New York Times Praises....Sarah Palin??

Yes, even the writer couldn't believe he was writing this column:

So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas.

There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick — words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: “The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box.”

But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

Read the whole thing here. He obviously took her seriously, which is something most in the media have never done.

New York Times Gears Up for the Campaign to Re-Elect Obama

Jed Babbin takes it to the New York Times:

It's been a bad month for the New York Times. The feeding frenzy it tried to stir up over Sarah Palin's e-mails left the sharks unfed. And the "investigative" story that was supposed to prove Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be an unethical scoundrel fell flat because its theory was unsupported by the facts.

To top it all off, the Times is -- for the third time in as many years -- in an open feud with New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan for what the gentleman correctly labels anti-Catholic reporting.

But none of that will change the Times' behavior. The Times is preparing itself for a huge push to re-elect President Obama and will leave no story unpublished that could possibly help Obama or hurt his opponent, regardless of who it is.

How did the New York Times -- the paper of Abe Rosenthal, R.W. "Johnny" Apple and Bill Safire -- become the paper of Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd? What changed it from the liberal paper that had been most fair to Ronald Reagan to the home of angry liberalism?
What happened? Pinch happened.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. -- known as "Pinch," a diminutive of his father's nickname, "Punch" -- became the paper's publisher in 1992 and has steadily transformed what was a newspaper into an ideological tool of the left. The final stage of that transformation will be completed in September, when Jill Abramson becomes the paper's executive editor.

Read the rest of it here.

The only good thing that can be said about the Times these days is at least they don't try to hide the bias anymore. It's right out there for everybody to see. And with thousands of other news sources readily available online there's really no reason for the Times to be considered America's news source anymore.

Huffpo/AOL "News" Fires Away at An Indestructible Target

You can sure see the negative influence the Huffington Post/AOL merger has had on AOL News.  I had plenty of problems with AOL News before the merger, but now it's basically unreadable.

Take for instance this item:

A quaint historical museum in Pin Point, Georgia, that is set to open this fall has become the target of an exhaustive ethics examination by the New York Times. Why would the Times devote almost 3,000 words to a community heritage museum? Pin Point, as it turns out, is also the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and it was Thomas who introduced Pin Point residents to his friend Harlan Crow, a Dallas real-estate tycoon and major conservative donor, who would ultimately fund the museum. According to some legal analysts, Thomas's role in Crow's decision to donate may have troubling ethical implications.

What hogwash. Looks like both Huffpo/AOL and the NY Times have decided to pick up where Rep. Anthony Weiner left off. He was running a quixotic campaign against Thomas while tweeting his crotch to various women around the country.

Here's why this is such a waste of time: Clarence Thomas has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. No piddly ethics complaints can touch him. I don't care if the Times writes 1,000,000 words on the issue, it's not going to change anything. The goal of this effort is to somehow intimidate a guy who basically doesn't have anything to fear, and to cloud any decisions that come from a majority on the court that includes Thomas that liberals dislike. Think Obamacare - that's what this is all about.

If the Times and Huffpo/AOL can't stop Thomas from sitting on that case they at least hope to claim the result is tainted by mysterious outside evil forces.  It's a completely wasted effort.

Did the Times or Huffpo/AOL ever devote 3,000 words...or even 10 words... to any of Obama's ethical challenges?

The New York Times(tanic) Gets a New Skipper

Well, somebody's got to go down with the ship.  Might as well be the first female executive editor.  Powerline has an interesting quote:

Yesterday Drudge linked to the New York Times story announcing the appointment of Jill Abramson to succeed Bill Keller as the top dog at the Times. I read the story and was amused by Abramson's expression of delight: "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth."

That is an incredibly rich quote. The Times serves as the perfect stand-in for liberalism, not just supposed journalistic excellence. It is a substitute religion that comes in several forms. (Over at NRO, Jay Nordlingercommented briefly on the quote.)

A funny thing happened on the way to shul, as we say in Yiddish. The Times has scrubbed the quote from the story.

All the news that's fit to print, huh?

Today's Chris Christie Lesson in Government

The New York Times has a surprisingly flattering profile of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.  Surprising only that it comes from the Times:

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Read the whole thing. I still don't want him to run for president in 2012, but by 2016 he'll be looking pretty strong if he keeps a good record in New Jersey.

We Work to Support the Government

You may have thought you go to work everyday to support your family, but that's not true. To liberals your daily work is done to support government entitlements. Just ask Thomas Friedman of the NY Times (from The Foundry):

After the first few lines of liberal columnist Thomas Friedman’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times, you would have thought he had finally seen the light:

“If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding road construction will do it.”

Yes, exactly. Maybe he’s finally seen the disastrous stimulus bill (that he supported) for what it is—a failure.

“We need to create a big bushel of new companies.”

Preach it, brother.

“We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity—”

Yes! Exactly!

“—and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make.”

Say what? And he was doing so well.

This sort of commentary exemplifies a pervasive liberal attitude towards the economy. Even when they are worried about it, their main concern is their ability to continue to fund increasingly large and unstable dependency programs. As in so many other areas, liberals see “job creation” as a means to an end. And that end is the expansion of the welfare state and the rising dependence of the average American on government. A recent Heritage report revealed that roughly 60.8 million Americans rely on the government for their daily housing, food, and health care while a growing share of Americans—more than 34 percent of all tax filers—pay no income tax.

This is simply unsustainable.

What we need as a country is entitlement reform, a reduced dependency economy and—fundamentally—a shift in the conception of the government’s role as a benefactor for moral as well as economic reasons. As President Reagan once said, “Welfare’s purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence.” We need to restore a government that encourages growth while empowering people to be self-sufficient.

Americans will work for their families. The day they start to believe they're working to support government entitlements is the day they stop working.

Democrats Have Sunk to Faking Hate Crimes

From Mark Steyn at The Corner:

Jonah mentioned this the other day in his column, but the tireless Andrew Breitbart returns to the theme, to devastating effect.

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn't, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. Representative Andre Carson (Democrat, Indiana) insisted he heard the N-word 15 times. He's either suffering from the same condition as that Guam-flipper from Georgia, or he's a liar. At a scene packed not only with crews from the Dem poodle media but with a gazillion cellphone cameras, not one single N-word has been caught on audio. (By contrast, see my post yesterday for how easy it is to get it on tape when real epithets are flying.)

I disagree with John Lewis (Democrat, Georgia) politically but I have always respected him as a genuine civil rights warrior. And I feel slightly queasy at the thought that he would dishonor both the movement and his own part in it for the cheapest of partisan points - in the same way I would be disgusted by a Holocaust survivor painting a swastika on his own door and blaming it on his next-door neighbor over a boundary dispute.

But that's what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they're not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn't that what societies with functioning media used to call "a story"?

Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it - and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.

Meanwhile, the New York Times takes to comparing freedom-loving Tea Party protesters to the Weatherman, a terrorist group. The NY Times had just better hope the Tea Party crowd doesn't go Weatherman on them.

David Brooks: Is "Deem and Pass" What the Revolutionary War Was Fought For?

David Brooks from the NY Times seems particularly upset about the Demon Pass:

But I persist in the belief that government is more fundamentally messed up than ever in my lifetime. Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass” — a tricky legislative device in which things get passed without members having the honor or the guts to stand up and vote for it.

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

Yes, I know Republicans have used the deem and pass technique. It was terrible then. But those were smallish items. This is the largest piece of legislation in a generation and Pelosi wants to pass it without a vote. It’s unbelievable that people even talk about this with a straight face. Do they really think the American people are going to stand for this? Do they think it will really fool anybody if a Democratic House member goes back to his district and says, “I didn’t vote for the bill. I just voted for the amendments.” Do they think all of America is insane?

There's part of me that hopes the pull the Demon Pass just because I'd love to see the public outrage that will follow. However, should they do that and Obama sign the bill, we're stuck with Obamacare because I don't think the courts will take the issue despite its unconstitutionality. Courts have been reluctant to involve themselves in "process" arguments.

Former NY Times Editor Has Breakdown Over Fox News

Boy, Roger Ailes and Fox News really has gotten into the heads of the lefties. Today in the Washington Post former NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines suffers a breakdown:

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

Let's pause here just for a moment. "Without precedent in our modern political history?" How about the relentless efforts of the NY Times, under Raines leadership, to destroy the Bush Administration through political attacks and the leak of secret information and plans? And let's not forget ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and most every other major newspaper in the country that joined in.

Getting back to the rant:

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: "The American people do not want health-care reform."

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue.

The American people and most of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change. Yet congressional Republicans have managed effective campaigns against health-care changes favored variously by Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. Now Fox News has given the party of Lincoln a free ride with its repetition of the unexamined claim that today's Republican leadership really does want to overhaul health care -- if only the effort could conform to Mitch McConnell's ideas on portability and tort reform.

Portability and tort reform are just about the only things that would actually reduce health care costs without destroying our health delivery system. Mitch McConnell has it right - Raines and the Democrats have it very, very wrong. Republicans are absolutely right to stand up against a government takeover of health care that will only increase costs and debt and reduce the quality of care.

Howell Raines was an idiot at the NY Times, and it's clear that time away from that lefty newsroom hasn't fixed that.

The Ice is Melting! The Ice is Melting!

Tim Blair provides us with 128 years of New York Times' stories that all have a common theme:

From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”

Now we have an honest-to-goodness climate disaster - at least a disaster for those pushing global warming - in the form of ClimateGate and the Times is nowhere to be found.

And just for fun there's this column today from a liberal columnist (not in the Times) who assures us that ClimateGate can't show that global warming is a fraud because the ice caps are still melting (which they aren't). It never ends.

Sending the Moderates to the Tall Grass

Even the NY Times, the official house organ of the Democrat party, has to admit that last night's results will make life more difficult for Obama:

The results in the New Jersey and Virginia races underscored the difficulties Mr. Obama is having transforming his historic victory a year ago into either a sustained electoral advantage for Democrats or a commanding ideological position over conservatives in legislative battles.

The coalition that swept him into the White House was absent on Tuesday night, with evidence that the young, African-American and first-time voters who supported Mr. Obama failed to turn out to help the Democrats Mr. Obama had campaigned for: Gov. Jon S. Corzine in New Jersey and R. Creigh Deeds in Virginia. (There are no exit polls in the upstate Congressional race to provide demographic information on the electoral outcome.)

Independent voters who had flocked to Mr. Obama in Virginia and New Jersey last year shifted on Tuesday to the Republican candidates in both states, Christopher J. Christie in New Jersey and Robert F. McDonnell in Virginia, according to exit polls in both states. That is a swing that will certainly be noted by moderate Congressional Democrats facing re-election next year, who may now be more reluctant to support Mr. Obama on tough votes in Congress.

Yep. When that Obamacare or cap-and-tax vote comes up, it's going to be harder to strong arm the Blue Dogs and moderates into supporting whatever Pelosi wants. Even newly elected NY-23 Congressman Bill Owens will have to step carefully, or his district that has been Republican since the Civil War will be Republican again in 2011.

Things just got a lot tougher for the liberal agenda.

Dick Morris thinks last night was the death blow for Obamacare. I'm not so sure, but I'd love for it to be true.

And Michael Barone, who knows the precinct-by-precinct election business better than anybody has his take here.

NY Times: Fox News Wins War With White House

Even the NY Times thinks the fight the White House has picked with Fox News is silly, and according to this piece, the White House has lost. Here's an exerpt:

Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president

It could all be written off as a sideshow, but it may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling. In his victory speech he promised, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”

Or not. Under the direction of Ms. Dunn, the administration has begun to punch back. On Sept. 20, the president visited all the Sunday talk shows save Fox News’, with Ms. Dunn explaining that Fox was not a legitimate news organization, but a “wing of the Republican Party.”

The one weapon all administrations can wield is access, and the White House, making it clear that it will use that leverage going forward, informed Fox News not to expect to bump knees with the president until 2010. But Fox News, as many have pointed out, is not in the access business. They are in the agitation business. And the administration, by deploying official resources against a troublesome media organization, seems to have brought a knife to a gunfight.

You can read the rest at the link. Bottom line, the White House decided to play bully, picking a fight with someone with far less power than they. However, like a big brute who challenges someone small and fast, the little guy is pecking away at the brute and winning.

No Medal for You!

The lead paragraph in the New York Times' story about Obama's failure with the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen yesterday:

President Obama not only failed to bring home the gold, he could not even muster the silver or bronze.

Ouch.

And to those like me who think Obama's strings are pulled by the political machine in Chicago, look at this from the same article:

In Chicago, the disappointment was deep but not aimed at the president. A city preparing for a victory rally — even the famed Picasso in Daley Plaza was decorated with an enormous Olympic medal — reacted with silence and disappointment.

Barry Bowlus, one of those waiting in Daley Plaza, said that at least Mr. Obama had tried. Had he not gone at all, Mr. Bowlus said, “there would have been a lot more heck for him to pay around here.”

I'll bet that's true. Mayor Daley said "GO!" and he went. Unfortunately for all of them the IOC was not impressed with Barry and Michelle's argument that the Olympics should be given to Chicago because that's where they're from. The pitch was arrogant and probably cost them votes they might have otherwise gotten. In the end Chicago only got 18 of 94 votes.

Sweeping into town at the last minute and letting your star power shine might help win primary elections, but it doesn't work on everybody.

The NY Times Discovers Fox News

It took them awhile but now maybe they'll learn something (from Don Surber):

The New York Times ignored the ACORN story for more than a year now, going back to at least July 2008 when it decided not to pursue this tip: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what — and for the charities like the housing orgs, that’s a problem. Charitable money cannot be spent on political activites. It’s a big no-no that can cost charitable organizations their exemptions.”

So what is its excuse now?

No one watches Fox News or listens to talk radio. I mean only 47% of the country failed to vote for Barack Obama, right?

But Clark Hoyt, the newspaper’s public editor said that will change.

“Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was ’slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.’ She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person ‘a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere’.

“Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias,” Hoyt wrote.

I think this is the first time I've ever had the "Fox News" and "New York Times" labels on the same post.

While Abramson may claim there was no liberal bias involved, it's clear they didn't consider anything going on with ACORN to be a story worth covering. After all, doesn't ACORN "help" people?

They're also big supporters of every lefty issue the Times supports, and friends of my friends are also my friends. You can call it "bias", or just "blindness".

Political Headline of the Day

From Ace:

Holy Crap: NYT Scrubs ACORN Statement to Omit Claim That Sting Failed in NYC, Thus Preserving the Statement's Possible Truthiness

Isn't it nice the helpful editors at the New York Times made sure ACORN looked slightly less silly?

A Woman Scorned and a Freudian Slip

The woman scorned is NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who now has her own place under Obama's bus:

The White House on Sunday dismissed a claim by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that administration critics like Rep. Joe Wilson, who called President Obama a liar during his health care address to Congress, are motivated by race.

Wilson, speaking on "FOX News Sunday," also denied the allegation.

"No, no," the South Carolina Republican said when asked if Obama's skin color was an issue for him. "Hey, I respect the president. ... I have a great respect for the Obama family."

Dowd wrote in her column that Wilson's outburst Wednesday -- when he shouted, You lie," at the president for claiming his health care reform plan would not cover illegal immigrants -- convinced her that racial angst is the underlying motive among Obama critics like Wilson.

"I've been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer ... had much to do with race," she wrote. "But Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president -- no Democrat ever shouted 'liar' at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq -- convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it."

Dowd wrote that Wilson "clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber."

Asked about the claim, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said race is not the factor.

"I don't think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "I think people are upset because on Monday we celebrate the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse that caused a financial catastrophe unlike anything we've ever seen."

I highlighted the Freudian slip in that last paragraph. Are we going to "celebrate" the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Maybe Obama will celebrate since the financial collapse helped him get elected, but the rest of America won't be celebrating the destruction of their 401k plans and other investment instruments.

That was an astonishingly poor choice of words.

Favorite Van Jones Headlines of the Day

There are some creative headline writers out there:

Van Goes - Mark Halperin

Bus Overtakes Van As Jones Loses WH Parking Spot - Dan Riehl

Of course, I liked mine too:

Van Jones Decides to Spend More Time With His Family

And then there's this shocker for New York Times readers:

White House Adviser on ‘Green Jobs’ Resigns

It's a shocker because this is the Times first mention of this story despite several days of controversy. Anyone who relies solely on the Times for their news will be mystified by this story since they're getting only a whitewashed version of the story days after it began.

And That's Not Quite the Way It Is

How many things can the NY Times get wrong about Walter Cronkite? Weekly Standard notices this in their corrections column:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite's career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite's coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. "The CBS Evening News" overtook "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents' reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of "The CBS Evening News" in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International [New York Times, July 22, 2009].

Other than that, it was perfect.

Treason Against the Planet

How's this for hyperbole from Paul Krugman in the NY Times:

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases. And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Yes, it's treason! Because if we don't do something NOW...well, nothing bad will happen since global warming ended in 1998 and isn't caused by man anyway.

Never mind.

The Goode Family

You might want to check out this new ABC animated show tonight - The Goode Family. Mike Judge, creator of Beavis & Butthead and King of the Hill takes on a lot of environmental sacred cows. Here's a preview:

It's on at 9 Eastern and Pacific, 8 Central, on ABC.

By the way, the New York Times hates it which means it must be pretty good.