lives and property in real time.

It gives me chills.

hat-tip: ICECAP

Was Rev. Wright Wronged?

This evening, Rev. Jeremiah Wright breaks his silence before a sympathetic interviewer, PBS' Bill Moyers. Bobby Seale and Louis Farrahkan apparently were unavailable to interview him.

Wright's big point is that he was wronged. Here's his exposition:

Wright defended his sermons, telling Moyers, "the persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly ... those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic."

Actually, I didn't need Wright's help to come to this point; I've thought about it quite a bit because I've seen my fair share of out of context quotes, so fairness mandates that I consider the "out of context" question here. As an example, let's look at this infamous Wright quote:

" ... and then [America] wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. 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."

I would actually like to hear a pastor say this, if the context around the quote is that God is within his rights to withdraw his favor from America because of the millions of his little ones we have suctioned and cut into oblivion in America's abortion mills.

But that wasn't the context behind the quote. We have the context, and it is this:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law ..."

And that's why God should damn America. Any black leader who says the (white) government (deliberately) gives black drugs and passes three strikes laws as a racist tool to imprison people who should still be on the streets even though they're three-strike criminals should expect media coverage, whether they're Obama's pastor or not.

In other words, we don't have to listen to the entire sermon, or the entire 20 years of sermons when Obama (theoretically) attended the church. Rev. Wright gave us the context. And if Al Campanis can get the boot for saying blacks "may not have some of the necessities to be, let's say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager," then Wright can certainly feel some heat for saying this.

Back to the interview:

He said his critics' motives are clear: to undermine Obama. "I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ. And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?"

Of course Wright has been used by some to undermine Obama and the story is bigger because he is Obama's pastor. That doesn't make the statements any less outrageous and any less newsworthy however, and a great deal of the newsworthiness of this story was the shock most of America felt upon hearing Wright for the first time. News is by definition "new," and this language from a pulpit was new to most of us.

Besides, before he accuses others of exploiting him because of Obama, Wright would do well to ask himself if he did not, in fact, benefit more from Obama than he suffered from him. How many times did Wright use his famous parishioner to aggrandize his church? How many favors did he ask Obama to do? This cuts both ways, Reverend.

Finally:

But he added, "They know nothing about the church. They know nothing about our prison ministry. They know nothing about our food ministry. They know nothing about our senior citizens home. They know nothing about all we try to do as a church and have tried to do." Focusing only on the snippets, he said, "was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons."

The same can be said of Hezbollah. They have "ministries" that feed and heal and educate. But they also fire rockets from Muslim civilian neighborhoods into Jewish civilian neighborhoods and send martyrs duped idiots into crowds of Jews with explosives strapped around them.

And Mussolini got the trains to run on time.

Hezbollah is not remembered for its schools; Mussolini is not remembered for his train schedules. And Wright won't be remembered by most of Americans for his outreach because it's nothing more than expected that a church the size of his would have numerous outreaches. Having them, then, does not exonerate him from his wrongs.

So you see, what's unfair is not the media focusing on the "snippets;" rather, it is unfair that Wright calls them "snippets." They are his rockets and explosive vests, so of course the media and the people will focus on them, and running crying and sniffling to broadcast's ubber-Lib will not change that one bit.

On Anniversary Of Beirut Bombing, WaPo Blames Bush

The Washington Post sure has a strange way to honor the dead.

Acknowledging (in the very last line!) that the State Department will hold a ceremony this morning marking the anniversary of Beirut Marine barracks suicide bombing that killed 241, causing the largest loss of American military life in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima, reporter Robin Wright tees off on an America-blaming piece on suicide bombing, not a piece that honors the fallen.

The piece quotes a study by Mohammed Hafez of the Naval Postgraduate School showing a big increase in suicide bombing as a tool in the new warfare.

The unpublished data show that since 1983, bombers in more than 50 groups from Argentina to Algeria, Croatia to China, and India to Indonesia have adapted car bombs to make explosive belts, vests, toys, motorcycles, bikes, boats, backpacks and false-pregnancy stomachs.

Of 1,840 incidents in the past 25 years, more than 86 percent have occurred since 2001, and the highest annual numbers have occurred in the past four years. The sources who provided the data to The Washington Post asked that they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the tallies.

The data show more than 920 suicide bombings in Iraq and more than 260 in Afghanistan, including some that killed scores of U.S. troops. All occurred after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

Of course, the Left knows who is to blame for all this. Rising Hegemon sums up their position with a question, "Is there nothing the Bush Administration cannot do?"

Always good for an off-base inanity, Juan Cole goes academic (i.e., too intellectual to be smart) on us:

542 [attacks] out of 658 is about 83% [in Afghanistan and Iraq], lending further testimony to Chicago Political Scientist Robert Pape's theory that suicide bombings tend to occur in countries under foreign military occupation by an otherwise democratic government. (That is, they are staged for the public in the occupying country to some extent; people tend not to bother to blow themselves up when occupied by a dictatorship.)

My gosh. Can't these people see something idiotic for what it is? This is the most a$$-backwards thinking I've seen since ... well, probably since whatever leftist dribble I was reading yesterday.

It's hard to tell by Cole's garbled structure whether Pape is referring to Iraq's democratic government or America's, but the fact is there would be no democratic government in Iraq were it not for us. We are not occupying; we have a fraction of the troops in Iraq or Afghanistan required by an occupation, and we are encouraging the strengthening of the Iraqi government, not controlling it.

And "people tend not to bother to blow themselves up when occupied by a dictatorship?" Did it not occur to these two academic muddle-heads that "occupied by a dictatorship" does not describe pre-war Iraq? "Controlled with an iron fist by a 100% Iraqi dictatorship" does. There's no occupation now, there was no occupation under Saddam. What is this ridiculous fixation with a word they can't even define?

As quoted by WaPo, you would never know that the study deals almost exclusively with Islamist bombing. Nothing is said about the rise of Islamist terror, preceding Iraq and Afghanistan.

No context is given from the Palestinian use of suicide bombs in their war on terror against Israel, even though they and the Tamil Tigers pretty much invented the suicide technology. No effort is made to explain the bombings in Algiers or China within the context of Iraq and Afghanistan.

And worse, there is no mention that there's a war going on. When there's a war, both sides need weapons or one side will summarily win. We have plenty of weapons that are capable of trouncing any conventional weapons the Islamists can raise against us, so they utilize a weapon that we have difficulty deterring: suicide bombs.

If there were weapon parity, suicide bombing would not be used; AK 47s, RPGs and other conventional weapons would be used by both sides.

So here's the story WaPo didn't write:

Islam has been actively at war against democracy since the 1980s and they have found that there most effective tactic is terror and their most effective weapon is the suicide bomber. These bombers -- recruited from the dregs of society and doped up before they're sent off -- are effectively keeping the war going, killing thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of our troops in the process.

Is the enemy, then, George Bush or Islamist warriors? For all but the intellectually befuddled and Bush-deranged, the answer is obvious.

Obama Wins Big Endorsement; Media Mum

Over the weekend, Obama picked up the endorsement of Hamas, delivered by Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to Hamas' Prime Minister:

"We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election. He has a vision to change America."

Let's finish that last sentence: "... to change America's policy in support of Israel and against terrorists and rogue terrorist states."

I read a fair amount of daily media, but I didn't hear about this endorsement until I read it this morning on Power Line. Why do you suppose the big media ... you know the ones that secretly are goofy over Obama but try to cloak it under the threadbare cover of "objectivity" ... didn't see this as a fit story to cover.

After all, they covered every footfall and prattle of Jimmy Carter's little visit with Hamas, didn't they?

hat-tip: memeorandum

Quote Of The Day: Who Said That?! Edition

"People cannot help but ask: the European Parliament always brags about human rights and freedom, so why does it turn a deaf ear to the serious human rights abuse of attacks on and killings of innocent people in Tibet?"

That seems like a normal enough quote, given China's long-time suppression of human rights in Tibet and its recent crushing of opposition demonstrations there. But normal it's not.

That's because it's from China's People's Daily newspaper, part of a recent lashing out at the "Dalai clique" that apparently is duping naive Westerners into getting this entire story 180 degrees misunderstood. It's poor, poor Beijing we should be worrying about!

And a big push this is. Here's what greets us front and center on the English-language edition of the People's Daily today:

• Documentary "The past of Tibet"
• Tibet regional chairman: Situation in Tibet returns to normal
• Tell you a true Tibet - Ownership of Tibet
• TYC, Common Enemy to All Human
• Eminent monks, masters condemn violence, pray for Olympics
• Tibetan Youth Congress = a terror group
• Commentary: Yet another show of lies by Dalai Lama
• Perspective on a Tibet with freedom, harmony and prosperity
• "A slap in face" to Paris itself

The journalistic phrase for that is "full court press."

The aggressive push is generating news bits on many fronts, including the bold claim by Beijing that what it referred to as "modified automatic weapons" were found hidden in a Buddhist temple in southwest China, near the Tibetan border.

Reuters reports the item straight-up:

Chinese forces found firearms hidden throughout a Tibetan temple in an ethnic Tibetan area of southwestern China which has been the scene of anti-Chinese riots in recent weeks, state television said.

Police, responding to what they said was a tip-off from the public, found 30 firearms in the monastery in Aba prefecture of Sichuan province last month, state television said in a report, a transcript of which was posted on its Web site (http://www.cctv.com).

If this item were about us in Iraq, it would have been reported much more skeptically, something like, "After raiding a holy mosque in a quiet Baghdad neighborhood, U.S. troops said they found what they described as firearms in the building. But local residents disputed the claim."

No local residents disputed this claim apparently -- probably because they feared they would be tortured until they, too, provided "a tip-off from the public" to the Chinese forces.

We break now for this little reminder to help you process this story:

Yes, it's Chinese soldiers with shaved heads carrying Buddhist monk robes -- evidence that the Chinese are manipulating events in Tibet. Sort of like planting weapons in a temple (not that I have any hard evidence that they did).

Also in the People's Daily offensive according to the Reuters piece:

• Charges that Western media trumped up coverage of Olympic torch relay demonstrations, making them appear more violent than they actually were. (I'm sure there were miles of violence-free torch-running somewhere, but who's going to cover that when you've got Paris and London to cover?)
  
  
• China's ambassador to Ireland stomped out of a speech when Tibet was brought up.
  
  
• Releasing news that five people had been arrested on a domestic flight after "acting strangely." If we read the Reuters report long enough, we find that that strange action was speaking a language no one could understand.
  
  
• And in Beijing, our good friend and ally Pervez Musharraf assured students the torch would be safe in Pakistan and added helpfully, "Tibet is an inalienable part of China."

China is letting the world know it will not stand down on Tibet and it will remember those who embarrassed it during its glorious Olympic moments. It is trying to bully the world as effectively as it has bullied minorities unfortunate enough to live within its borders.

They've got a lot of economic power behind them, but the Tibetans have a lot of emotional power behind them, and I don't think this will die down between now and August. The Chinese will continue to be troubled with outbursts of anti-Chinese sentiment up to and throughout the games.

In the end, nothing will change. They'll slap a happy face on the games, and when everyone goes home, it will return to business as usual in China and Tibet. If we are to take any lesson away from Tiananmin Square, it is that. If you need a reminder of what China will do to protect itself, watch this powerful, awful clip:

Sunday Scan

Chinese Faking Protests?

What, you might ask, are Chinese soldiers doing holding fake Tibetan Buddhist monk robes?

Could they be preparing to stage violent protests by "monks" in order to justify more violent attacks in response by the Chinese military?

That's an easy conclusion to reach if you read Big Lizard's Forget It, It's Chinatown post, which uses Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan to hint at what really might be going on with Chinese military action in Tibet ... and, incredibly, anti-Chinese Olympic torch demonstrations.

Japanese-language blog postings from anti-Communist Chinese nationals living in Japan? Isn't the blogosphere amazing?

Clinton Schizophrenia

In public, the public Clinton makes her case that President Bush should boycott the Olympics grand opening in protest to Chinese suppression of pro-religious freedom demonstrations in Tibet.

In private, the somewhat less public Clinton stuffs cash into the couples' bank accounts, cash "earned" from his position as an advisor to China's main internet provider, Alibaba, which is helping the Chinese government totalitarians track down and prosecute Tibetan protesters.

Reports the LA Times in a front-page expose today:

Alibaba, which took over Yahoo's China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

This is the same charity the Clinton's do not list on Hillary's Senate financial disclosure forms, despite the fact that it has raised some $500 million, with much of it coming from the Saudi royal family and the sheiks of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar. The Capital Research Center says of the foundation:

Bill Clinton is masterminding his charitable foundation’s fundraising campaign at the same time that he advises his wife’s presidential campaign. Might that create some conflicts of interest? At the very least, linking nonprofit fundraising to political proximity is sure to generate lots of philanthropic clout—but to what end? Bill Clinton promises to disclose the names of donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation when his wife becomes president. How reassuring.

The wrap-up of the LAT story was pretty amazing:

Human rights activists said clear evidence of Alibaba's collaboration with China's state security apparatus surfaced last month with the appearance of a "most wanted" posting for Tibetan rioters on the firm's Yahoo China homepage.

The postings, which appeared March 15 on both Yahoo China and Microsoft's MSN China homepage, carried photos of suspected rioters and a phone number for informants to call. The postings vanished later the same day after news accounts highlighted them.

Yahoo officials said they had no advance warning from Alibaba that the postings would run. "We made our concerns known that the displays were inappropriate," one Yahoo official said, but were told by Alibaba officials "that it was a standard news feed."

The Clinton foundation spokeswoman would not address Alibaba's role in aiding the crackdown in Tibet. Instead, she emphasized the former president's efforts to push AIDS relief in China. "He has both pushed and helped the government of China to acknowledge and tackle the growing HIV-AIDs crisis facing their country," she said.

I'm struggling here to figure out why funding AIDs relief answers questions about Clinton failing to support human rights in China because he's taken money from the Commie oppressors. And I'm failing to see how Hillary Clinton can be president without Bill Clinton influencing her every move.

And I'm sure the Obama camp is happy it has the LAT working so hard for him.

Politics, Italian Style

That's the derrier of Italian porn star whore Millie D'Abbraccio, and it's gracing not a movie poster, but her campaign poster for a seat on Rome's City Council.

She's running as a Socialist. Surprise!

And here's her the big idea of her campaign:

If elected, D'Abbraccio wants to create a red light area with strip clubs, erotic discos and sex shops called "Love City" just kilometers away from the Vatican.

"It would be something cute, clean -- nothing to do with prostitution," said the actress whose films include "The Kiss of the Cobra" and "Paolina Borghese, Imperial Nymphomaniac." (source)

Cute and clean. Uh-huh. As screwed up as DC is, and as far out as our leftists are, things here are better, far better, than they are in Europe.

Which is why leftists love Europe so much.

BBC Warming Wilt Chronicled

In last week's Sunday Scan, I ran a piece documenting how BBC had edited a news item on lower global temperatures to basically take out any reference to lower global temperatures.

Now The [UK] Register has run the series of emails between Warmie fundamentalist Jo Abbess and Beeb editor Roger Harrabin that resulted in BBC cowering in fear of being branded a "global warming skeptic."

The exchange started hot and got hotter, with Abbess finally threatening Harabin:

"It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth." [Our emphasis]

Abbess was worried about the consequences of Harrabin's report. People might think The Wrong Thoughts. She spelled it out:

"A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say "See! Global Warming has stopped !"

And she signed off with a threat:

"I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics."

Harrabin meekly responded:

"Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more."

So the initial copy ...

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

... became:

But this year's temperature would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

If the debate on global warming is over, how come Abbess had to debate BBC into changing its story?

And if the media is to be believed, why did BBC fold?

BTW, a Google search on Jo Abbess now turns up a relatively strong 110,000 hits. I dug three pages into it and every link had to do with this scandal. God bless the blogosphere.

hat-tip: Icecap

Green Vs. Green Combat

And while we're on the subject of strange happenings in the Greenie/Warmie world, I must pass along this story from the NYT as the story that gave me the most giggles in the last week:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Call it an eco-parable: one Prius-driving couple takes pride in their eight redwoods, the first of them planted over a decade ago. Their electric-car-driving neighbors take pride in their rooftop solar panels, installed five years after the first trees were planted.

Trees — redwoods, live oaks or blossoming fruit trees — are usually considered sturdy citizens of the sun-swept peninsula south of San Francisco, not criminal elements. But under a 1978 state law protecting homeowners’ investment in rooftop solar panels, trees that impede solar panels’ access to the sun can be deemed a nuisance and their owners fined up to $1,000 a day. The Solar Shade Act was a curiosity until late last year, when a dispute over the eight redwoods (a k a Tree No. 1, Tree No. 2, Tree No. 3, etc.) ended up in Santa Clara County criminal court.

The couple who planted the trees, Carolynn Bissett and Richard Treanor, were convicted of violating the law, based on the complaint of their neighbor, Mark Vargas, and were ordered to make sure that no more than 10 percent of the solar panels are shaded.

A few weeks after The San Jose Mercury News wrote about the situation, the first act ended with the couple pruning 10 feet to 15 feet of Tree No. 6’s upper branches. The event drew more cameras than an episode of “Extreme Home Makeover.”

The Bissett-Treanor team responded as liberals will -- they turned to Big Brother, specifically in the form of Joe Simitian, a Dem (natch) state senator from nearby Palo Alto, who now will busy the state legislature with a new bill that will grandfather the owners of trees that pre-existed the installation of neighboring solar panels from prosecution under The Solar Shade Act.

The story concludes:

The state, Mr. Simitian pointed out, has a law to encourage the construction of one million solar roofs. “I’m trying to avoid a million neighborhood arguments,” he said.

Yes, that would be a lot of hot air.

Maoist Moron

In case you thought nothing much happened in San Francisco this week because the Chinese conspired with the Newsome administration to re-route the Olympic torch parade, you'd do well to visit this lengthy and impressive photo album at Pajamas media.

It was, in fact, quite a show with multiple anti-Chinese causes present and plenty of hostility flaring between pro- and anti-Chinese factions. Included is this photo of some anti-Chinese street theater:

Note the long-haired imbecile on the left in the Mao t-shirt. Who wears a Mao t-shirt on any day, and who is idiotic enough to wear one to an anti-China demonstration?

Beware when the left embraces your cause, because lame-brains will be coming to your side.

hat-tip: Jim

Five Years In Iraq

The invaluable MEMRI marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq with excerpts from articles written by liberal Muslim commentators, all of which are worth reading.

I particularly liked this excerpt from an interview by Iraqi Journalist 'Abd Al-Jabbar Al-'Atabihad of a news vendor in Baghdad. He asked the vendor how he felt on the anniversary of the invasion and was told:

"At the start of my journey I stopped by the newspaper seller to ask how he was after five years of change. He said: I will sum up what you ask in a few words. Despite everything that happened and is happening, I feel pride in the fact that the years of dictatorship are gone. There were no worse years than those, when we were afraid of our own shadows and our own children. I won't claim that the situation now is ideal, but compared to the past, it is much better, without any comparison…

Despite the sorrows I find in our present situation, I feel relieved. In the days [of the dictatorship] I didn't feel optimistic. Now, I am optimistic about what is to come. What is happening now is passing; while it has gone on long, it will end - it could end in the twinkle of an eye.

How do liberals, who are supposed to be the strongest champions of freedom, oppose the war in Iraq when it is so obvious that the work we are doing there is the good, hard work of defending freedom, and freeing the oppressed?

Also in the MEMRI post is an "Apology to the Valiant American Soldier" by Iraqi liberal (truly liberal, as opposed to the shameful disgraces that constitute liberalism in the US today) Khudayr Taher. Its beauty surpasses mere words; it is much deserved blessing for our troops:

"We forsook you and betrayed you - we, whose history is an expression of massacres, conflagrations, and ruin. We killed you, and we killed our dream and aspiration of reaching the sun, the moon, and the stars - [we killed our dream] of availing ourselves of the opportunity to live as true humans, thanks to your presence.

"My dear, brave American soldier, you noble individual who traversed land and sea in order to write the story of Iraqi freedom for the first time in its modern history - you believed, in accordance with logic, self-evident truths, and rational thought, that a people who had been subjected to repression, starvation, and killing would dance for joy, and would thank Allah who sent you to them as a liberating angel. [You believed that] they would strew flowers and break out in songs of joy that would smash the chains of slavery, ignominy, and humiliation.

"Not even a writer of surrealistic [literature] or [theater of] the absurd would have imagined that the Iraqi people would revolt against their liberator and would rush ardently back to a new bondage of a different kind - that of the religious cleric, the tribal sheikh, and the gang leader. It was unthinkable that the people would go against logic, rational thought, and self-evident truths, in a mad rush towards the abyss and total ruin.

"My beloved, brave American soldier, we apologize to you, and we are saddened at our wretched and miserable selves. Since we are a people that slaughters itself, and kills one another, cutting off heads, what can you expect from us other than ingratitude, perfidy, and stabbing you in the back for the benefit of Iranian and Syrian intelligence and Al-Qaeda?..."

Pass that one along, will you?

Obama-Fawning Continues At MSM

Barack Obama said something that sniffed a bit like a whopper today -- and not the hamburger kind. Not that anyone in the media bothered to question it.

The story is all over the media, from an interview Obama gave to The Advocate, a gay newspaper. In it, he says he'll do what he can to make military life better for gays, and criticizes "don't ask don't tell" thusly:

"We're spending large sums of money to kick highly qualified gays or lesbians out of our military, some of whom possess specialties like Arab-language capabilities that we desperately need. That doesn't make us more safe."

Really? We've been kicking out Arab speaking gays? I'd like a bit of verification, please.

I'm not sure about "don't tell," but reporters sure have a "don't ask" attitude about Obama. Outlets that have run the story without fact-checking the quote include CNN, the Guardian, Military.com, Town Hall, Fox News, The Boston Globe, and Stars & Stripes -- all of them, and many, many more carrying the same AP story without a question.

As it turns out, a second or two on the good ol' WWW could have given reporters an initial, iffy answer to the question, if they had thought to ask it:

The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has only six (6) fluent Arabic speakers out of 33 who speak Arabic. Yet, despite the Bush administration’s lip-service to a need for more Arabic speakers, the U.S. military has fired over two dozen linguists for being gay: 20 were Arabic linguists, 6 were Farsi linquists. (source)

Even if the statement is true -- it's linked to a Carpetbagger Report post that links the source for the quote to The New Republic (hardly a credible source!) via a broken link that lands you on the home page, where a search for "pentagon linguists arabic" lands you nothing.) -- it's disingenuous.

The number of fluent Arabic speakers in the Baghdad embassy is a useless piece of information deliberately used to make the problem appear big because the number is so small. But there are linguists elsewhere besides the embassy, from Forward Operating Bases to Central Command to the NSA.

But at least I asked the question. I thought the days when reporters grabbed the news releases from the candidates and ran them without a question ended with Watergate. But I guess that only goes for Republicans.