The Media In Action

If you really want to see how ugly the media has gotten in it's relentless search to find something bad to report, this post from Bill Roggio should about cover it for you.

Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan: Earlier this week, Glenn Reynolds reproduced an informal email from Afghanistan, which included an anecdote about the Canadian media maintaining the "Death Watch" (their own words) at Kandahar Airfield. The reporters are restricted to maintaining a presence at the airbase to report on potential deaths or wounding of Canadian soldiers. The soldiers resent the media for this, and the reporters do not like manning the DeathWatch as well. They are at the mercy of the news bureaus, who crave the sensational stories.

Tonight I had the displeasure of witnessing the Death Watch in action. An Al Jazeera report, based on an unsubstantiated claim from an unnamed Taliban source, indicated a Canadian soldier was kidnapped in Afghanistan. Reuters repeated the unsubstantiated claim, which later morphed into an unspecified number of Coalition troops. Canada's Globe and Mail, in a rush to press, misidentified the lead Canadian Public Affairs Officer, Major Scott Lundy, as the "spokesman for NATO Special Forces" (the webmaster later corrected this and removed the reference to Major Lundy altogether.)

The Canadian media rushes into action, trying to get to the bottom of the story which very likely is a Taliban information operation. Cell phones are buzzing, reporters are pressing the public affairs officers for quotes. The Death Watch is in full news-gathering mode. Media outlets in Canadian are requesting live interviews and quick columns from their reporters at the airfield. The Canadian forces are in turn conducting a headcount but discount the reports, as this has happened in the past. If this is a false report, as it likely is, the propaganda machine of al-Qaeda and the Taliban has succeeded yet again in manipulating the Western media into doing their bidding. The DeathWatch continues as I submit this post, and Al Jazeera is downplaying the reports of the kidnapping. (Links removed - go to Roggio's blog to read the entire thing)

The post goes on to detail real news as opposed to the disinformation the media is primed and ready to soak up with no concern for truth. Go read it for yourself. You sure won't read it from any of the "Death Watch" reporters.

101st Blog Of The Day

Continuing my mission to visit one member of the Fighting 101st each day, today I wandered over to the 7 deadly Sins. I found much love for the French. Don't miss what the French really think of America. There's also a post that my semi-regular commenter Sven would love. As well as monkey chow!

This mission is looking more and more hopeless - that blogroll just keeps growing!

Must. Read. Lileks.

This is fabulous.

You're an enlightened world citizen. Your T-shirt says "9/11 was an inside job." You're pretty sure we're living in a fascist state, that President Bush taps the Dixie Chicks' phones, Christian abortion clinic bombers outnumber jihadis, and the war on "terror" is a distraction from the real threats: carbon emissions and Pat Robertson. Then you learn that 17 people were arrested in a terrorist bomb plot. How do you process the information? Let's take it step by step.

Gosh, that's horrible, you think. But no — that's what they WANT you to feel. Recall the prime directive: Question Authority (unless he's a college professor). The plotters must have been impoverished olive farmers radicalized by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why, if someone came in and toppled your president, you'd go to their country and … well, you'd thank them. Unless they did it for the wrong reasons! Then you'd blow something up. Like an SUV dealership. At night. Anyway, you understand; you care a lot about Iraqis these days. You think about Iraq more than China, to be honest, but it's not as if you'll scrape off your "Free Tibet" bumper sticker — unless it's to make room for "Free Darfur." Or "Hands Off Darfur," depending.

Believe it or not it gets better from there.

Sure He Did

Pat Robertson insists he did so lift a ton in a leg-press. Honest. Really.

"I did it one time, one rep, but I had built up to it for about three years," Robertson insisted on Wednesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, the first time he has spoken with a reporter since the leg-press brouhaha.

Robertson said his doctor encouraged him to leg-press weights to strengthen his bad knees.

But he said he did the 2,000-pound lift on an incline leg press with the machine's brake on, which means he did not have to lift the weight the whole way.

"When the professionals do it, they take the brake off and let the weight come all the way down on them. And if you don't have a lot of help, you've got a Volkswagen sitting on your hips. I didn't do that," he said.

Which just gives us a chance to dust this old thing off again.

See What Damage A Sweet Tooth Causes?

No, not to your teeth. Well, those too. Thieves in Crystal, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, broke into a Little League concession stand and stole a backpack full of candy valued at about $30. The fled when they heard a car. Unfortunately, they left behind a cell phone. Then the thief who dropped it called the phone.

And he identified himself to police.

According to court documents, sometime after the theft on Saturday night, the phone's owner called the phone and identified himself. Officers arranged to meet him and return the phone, and a witness identified the man as one of the burglars.

….

Under questioning, Current allegedly told investigators he waited outside while Scudder entered the building. The complaint alleged the two filled a backpack with candy and ran when a car drove by.

When officers went to Scudder's door, he chewing on some Skittles. Confiscated from the house were 20 bags of candy and another 20 packages were found in a backpack, the complaint said.

Damage to the concession stand was estimated at $500 to $1,000.

So that sweet tooth is going to cost the two geniuses a criminal record and they'll have to pay for the damage, as well. No word on whether genius number one got his phone back, either.

Please Inform Any Military Personnel

Please let anyone you know in the military that the theft of the Veterans Administration data we reported on earlier is even worse than first reported. The data includes personnel data for active duty personnel, reservists and members of the National Guard.

Social Security numbers and other personal information for as many as 2.2 million U.S. military personnel — including nearly 80 percent of the active-duty force — were among the data stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs analyst last month, federal officials said yesterday, raising concerns about national security as well as identity theft.

The department announced that personal data for as many as 1.1 million active-duty military personnel, 430,000 National Guard members and 645,000 reserve members may have been included on an electronic file stolen May 3 from a department employee's house in Aspen Hill. The data include names, birth dates and Social Security numbers, VA spokesman Matt Burns said.

Defense officials said the loss is unprecedented and raises concerns about the safety of U.S. military forces. But they cautioned that law enforcement agencies investigating the incident have not found evidence that the stolen information has been used to commit identity theft.

"Anytime there is a theft of personal information, it is concerning and requires us and our members to be vigilant," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. He said the loss is "the largest that I am aware of."

Army spokesman Paul Boyce said: "Obviously there are issues associated with identity theft and force protection."

For example, security experts said, the information could be used to find out where military personnel live. "This essentially can create a Zip code for where each of the service members and [their] families live, and if it fell into the wrong hands could potentially put them at jeopardy of being targeted," said David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Another worry is that the information could reach foreign governments and their intelligence services or other hostile forces, allowing them to target service members and their families, the experts said.

Something has got to be done about this at once. It's time for a national law making identity theft a very, very severe crime with very, very severe punishments for engaging in it. The head of the VA should resign as well. The White House needs to issue a policy right now clamping down on the handling of sensitive data within the government. There simply is no excuse for this.

UPDATE: Lawmakers are calling for more funds and the ouster of the head of the VA. You heard it here first.

Dishonor

Sorry, I have no sympathy whatsoever for this person.

In a rare case of officer dissent, a Fort Lewis Army lieutenant has refused orders to head out to Iraq this month to lead troops in what he believes is an illegal war of occupation.

1st Lt. Ehren Watada was scheduled to make his first deployment to Iraq this month. His refusal to accompany the Stryker brigade troops puts him at risk of court martial and years of prison time.

"I feel that we have been lied to and betrayed by this administration," Watada said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Fort Lewis. "It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war."

In making his decision, Watada has reached out to peace groups, including clergy, students, some veterans opposed to Iraq and others. Some war critics are raising money for his legal defense as they seek to galvanize broader opposition to Bush administration policy in Iraq.

"There has been an outpouring of support in the Puget Sound area," said David Solnit, who works with the anti-war group Courage to Resist. The group and others are helping organize a press conference today in Tacoma to launch the support campaign.

Watada met over the weekend with Olympia peace activists, and had hoped to attend the press conference. But after a Tuesday meeting with an Army colonel, he was given written orders not to attend during duty hours between 6:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Instead, he expects to offer a video statement.

The anti-war people are rallying around him and do not see the long-term repercussions of this. This is a refusal to obey a lawful order. It is not the place of a junior officer to second guess the elected Commander and Chief and the duly elected members of Congress who voted to go to war. It is not the place of a junior officer to contact peace activists in hopes of getting out of the consequences of his actions. This is not heroic, this is cowardly.

Do you want a military that decides not to obey lawful orders? I'd rather not have one, thank you.

Mr. Watada fears the Army will want to make an example out of him. I rather suspect Mr. Watada is correct. The Army should, must and will punish him for this. But his troops are ever so much better off without him.

UPDATE: Others: Confederate Yankee, Wizbang, Stop the ACLU and Riehl World View, Euphoric Reality, MFVOV , Small Town Veteran, bRright and Early, The Sandbox,

Smoking Some Strong Stuff

Is Mister Mark Malloch Brown, deputy to Kofi Annan. You see, in Mr. Brown's world the real, honest truth about the UN is being stifled, absolutely RE-pressed by those evil overlords of American information Rush Limbaugh and Fox news. No, really, he said so in a speech.

"The prevailing practice of seeking to use the U.N. almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable," said the deputy, Mark Malloch Brown. "You will lose the U.N. one way or another."

In a highly unusual instance of a United Nations official singling out an individual country for criticism, Mr. Malloch Brown said that although the United States was constructively engaged with the United Nations in many areas, the American public was shielded from knowledge of that by Washington's tolerance of what he called "too much unchecked U.N.-bashing and stereotyping."

"Much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News," he said.

Well, that certainly explains a lot, doesn't it? So do these remarks:

The speech reflected frustration in Mr. Annan's office with a looming crisis over the United Nations budget, which, under a six-month gap agreed to under pressure from Washington in December, will pay the bills only until the end of June.

The deal was struck to link budget approval with achievement of significant management reforms, and Mr. Bolton made frequent mention of Congressional impatience with the United Nations and legislation that would authorize Washington to start withholding its dues. The United States is the largest contributor to the United Nations, paying 22 percent of its budget.

"In recent years the enormously divisive issue of Iraq and the big stick of financial withholding have come to define an unhappy marriage," Mr. Malloch Brown said.

He noted that the United Nations was fielding 18 peacekeeping operations abroad at lower cost and higher effectiveness than "comparable U.S. operations." Yet, he said, that fact has been ignored or underplayed by policy makers and opinion shapers in Washington.

Ah yes, the UN, keeping costs down by running sex-slave rings. Gotta love these guys. Oh heck, Mr. Brown. That link is to that other monolithic news organ that never tells the ignorant American peepul anything true, either. The Washington Post, don't you know.

Incidentally, I never listen to Limbaugh and haven't watched Fox News much in the past several years.

UPDATE: Others: Flopping Aces, NRO Media Blog

UPDATE: John Bolton is NOT happy with the deputy to Mr. Annan:

"I spoke to the secretary-general this morning, I said 'I've known you since 1989 and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time,"' Bolton told reporters on Wednesday.

"To have the deputy secretary-general criticize the United States in such a manner can only do grave harm to the United Nations," Bolton said.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has quite a lot more of the speech. It's even worse than the press reports.

Well, They Certainly Are Enthusiastic

Some scientists are all kinds of excited about a new find. it seems that I. plenipes has again been spotted in a remote area of California. First spotted in 1926, the species has eluded capture ever since, apparently. The scientists are pushing to have the land where they were found protected.

"This is a milestone find," said Richard Hoffman, a millipede expert at the Virginia Museum of Natural History who had no connection with the discovery.

….

It remained elusive until a 28-year-old scientist from East Carolina University, Paul Marek, and his brother chanced upon it last fall.

"I practically fell over when I found it. It was extremely exhilarating," said Marek, who published the discovery in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

….

"By rediscovering it, we add more pieces of the puzzle to understanding it," (said Darrell Ubick, an entomologist with the San Francisco-based California Academy of Sciences)

Are these folks all het up or what?

We haven't got the heart to tell them what we would do if we discovered an example of I. plenipes anywhere near us. Because they'd likely cry. We'd step on it quickly.

We don't get all excited by millipedes. More like instant revulsion.

Scientists can be so odd.

Is This A New Rule?

Not being a baseball fan at all, since I subscribe to the notion that baseball is 15 minutes of action crammed into a three hour game, I have no idea if this is actually in the rule book or not. During a baseball game, a seagull swooped between the pitcher and the batter with some really, really bad timing.

The ball hit the bird. The batter swung at the ball and missed. The ball got away from the catcher. Since it was a third strike, the batter ran to first but was thrown out by the catcher to end the inning.

The bird flew away, later, by the way. Here's the part that I don't know the answer to:

The umps ruled that play should have stopped the moment the ball hit the bird. Durham was sent back on to the field, and the Buffalo batter returned to the plate to finish his at-bat.

So, is this a seagull rule single? A seagull mulligan? What do you call this?

An Astonishingly Stupid Bill

I already posted my opinion of the idiotic effort to form a "native Hawaiian" government by passage of a wrong-headed bill now pending in the Senate. There's a paper out by the Heritage Foundation that really lays out the problems with this idea in detail.

The U.S. Senate is scheduled to begin debate as early as June 7, 2006, on the misleadingly named “Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005” (S.147).[1] The proponents of this bill, some motivated by seemingly benign purposes and others by a desire to benefit from special preferences, argue that it redresses ancient wrongs done to early Hawaiians by various powers, including the United States. The bill purports to authorize the creation of an exclusively race-based government of “native” Hawaiians to exercise sovereignty over native Hawaiians living anywhere in the United States. This “Native Hawaiian Government” could allegedly exempt these Hawaiians from whatever aspects of the United States Constitution and state authority it thought undesirable. Not only is this a terrible idea; it is also unconstitutional.

The United States Supreme Court ruled decisively that this approach violates the Constitution in Rice v. Cayetano (2000). Yet the proponents of S.147 believe they can bypass this ruling simply by enacting a law that calls the descendants of so-called “aboriginal” Hawaiians an American Indian tribe. The bill would require the federal government to create a database of persons with one drop or more of “aboriginal” Hawaiian blood, organize elections for an “interim government” of this alleged “tribe,” and finally recognize the sovereignty and privileges and immunities (or lack thereof) that the new government establishes for its “tribal members.” Although Hawaii correctly argued in the Rice litigation that descendants of aboriginal Hawaiians are not an American Indian tribe, state officials have changed their minds—because that is the only way they can practice racial discrimination on behalf of a favored interest group. Hopefully, the United States Constitution is not so easily circumvented.

It goes on from there detailing even more reasons that this appalling piece of legislation should be killed.

UPDATE: If you need any proof that this is a stupid and wrong-headed idea, look no further than the New York Times. They have endorsed it.

Actually, This Says A Lot

There's an interesting piece in the Baltimore Examiner today that reveals a lot of what is going wrong with media coverage. President Bush is actually racking up quite a few victories, but coverage of them is lacking.

SAN FRANCISCO - When President Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to run the CIA, the press focused on disapproving Democrats and even some Republicans who were dubious about confirmation.

A month later, when the Senate confirmed Hayden by a 78-15 vote, the story was given much less emphasis in the media, which had moved on to other stories critical of the Bush administration.

Similarly, when Bush nominated one of his aides, Brett Kavanaugh, to the federal judiciary, the press was filled with reports about Democrats threatening a filibuster because Kavanaugh once worked for special prosecutor Kenneth Starr in the case against President Clinton.

Last week, there was much less media coverage of a Rose Garden ceremony in which Bush presided over the swearing-in of Kavanaugh, who had been confirmed by a 57-36 vote.

Bush has quietly been racking up small victories like these that seem at odds with the media’s conventional wisdom of a presidency on the skids.

This is quite true. There was massive coverage before Hayden was confirmed, only a little when he was confirmed. (I didn't blog about Kavanaugh). There is something very revealing here as to why this is:

“In today’s political climate, daily headlines and fast-moving events make it easy to lose the forest for the trees,” Bush counselor Dan Bartlett wrote in a memo this week. “But there is a clear tide of positive developments that reflect the president’s ability to get things done.”

Bartlett’s memo was dismissed as “happy talk” by Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News. And White House correspondent Ken Herman of Cox Newspapers noted that Bartlett “found reason for optimism in Iraq … on a day when gunmen rounded up 56 people at a Baghdad bus stop.”

This is probably a lot more revealing than Halperin realizes. There is such a strong bias against Bush that Halperin cannot see it. Even when presented with facts, Halperin cannot admit there is any truth to them. The media control of the narrative remains what it is.

Only bloggers don't allow complete control by the media establishment anymore. The control of the narrative is slipping through your fingers, Mr. Halperin.

Constitutional Amendment Fails

The attempt to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage has failed in the Senate. Supporters say the effort is not dead even though they actually lost a vote in the totals from the last time they tried to get it passed.

Supporters had predicted they would gain votes this year over the last time the issue came up, in 2004, but actually lost one vote for the amendment in a procedural test tally.

Wednesday's 49-48 vote fell 11 short of the 60 required to send the matter for an up-or-down tally. The 2004 vote was 50-48.

A majority of Americans define marriage as a union of a man and a woman, as the proposed amendment does, according to a poll out this week by ABC News. But an equal majority opposes amending the Constitution on this issue, the poll found.

I'm on the record as saying I thought this was a losing move one way or the other. One thing that is really troubling is the public statement Ted Kennedy made about this:

"The Republican leadership is asking us to spend time writing bigotry into the Constitution," said Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2003. "A vote for it is a vote against civil unions, against domestic partnership, against all other efforts for states to treat gays and lesbians fairly under the law."

In response, Hatch fumed: "Does he really want to suggest that over half of the United States Senate is a crew of bigots?"

Forty-five of the 50 states have acted to define traditional marriage in ways that would ban same-sex marriage — 19 with constitutional amendments and 26 with statutes.

That is really over the top. Obviously, most states are against this, is every one of them bigoted, too?

And Away We Go

There is an unsigned editorial in today's New York Times that accuses Ohio Republicans and Kenneth Blackwell in particular of trying to block voter registrations. They also take a swipe at Florida. There is one real jaw dropper in this piece, though.

Mr. Blackwell's rules are interpretations of a law the Republican-controlled Ohio Legislature passed recently. Another of the nation's most famous swing states, Florida, has been the scene of similar consternation and confusion since it recently enacted a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years.

Florida's Legislature, like Ohio's, is controlled by Republicans. Throughout American history both parties have shown a willingness to try to use election law to get results they might otherwise not win at the polls. But right now it is clearly the Republicans who believe they have an interest in keeping the voter base small. Mr. Blackwell and other politicians who insist on making it harder to vote never say, of course, that they are worried that get-out-the-vote drives will bring too many poor and minority voters into the system. They say that they want to reduce fraud. However, there is virtually no evidence that registration drives are leading to fraud at the polls. (Emphasis added).

That's a flat out bizarre statement and completely untrue to boot. There have been numerous instances of voter registration drives involved in fraud.

Here's the solution: Require positive identification when casting a vote. Period. You need to show a driver's license to buy cigarettes for heaven's sake. And try and cash a check without ID. Anyone who advocates against positive ID for voting is supporting voter fraud in my opinion. Pure and simple.

Well, The Rhetoric Is Changing A Bit

Maybe the White House is starting to understand that an enforcement-first approach to illegal immigration will make a lot of other things possible. Something I've been advocating all along.

ARTESIA, N.M., June 6 — President Bush tried on Tuesday to win back the trust of conservatives who have distanced themselves from him on immigration, promising to "get this border enforced" and warning those who enter the country illegally that "if you get caught, you get sent home."

After weeks of embracing "comprehensive immigration reform" — Washington shorthand for a Senate bill that includes a temporary guest-worker program and a promise of citizenship for some illegal immigrants — Mr. Bush shifted his tone in remarks at the Border Patrol training academy here. Having nudged the Senate into action, Mr. Bush is turning his attention to the House, where Republicans deride the Senate plan as amnesty and are balking at the idea of compromise.

After watching Border Patrol trainees conduct mock security stops under a blistering 100-degree sun, Mr. Bush told the agents "I want the country to pay attention to what you're doing."

It remains to be seen if this will help get a bill through conference. There are a lot of pretty darn hard-core House opponents to the monstrosity the Senate gave birth to. And there should be, that bill is an unmitigated disaster. But securing the border fist and foremost makes a lot of other compromises much more palatable. The Bilbray win should also make it apparent that a tough stance on immigration reform is a political winner this year.