David Finkel notes that while some polls have Bush in the low forties (actually, most have him in the middle to high forties), some states consistently poll well above 50%. Nebraska polls at 55%, Idaho at 58% and my adopted home state of Utah is a startling (for some) 61%.

I am pretty sure that Finkel thought of this story angle to get the Post to pay for a skiing trip. They should have sent him to Nebraska.

Finkel goes to Randolph, Utah, population 480, where 17 people voted for John F. Kerry. Try as he might, Finkel can't quite make the simple people of Randolph look stupid for being Bush voters although he tries.

In small-town quiet, she finishes her work. Somewhere out there are the sounds of chattering terrorists, and shivering homeless people, and helicopters ferrying soldiers, and a president rehearsing a vitally important speech.

In comes Debra McKinnon, 53, who says she nearly dropped dead nine months ago from heart failure and is working for one reason only: health insurance. She takes 12 pills a day, for which she pays several hundred dollars a month, which, without insurance, would be four times that. Is that Bush's fault, though? "No," McKinnon says. "It's a problem from the drug companies to the lawyers to the doctors to Congress, and it's not because Bush isn't a caring man. I think he's a very caring man. I think he's a decent, God-fearing person, and I hope we are, too."

Oh my heck! That was way too sophisticated a view of a complex problem. If Debra lived in New York City, she would have reflexively given Finkel a Kanye West retort--Bush doesn't care..."

In comes Charlene McLean, who runs a flower business out of her garage and says that the problems in America are due to a "gimme, gimme, gimme" attitude that is the fault of the Democrats and is turning the country cockeyed. "We can't do this because it offends the gays. We can't do that because it offends the atheists," she says. "Well what about the average American? What about the common person?"

What? Charlene has the nerve to think that she might be one of the "little people" that Ted Kennedy says he cares so much about? Nah! She's white and straight and must be rich as Croesus. She's clearly "out-of-the-mainstream", isn''t she?

In comes Lois McLean, Charlene's mother-in-law, who is 77 and works at Gator's part time because Social Security isn't quite enough to finance her modest life. "I think he's doing a good job," she says, her voice hoarse from having a tube pushed down her throat. That happened when she went to the dentist to have a tooth pulled and she suddenly stopped breathing, and then passed out. She woke up in the hospital emergency room, where, once she was stable, the dentist finished yanking out the tooth.

Adapt to your circumstances, she says. That's what the dentist did, that's what Bush has done, and that's what she tries to do, too. "I myself have to make my life better," she says.

What a concept--"I have to make my life better." Lois McLean is a descendant of people to made this country with sweat, love and nary a whine. Hinkel calls them "Bush believers", but what they are really people who believe in themselves and each other, and that's who they rely on--not Ted Kennedy.

She turns off the "open" sign and starts adding up the day's receipts. It isn't much. She netted $10,000 last year, if that. She has no savings. She has no retirement plan. She works seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Her last vacation was a quick trip last Thanksgiving to see her in-laws in southern Utah, where "I cooked turkey, and they didn't like the turkey, and that's how that went," and the longest she ever remembers shutting down Gator's since opening day 18 years ago was when she helped a family member move to Oklahoma.

...and she doesn't blame the president.

There have been no funerals here from Bush's war on terrorism. There are no unemployment lines, no homeless people sleeping in doorways, no sick people being turned away from a hospital because of a lack of insurance, no crime to speak of, no security fence needed around the reservoir, no metal detectors at the schools.

All true, and Finkel allows you to infer that Bush is popular here because of the absence of such problems. The reality is that homelessness occurs when people don't care about each other--a notable urban and Democrat phenomenon. In Utah we don't "care about people" in the abstract. People turn to their families and to their churches and lastly, way down the list, the government. Many times a year, young people in Utah sit on the tail gates of pickup trucks and gather tons and tons of groceries for the homeless shelters in this state, other states and other countries. There is more charitable giving here in Utah than almost anywhere else in the country. Utah also has one of the most effective and efficient medical establishments in the country.

Funerals?

Don't kid yourself. Utah is among the largest contingents of National Guard deployed to Iraq. Recruitment for the armed forces in Utah is as healthy as it ever was. Our university campuses feature many young men and women in dress uniform fulfilling their ROTC requirements.

The calm in the eye of the storm isn't an accident, its the result of conservative values.

The Turks, like the French, are nominally our allies, but they don't have to like it.

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine-gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison -- where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

Not exactly good clean fun.

Yet it is somewhat understandable considering a incident, unpublicized here in the U.S. but yet a major blow to U.S.-Turkey relations.

"Valley of the Wolves Iraq" opens with a true story: On July 4, 2003, in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, troops from the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade raided and ransacked a Turkish special forces office, threw hoods over the heads of 11 Turkish special forces officers and held them in custody for more than two days.

The Americans said they had been looking for Iraqi insurgents and unwittingly rounded up the Turks because they were not in uniform. Still, the incident damaged Turkish-U.S.. relations and hurt Turkish national pride. Turks traditionally idolize their soldiers; many enthusiastically send their sons off for mandatory military service.

What isn't understandable is how two American actors could take prominent roles in the film.

Billy Zane plays the evil American commander who makes Saddam's boys look restrained by comparison and Gary Busey, hanging onto the bottom of the 'D' list by his fingernails, decided it would be a good career move to embody a long-standing blood libel--the Jew who steal your organs and sells them for money.

I think if your career has sunk to the depths where these are the only parts you are offered, you should consider selling real-estate instead.

My daughter had the Oprah Show on today, where Anderson Cooper and Lisa Ling are touring the devastation in New Orleans in an effort to regenerate public interest in restoring the area.

I would say I have a generally good opinion of Ms. Winfrey, whose generosity and good intentions are clearly genuine, and while I don't trust Anderson Cooper as far as I can throw him (an "emoting" anchor is basically a invitation to oversimplify complex issues...), I watched as Cooper and Lisa Ling (should I know her?) interviewed people and toured the devastation.

At minute 22 in the show (I don't have an easy way to extract a single image from the TiVo), the camera shows a house with the now familiar search and rescue code--an 'X' with specific data entered in each quartile. The top quartile has "9-5" spray-painted to indicate the date the site was examined, but then the camera zooms in an Ling intones in a voice over:

"September 5th, and that number at the bottom of the 'X' means that they found one person dead..."

The camera lingers and at the bottom quartile of the 'X' is a '1' with a circle around it, yet I noticed something odd right away--the '1' had a different tone to it, did not appear to be spray-painted and was noticeably different in character to the '9' and '5' numerals in the top quartile. The circle around the one on the other hand, was consistent with the other numerals and was clearly spray-painted.

Someone, likely someone from the Oprah camera crew, had placed a piece of tape inside the 'zero' to allow Ling to make the statement that someone had died in the house.

I will try to extract the frame and post it as an update here, but I have no doubt that the Oprah show breached journalistic ethics to show us a staged image. (I ended up taking a digital photo of the television screen in freeze frame...)

In a media environment where the National Press corps has a conniption over having their irrelevancy rubbed in their face by Dick Cheney, this perfectly illustrates the reasons why--an abstract vision of a "greater truth" that makes it necessary for media elites to lie to the American people.

Its reasonable to ask why I don't give the Oprah show the benefit of the doubt--the reason is the first go around on Katrina by Oprah's posse of celebrities. The posing with dead bodies was not just bad taste, but subsequently demonstrated to have been extremely misleading--dead bodies were not everywhere in New Orleans and in fact very few people died at all.

A year or so ago, I caught a similar episode of lying with pictures when a picture of Muskoxen grazing in the foothills of the Brooks range was captioned as the location for the proposed drill site. The actual drill site was more than fifty miles away on the coastal plain.

Again--inaccurate, but "true".

I have been unable to find a way to contact the Oprah show other than the web-site comment form, which is doubtful to be read in a timely fashion (if at all).

UPDATE: This Flickr archive was quite informative and shows how the search and rescue markings were employed and what they meant.

the bottom quadrant is for victims brought out. this one has a zero, which is a good sign: nobody found inside, dead or alive. due to its location and size, this lakeview area house was probably totally submerged for quite a while. zero is good.

the old way of doing things was to write something like "2 live, 1 dead" in the victims quadrant. on some of the pet search images i posted -- which didn't use this primary emergency X marking -- they used "doa" for pets they found dead.

but some of the X markings for preliminary searches were confusing. looking around flickr at recent images i found one that said "1A" in the bottom portion. one alive? i guess, unless one adult... or one ambulanced? i don't know. hopefully all the various teams and crews could interpret that. i know there was official concern about how to mark for recovered bodies in a more sensitive way than had been taught in search and rescue for years, because i found a homeland security document about being more sensitive to that. hope it doesn't cause confusion. i'm not sure being more obscure can really lessen the pain, but i sure understand the horror of seeing orange paint announce a death.

Lorie Byrd takes issue with the Oprah show's characterization of the gulf coast as a third world country.

I saw that show as well and found myself irritated at the blatant manipulation by good liberal-left journalists speaking "truth to power". Not that there is anything wrong with doing a Katrina story and the progress (or lack of it) at restore the gulf coast to its former "glory", but speaking truth to power always seems to really mean "fake, but accurate".

A few days ago, I wrote a post about this same show where the Oprah camera crew appears to have altered a search and rescue marking on a ruined house so that Lisa Ling could intone "somebody died in there". Shades of Killian!

Obvious Oprah doesn't have the journalistic stature of Dan Rather (lucky her...), but as a former journalist, she should know better, and as someone whose entire career is based on the trust she has with her audience, this is inexcusable.

I was going to write a post on the See-BS poll, but after reading John Hawkins explanation of the methodology of skewed polls, I figure I'll just like to his post

So, they undersampled the number of Republicans by more than 8.5% and over sampled Independents by more than 8%. Let's adjust for that (in a very general way). Add in 8 more Republicans and we'll say Bush's favorability goes up 8 points. Take out 8 Independents and we'll figure Bush loses 4 points of support (Independents were roughly split between Bush and Kerry in 2004) and now Bush's approval rating, after having 4 points added onto it, is at 45.5. Of course, it's not quite as simple as I've made it look here, nor is this as accurate as simply polling likely voters with a correct breakdown of party affiliation, but it's close enough for our purposes.

Then, we consider the polls margin of error, 3 points, and Bush's real approval rating among voters who'll actually be going to the polls in November is probably somewhere roughly between 42.5 - 48.5. That's not great, but it doesn't have exactly the same sort of zing that 34% has either, does it?.

What does Chris Matthews have in common with Bill O'Reilly besides a cable show?

The left thinks he's a Bush tool.

Notwithstanding Matthews's Democratic roots (former speechwriter to President Jimmy Carter, aide to several Democratic members of Congress), during a 2003 episode of Hardball, Matthews told Republican pollster Frank Luntz, "I'm more conservative than people think I am. ... By the way, I voted for [President George W.] Bush. ... I like to surprise people." Matthews's praise for Bush has at times been effusive; in 2005, he said that Bush "glimmers" with a "kind of sunny nobility"; that "[e]verybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs"; and that, if he succeeds in creating a democracy in Iraq, Bush "belongs on Mount Rushmore."

In December 2005, after documenting dozens of examples of Matthews proffering conservative misinformation on Hardball, Media Matters for America crowned him "Misinformer of the Year" -- succeeding Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly. And as this brief study documents, the views expressed on Hardball are "more conservative than people think": Republican/conservative guests have dominated Hardball panels since 2006 began.

It seems silly to pick on poor ol' unobstrusive Chris. In Chicago, you could fit all of his viewers in the local little league sandllot.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews, parodied endlessly on "Saturday Night Live"? Fewer than 10,000 viewers tune in for his "Hardball" (in any of the time slots his show has aired during the periods surveyed here), which means his biggest audience, by far, is in comic imitation. CNN's Larry King, a broadcasting icon, talks to celebrities? 33,000 viewers. . .

Matthews finished last year ranked 31 in the cable ratings with an average audience of 300,000, behind such ratings giants and Rita Cosby. On the bright side, he kicks Lester Holt's butt.

Now I don't really understand why a guy like Bill O'Reilly gets the big numbers--personally I can't abide the show, but Matthews' rating problems doesn't seem to be related to being too right-wing. It would be a shame if Media Matters thumbs-down on Matthews lost him whatever audience he still has.

The New York Times takes bloggers to task for accepting press releases from Walmart. Seems that such behavior is reserved only to the elite media.

Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. "All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills," he wrote.

It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.

Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell's Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart's public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers. "If you're interested," he continued, "I'd like to drop you the occasional update with some newsworthy info about the company and an occasional nugget that you won't hear about in the M.S.M." — or mainstream media.

A curious lack of attribution in the article--no link to the offending post, no identification of the blog itself until much later on. Pickrell runs Iowa Voice, which I'd never encountered before and therefore sustains the axiom that all publicity is good publicity.

Pickrell has a few things to say about this as well.

I think this story is starting to wind down, now that people are seeing it for what it is: a New York Times hit piece on bloggers and Wal-Mart.

But this morning, the Washington Post gets involved (full disclosure: found the link in my site stats!). He's close, but not quite, on the mark:

"I get a ton of email from a bunch of different sources. If I run a post specifically using information contained within an email, I will say so (you can see numerous instances of this being the case). Likewise, if I quote somebody or something, it's in a quote box. That's how blogs work (apparently, he didn't understand that). . . .

"Notice the part in question is in a . . . quote box. That means that I didn't write it. As for who sent it, I don't recall. . . . I knew that Michael Barbaro was going to write this piece of dung called a news article. I was reluctant to even talk to him, given the history of the NYTs and blogs/bloggers. I see I was correct in my reluctance. Never again, brother."

On the other hand, Pickrell, who attributed one item from a Wal-Mart flack to a "reader," was quoted by the Times as saying: "I probably cut and paste a little bit and I should not have."

This "selective quoting" of what I said doesn't help the matter at all. He perpetuates the "Brian's lying" meme when he puts the quotes around the word "reader"...that implies I'm lying, when I'm not. The email I received DID come from a reader/fellow blogger. I stressed that pretty hard to Barbaro.

And secondly, I never said "I probably cut and paste". I've explained what happened here. Nothing sinister, and not a good excuse, but it's what happened. I could have taken the dishonorable way out, as I noted, but felt it was far better to take my lumps for not checking a simple misplacement of a piece of code (the code that encloses text within the quote box).

The fact is, I was sent some links to some news sites. Big freakin' deal. I get emails from regular people and fellow bloggers, and *gasp!!!* they all contain links. This morning alone, I have received twelve email tips from fellow bloggers, sixteen tips from regular readers, three emails from the Washington Post, two from the New York Times, one from the Washington Times, several from NewsMax, and a couple from World Net Daily, plus a smattering of press releases/newsletters from various political campaigns, PACs, and other agenda-driven sites (both for and against things I believe in). Plus all the comment notifications, trackback notifications, and a slew of spam and personal emails that get sent to me via the blog. (note: while writing this, another email just came in from the WaPo).

I would guess than any blogger with 500 unique readers a day gets news releases and blind emails. I don't discourage it, but to date I haven't found anything particular compelling about these communications. Ya can't blame people for trying.

The irony here is that anyone with the slightest familiarity with PR knows that sending press releases to local and national publications is standard practice--that's why they are called PRESS releases. Didn't we just witness the entire Washington press corps haveing a conniption because they hadn't been spoon-fed the Dick Cheney shooting incident?

For the record, I believe you Brian. In the future though, when the New York Times calls-hang up.

..or something else you won't see on See-BS news.

The Jurist, a University of Pittsburgh law school publication is reporting the the Council of Europe has concluded an investigation into the "secret prisons" we're supposed to have in Europe and just couldn't find any.

Reuters carried the story as well--kinda sorta.

European states need tougher laws to guarantee oversight of their spy services and better controls over foreign agents operating on their territory, a European human rights watchdog said on Wednesday.

But the report by the Council of Europe produced no "smoking gun" evidence that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had run secret jails in Europe for al Qaeda suspects.

Yes, oddly enough, the absence of secret prisons is an afterthought in a story about European concerns with nasty foreign spies trapsing all over Europe.

The parallels with the missing WMD story are delicious, complete with the assertion by a Swiss legislator that the prisons are there, we just haven't found them yet.

To be honest, I actually agree with the Swiss guy--there probably are secret prisons, but what European country, council or investigative body is going to embarrass itself by actually finding them? By the same token, I also am sure that Saddam's WMDs are stashed some place as well, and for the same reason--both the secret prisons and the WMD are too valuable NOT TO HAVE.

I think its only fair though that the New York Times should be reduced to rubble as a consequence of their "lying" about the secret prisons and giving aid and comfort to America haters.

H/T Protein Wisdom

Micky Kaus catches the LA Times in yet another slimeball move The Times has apparently amended their original pro-illegal coverage to exclude any mention to the large number of Mexican flags being flown at the protest.

Amid a sea of American and Mexican flags, protesters chanted "Si Se Puede!" and waved banners in Spanish that read, "We aren't criminals" and "The USA is made by immigrants.":

That paragraph is now gone.:

Kaus would rather believe his own eyes.

From what I saw, this statement is false. There were about as many Mexican as American flags (as reported below). Here's what to me seems a representative LAT photo of the crowd--judge for yourself.** Maybe it depends what part of the demo you were at and at what time. But at the very least "more American flags" is a highly deceptive assertion.

How many illegal immigrants are there?

Its a fair question, especially since so much of the debate about what to do with the illegal immigrants that are here already. I've been hearing 12 million a lot lately, but how do they know? We are in fact talking about "undocumented" people--people off the grid, so where are we getting this number from?

A CNN article in 2003 touted an estimate of 7 million, up from 5.8 million in 1996. The estimates came from A Department of Homeland Security executive summary that used census data from 2000 to produce the number and the estimate that illegal migrants were coming across the borders at a rate of 350,000 a year.

For the 12 million number being bandied about, illegal immigration would have had to triple between 2000 and 2005, for a rate of one million illegals coming across the borders every year? I find that not just unlikely, but ridiculous.

What would account for this massive increase?

A Washington Post article from a year ago states that illegal immigration is increasing, but offers no support for the view except that Mexican illegals are being found in states where they previously had not been found in significant numbers.

Not only is the premise suspect, but the numbers that they do quote are just wrong.

Based on Census Bureau and other government data, the Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group in Washington, estimated the number of undocumented immigrants at 10.3 million as of last March, an increase of 23 percent from the 8.4 million estimate in 2000. More than 50 percent of that growth was attributable to Mexican nationals living illegally in the United States, the report said.

Perhaps this is just another example of Pew Research engaged in deliberate fraud, but the 8.4 million estimate is not supported by the INS or U.S. census bureau which is broken down as 5.5 million illegals came to this country during the entire decade of the 1990s, with an additional 1.5 million residual immigrants who came in the 1980s.

The implication of this is remarkable--the Pew Hispanic Center and others are suggesting that rate of illegal immigration doubled since the 90s in the midst of an era that featured enhanced post-9/11 viligance and an economy that has been recovering from a recession that started in 1999/2000, took a huge hit in 2001 and has only now reached the employment level peaks of the 90s.

I smell a rat.

Clearly it is in the interest of the pro-illegal lobby to inflate the number of illegals in this country, but we're fools if we buy it. If I were to guess, and why shouldn't I since everybody else seems to be, the rate of illegal immigration to this country could have at best remained steady and in all likelyhood declined. When the economy was booming in the late nineties and the Clinton administration had no intent of doing anything more than token patrol of the border, the rate of immigration was probably at its high water mark..

Even at a rate of 300K a year, the current number of resident illegals would be 8.5 million, not 10, 11 or 12 million. I actually suspect that the rate declined and that there are probably only about 8 million or so in the country. We may even have seen a net negative in-flow. Americans don't realize that most immigrants, particularly Mexicans, don't see their stay in the U.S. as permanent. Over the years I've spoken with many of them, both in Mexico and the U.S. and they see their stay in the U.S. as a way to get ahead, to put enough money away to build a hacienda or accumulate enough capital for a business venture in Mexico. Mexicans naturally prefer Mexico, which shouldn't be all that surprising. Those that do stay, often don't start out with that in mind--they get married, have children and find themselves with a life here, and little reason to go back. Paradoxically, the services we offer freely to illegals--education, medical, etc... make it attractive to stay, in spite of the call of their native culture.

Their is an incredible duality in our immigration policy--we make legal immigration hard, and illegal immigration easy. I have to disagree with the point that the problem with illegals is that they are illegal. Is something really illegal when its barely enforced and almost never punished? I can think of a dozen "illegal" things that people do routinely because if enforced at all, it is done so haphazardly that it is largely meaningly--how many of you routinely go 10-20 miles over the "speed limit"?

Frankly the disincentive to speed is actually greater than the disincentive to immigrate illicitly because at least you get a fine when you get caught speeding. If you get caught entering this country illegally, you go home, and if you are well past the border, then you get a hearing and are free on your own recognizance.

Contrast this with one of my neighbors who had to work for two years and spend many hundreds of dollars to bring her mother over from Canada.

Its a crazy system, and intentionally so. We've been sold out by the politicians yet again.

Sean Hannity and Mark Levin mix it up with Alec Baldwin on WABC Radio's Brian Whitman show.

It seems that Sean Hannity and Mark Levin are the only two guys in the country who take Alec Baldwin seriously. He's a hothead, he says foolish things--give the guy room to earn his clown bona fides.

As it stands, Levin, Hannity and Baldwin reminded me of the old Steve Miller Band favorite--"clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am--stuck in the middle with you."

I suppose the size of Hannity's audience means there is a substantial market for these kinds of antics, but whatever happened to charm and the razor wit? Baldwin could have been dispatched with a well-chosen phrase instead of this bout of mud wrestling.

Perhaps the remaining sole practioner of the art is Jon Stewart, who while he doesn't quip much, understands that less is more, that when something is absurd, comment dispassionately from the sidelines or risk getting mistaken for one of the clowns.

Apparently the Associated Press doesn't think the blogosphere counts for anything.

From The Raw Story:

We contacted an AP senior editor and ombudsmen both and both admitted to having had the article passed on to them, and both stated that they viewed us as a blog and because we were a blog, they did not need to credit us.

As we saw in 2004, the elite media has revved up its spin machine in a big way on behalf of its favorite political party.

They think they are being subtle, but when you're "subtle" every single day, you're not being so subtle.

The Washington Post story on the portable biological labs being "the biggest sand toilets in the world" is still getting play on the broadcast networks. Good Morning American ran with it yesterday, and again today.

The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team's reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.

The old "Bush-lied" meme.

Of course, people who understand intelligence know that you never rely on one source (and neither should you), and so way down at the bottom of the article (which incidentally is where they keep the truth as a general rule...), one finds this tidbit.

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

At little personal experience here--while I have no expertise in bioreactors (beyond and understanding of their basic function), I do have some experience with experts. Expertise is almost always defined, in simple terms, as an inch wide and a mile deep. One knows everything about one thing. The problem with this is that experts often lack imagination. They will be the first to tell you something can't be done just before you do it. This doesn't mean expertise isn't useful, just that it has limits. If you have expertise in one method of weaponize anthrax, would you necessarily recognize the value and limits of another method? I consider that there is a distinct possibility that one would require the expertise of the system designer to properly evaluate the system's potential or capabilities. Of course, I don't know that this is the case, just that it could be the case and would certainly explain why various groups of experts (three American, at least one British) draw different conclusions from examining the same system.

So the Post, and the rest of the anti-war media preferred that the Bush administration would have gone with the conclusions of the minority rather than the majority--now that would have been cherry-picking, but the right kind of cherry-picking for the over-paid elitists in Washington and New York City news bureaus.

Come to think of it, the media loves intelligence cherry-picking--they do it all the time. Media reporting on Iraq is just one big exercise in intelligence cherry-picking.

I kid you not.

You may have heard about the South Park controversy in which Comedy Central removed a portion of an episode satirizing the Prophet Mohammed, while letting through a portion of the program that featured Jesus Christ defecating on the American flag..

Setting aside the prurient characteristics of South Park in general, it is an equal opportunity satirical vehicle, mocking religions in general. So why is it OK to diss Jesus but not Mohammed (or the Scientologists)?

Michele Malkin has Comedy Central's explanation:

To reiterate, as satirists, we believe that it is our First Amendment right to poke fun at any and all people, groups, organizations and religions and we will continue to defend that right. Our goal is to make people laugh and perhaps, if we're lucky, even make them think in the process.

Comedy Central's belief in the First Amendment has not wavered, despite our decision not to air an image of Muhammad. Our decision was made not to mute the voices of Trey and Matt or because we value one religion over any other. This decision was based solely on concern for public safety in light of recent world events.

In other words, "We're chicken-shit."

I'm listening to a lot of complaints this weekend about media treatment of Christians, particularly with regards to the spate of programs and articles critical of Christian faith scheduled particularly for Holy Week. It seems to me that the media has shown Christians the way to stop this behavior--get violent.

Apparently, a civil request for fair treatment and a car bomb, will get you a lot farther than just a civil request for fair treatment.

I'm not suggesting Christains resort to violence, which rather defeats the point of being Christian, but along with the call to be as "gentle as doves" comes the collorary to be "wise as serpents".

A rather fluffy article in the LA Times discusses Katie Couric's "perkiness" which is another way of saying its a problem for a news anchor.

Oddly enough, the approach seems to be to scold those who reflexively attached the "perky" modifier to any mention of Couric, or to suggest ways in which she could be less perky.

Nobody seems to buy the proposition that Couric can make the transition from monring television to evening news anchor "as is".

I don't think the media's editing out of "perkiness" as a descriptor is going to work--millions of people watch her everyday--they know what it means in the Couric context, and even if you don't call her perky, people will be thinking, "gee, that woman is perky..."

On the other hand, a contrived "gravitas" isn't going to fly either. People are still making fun of Dan Rather's ostentatiousness. Undoubtedly one of the reasons See-BS Evening News ratings improved with Scheiffer is that his gravitas is so clearly authentic.

Perhaps Couric can find her "inner gravitas", but I doubt it. Gravitas isn't a dark business suit, a grave tone and solemn stare--its a way of looking at the world, and Couric just doesn't have that kind of intellectual wattage.

Do you think there's a 30 day cooling off period See-BS can use?

After reading David S. Broder's column today (Listen to the Brass) asking for a Congressional investigation of the accusations made by the whine offensive of a number of retired generals, I recalled something I had read about a week and a half ago at Riehl World View. There was this observation that David S. Broder of the Washington Post seems to be experiencing the early stages of senility.

Goleta, Calif.: Any word on how Scott McClellan's blood pressure (or general health) is hold up these days?

David S. Broder: To the best of my knowledge, the senator has not made public the results of any very recent medical exams. But I have seen him at work on Capitol Hill and he appears to be healthy and vigorous.

Shortly after that, I got a unsolicited phone call from the Washington Post, asking if I wanted to subscribe to the paper and I got to talking with the young man and I said, "I get the message." Don't dismiss Riehl's misgivings as just media antipathy. He has allies in the MSM who cannot speak out themselves."

I thought about the conversation as I contemplated the fact that elite media figures are getting an unprecedented amount of criticism these days. Not even before the internet was invented by Al Gore has there been any criticism of the elite media like there is now

The Post's managing editor has expressed confidence in Broder and the rest of his writers, after all, if you fired a columnist everytime a blogger caught a mistake, lie, distortion, partisan attack, baseless premise or exercised the fallacy of special knowledge, the bylines would look like a merry-go-round.

But the case the bloggers are making about the ethical lapses and incompetence of the elite media are serious and it hasn't gone unnoticed at the highest levels of government.

There have always been people who have opposed wars. Wars are terrible things. On the other hand, if every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War and we wouldn't have been involved in World War I or II, and if we had we would have failed, and our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel. I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees. They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it. They're much better at (laughing) managing those kinds of things than we are, and we have to recognize that we're not going to lose any battles out in the global war on terror out in Iraq or Afghanistan. The center of gravity of that war is right here, and in the capital of the United States of America and other Western capitals, in London, they're trying. It's a test of wills, and what's at stake for our country is our way of life.

Adding the litany of ethical violations to the charge of giving aid and comfort to the terrorists constitutes "a definitive rebuke" to the MSM. The elite media has covered the war on terror with "a casualness and swagger that is the special province of those who have never had to actually fight a war, or bury the results."

The elite media have consistently denied all charges of partisanship, ethical violations and journalistic irresponsibility, but they are being challenged by informed citizens, bloggers and people fighting and dying for this country. We are having to rely on private citizen journalists to embed with the American military in Iraq to see what is actually going on because the elite media simply insist on reporting the most important story of our time from hotel balconies in Baghdad.

Furthermore, they were able, because they were embedded, to see and then give the world and the people of the United States a slice of what was actually happening, real reality, and it was a good thing. More recently, very few people had been being embedded. We're still offering that opportunity, but there have been far fewer journalists who have stepped up to become embedded.

The situation cries out for serious congressional oversight and examination; hearings are needed as soon as Congress returns. These charges have to be answered convincingly -- or Broder and the rest of the media asses have to go.

Crazy Politicos

Penraker

Villainous Company

Its just amazing how someone can be in the public eye for decades and all you hear is how fabulous he or she is, then suddenly, as if a switch is flipped, the guy is a wacko.

Michael Jackson was always a wacko, but the media softpedalled his strangeness.

So what's the story with Tom Cruise? Is he a longstanding wacko with a hitherto effective publicist, or a guy getting reamed by the press?

Hard to say. I suspect most people enjoy a little private wackiness known only to family and friends, but social mores prevent us from displaying our eccentricities for all to see. Of course when your a famous actor, you can do pretty much anything you want, or at least you would be led to believe that was the case until the cocaine bust, the prostitution sting or a body is discovered in your swimming pool.

In any case, Cruise, whose girlfriend-slash-fiance is having his baby very shortly, has been allegedly quoted saying some pretty bizarre things and being a bit too evangelical about his Scientology. Nevertheless, this latest outburst is well within Michael Jackson land.

TOM Cruise yesterday revealed his latest bizarre mission..to eat his new baby's placenta.

Cruise vowed he would tuck in straight after girlfriend Katie Holmes gives birth, saying he thought it would be "very nutritious".

The Mission Impossible star, 43, said: "I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there."

I've butchered deer, cleaned countless fish, but this made me queasy.

It used to be that a Nobel Peace Prize meant something--until Yasir Arafat and JImmy Carter won one.

Andrew McCarthy makes this point very eloquently.

As expertly explained in an important essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in the March 2006 issue of Commentary, the publication of at least some of the stories the media have chosen to honor may be felony violations of the federal espionage act, which proscribes the revelation of certain national defense secrets, including signals intelligence (which is at the heart of the NSA-surveillance program disclosed by Risen and Lichtblau in December 2005). If you buy that we are at war (and 150,000 young Americans in harm's way would suggest to some that we are), if you buy that we are confronting an enemy hell-bent on murdering as many of us as possible (as nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the wreckage of Flight 93 would seem to attest), this kind of reporting is not praiseworthy; it is incomprehensible.

The logic behind this is that prestige of a prize like the Pulitzer launders the stink out of the indefensible, but the reality is that the stink remains and contaminates the prize as well.

McCarthy alludes to the Barry Bond's controversy, but I think of the Utah 2002 gold medal for ice dancing where a French skating judge colluded with a Russian judge to insure that the Russians beat out the Canadian team of Sale and Pelletier. Since the French judge's marks were dropped, Sale & Pelletier tied for gold with Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze.

The question is--how proud are the Russians of their golds knowing that they'll always have an asterisk hanging above them?

Liberals, in their zeal to preserve the power, are in fact destroying the institutions that otherwise might have served them well.

John Connolly writes in Vanity Fair an account of the Pellicano Wiretap scandal, the notoriety of which is ironic on so many levels.

Considering how irate liberals were (including Hollywood liberals) about the so-called "NSA wiretap scandal", the widespread, almost casual use of wiretaps by Hollywood lawyers and celebrities to get the dirt on their ex-wives (and ex-husbands), business partners and aggrieved personal assistants makes for a good belly-laugh.

This quote caught my eye:

In the national investigative community, in fact, there is a sense that Pellicano could have thrived only in L.A. His mock-mafioso act was tailor-made for Hollywood, which expects a private detective to act the way detectives do in the movies, where illegal activities such as tapping telephones and bribing cops are routine. Peers who know him, like Palladino, suspect Pellicano became so wrapped up in his fantasy he lost touch with reality. The irony, they say, is that the background checks he allegedly bribed policemen to run can often now be accessed in publicly available databases.

"You have to understand, a lot of what he did was unnecessary," says Palladino. "He was asking for information he could have gotten otherwise. Either he really didn't understand how much is now available or he was just too lazy. I mean, this is not how anyone else in this business does business. It's the way it is in the movies. And, unfortunately, he had this L.A. community—they're like politicians, they don't have much to do with regular people. They don't know much about the real world. They don't know much about bounda­ries or rules. They're rich and spoiled and out of touch. And this was a guy who reflected their reality, which was the reality in films."

Apparently, the account of flamboyant private detective taking money to get dirt on Michael Jackson's victims isn't sexy enough, so crime novel author cum journalist John Connolly figured he had to "sex-up" Anthony Pellicano, giving him a wannabe Goomba backstory.

Unfortunately, Pellicano's ex-wife wasn't having none of it and ratted him out.

"I did not give my permission ever to be quoted in the Vanity Fair article. In my opinion, John Connolly acted unethically when he reported the story. All the quotes and information supposedly attributed to me are erroneous. How dare he drag my children into this. Those events he describes involving my children never happened. I did agree to be photographed by Vanity Fair. But I never agreed to contribute to the article."

It seems that not only Hollywood prefers that reality resemble film more closely.