Doubtful

Drudge has the big, raging headline: TALK OF HILLARY EXIT ENGULFS CAMPAIGNS. I rather suspect that this is a ploy - likely by the Clinton campaign itself.

Facing a double-digit defeat in New Hampshire, a sudden collapse in national polls and an expected fund-raising drought, Senator Hillary Clinton is preparing for a tough decision: Does she get out of the race? And when?!

"She can't take multiple double-digit losses in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," laments one top campaign insider to the DRUDGE REPORT. "If she gets too badly embarrassed, it will really harm her. She doesn't want the Clinton brand to be damaged with back-to-back-to-back defeats."

Meanwhile, Democrat hopeful John Edwards has confided to senior staff that he is staying in the race because Hillary "could soon be out."

"Her money is going to dry up," Edwards confided, a top source said Monday morning.

That's twice the money problems rumor has surfaced just today. But James Carville is mentioned in the story as well. This story reeks of Carville and his media manipulation. I'm not the only one throwing the flag on this, either. Dan Riehl sees the Carville fingerprints on it:

…One cannot be re-born until you die. What better way to do it than to plant the story of your demise, eventually pinning it on the underhanded dealings of a presumably noble competitor's campaign? Nothing like sucking the wind out of your competitions headline grabbing success with a staged funeral that doesn't take place….

Sorry, it is too soon and the Clintons simply do not give up this easily. Look for a resurrection report very soon about Clinton's reborn campaign. She isn't done yet.

UPDATE: Others: (Not buying it):  Hot Air, Outside The Beltway, PoliGazette, Ann Althouse, Pundit Guy, Captain's Quarters, Wake Up America, Real Clear Politics, Blogs of War, Bits Blog, Gateway Pundit, Fausta,

(Sort of buying at least part of it): Daily Pundit, The Gun Toting Liberal JammieWearingFool, Daily Pundit, Powerline, Atlas Shrugs, Mac's Mind,

I expect that I'll be updating this list rapidly as more weigh in over at Memeorandum.

Ahem

Fascist America in 10 easy steps . That is the title of a breathless story (or fairy tale) in the Guardian written by Naomi Wolf. Oh, do take the time to read it, what follows will make much more sense if you wade about in the fever swamp for a moment. But Naomi did present a little blueprint that fits something else that is going on in the world. Therefore, we here in the Crabitat have decided to reinterpret the list Ms. Wolf so graciously projected:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

Global warming! Global warming! We're all going to die.

2. Create a gulag

Demand the ouster of people who do not accept the "consensus" about global warming from their jobs. (Prison to follow.)

3. Develop a thug caste

Send in the screeching hordes to shout down anyone who disagrees with global warming "consensus."

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

Set up "global warming deniers database ." (If we weren't before, we expect to be on it shortly).

5. Harass citizens' groups

See 3.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

So far, only refusing to allow publication of opinions that disagree with "consensus" in scientific journals and threatening letters from US Senators - give it time.

7. Target key individuals

Expect to be reviled and accused of being a tool of the oil companies if you dare to speak out against the "consensus."

8. Control the press

The New York Times. Case closed.

9. Dissent equals treason

See 4.

10. Suspend the rule of law

Give them a chance at power and the full set will be complete.

Amazing how that works, isn't it?

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has linked to this. Visitors, please do take a look around. (You might be interested in the letter we found.)

Bull

Absolute Bull. A "study" supposedly "shows" that 665,000 "excess" deaths occurred in Iraq since the US invasion. Thats almost 15,500 every month above the expected death rate. Bull. Throw the flag on this one, folks. That the media is even reporting this crap shows a venomous partisan slant. The Washington Post should be ashamed they even printed this hackery. This would be almost 400 (article says 500 - even higher than my back of the envelope calcs) people PER DAY. Over the normal death rate?

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

This is utter and complete crap. Period. No thinking person can possibly believe these numbers. When have you EVER heard of that many people dying in one day in Iraq, much less every single day since the war began. For heaven's sake, think, people.

UPDATE: Others: Right Wing Nut House, OTB, Decision '08, Astute Bloggers, Gateway Pundit,

UPDATE: Political Pit Bull has some numbers that are even more pertinent to any discussion of this subject.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee:

To buy these conclusions, you have to swallow the impossibility that Reuters, the Associated Press, UPI, the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, Robert Fisk, al Manar, al Jazeera, and every other news conglomeration in Iraq are a willful part of the largest cover-up in human history, hiding three times of the number of those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (214,000 according to wikipedia) over the course of three-plus years.

It’s patently absurd.

UPDATE: Game, set, match. The Iraqi government rejects the "study" as exagerated.

“This figure, which in reality has no basis, is exaggerated,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali Debbagh.

“It is a figure which flies in the face of the most obvious truths,” he said, calling on research institutions to adopt precise and transparent criteria especially when the research concerns victim tolls.

Not that this will convince the TruthyTrolls™.

FALSE Charges

This one positively reeks of outright lies being reported as fact by a major media outlet. Period. There is no - none - zero - zip - reason Israel would use anything other than normal weapons. This one stinks out loud. And this may finally be the straw that breaks the camel's back on clamping down on outright hostile abuses of so-called journalism.

Israel using chemical weapons: doctors

Lebanon is investigating reports from doctors that Israel has used weapons in its 15-day-old bombardment of southern Lebanon that have caused wounds they have never seen before.

"We are sending off samples tomorrow, but we have no confirmation yet that illegal weapons have been used," Health Minister Mohammed Khalife said.

The Israeli army said it had used only conventional weapons and ammunition in attacks aimed at Hizbollah guerrillas and nothing contravening international law.

Blackened bodies have been showing up at hospitals in southern Lebanon two weeks into the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas that has seen at least 418 people, mostly civilians, killed in Lebanon and at least 42 Israelis.

Killed by Israeli air raids, the Lebanese dead are charred in a way local doctors, who have lived through years of civil war and Israeli occupation, say they have not seen before.

Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.

Cham said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."

"If you burnt someone with petrol their hair would burn and their skin would burn down to the bone. The Israelis are 100 per cent using chemical weapons."

Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has repeatedly accused Israel of using phosphorus bombs in its offensive.

This one is so high and deep it defies belief. Throwing the flag on this one, folks.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee thoroughly dismantles this one.

If It Doesn’t Get Traction The First Time

Repeat it over and over again until the meme catches hold. Similar to how Dana Priest got her Pulitzer, by repeating a rewritten story from 2003, Texas Rainmaker points to an astonishing trail of articles by Will Lester of the Associated Press.

Lester is asserting (over and over again) that cell phone only households are skewing polls. Now, while I have a significant amount of training and experience in both statistics and design of experiments, I am no pollster. Nor do I really want to be. But this meme is particularly designed to advance a leftist agenda. As if polling were not already heavily skewed left (as I have pointed out over and over). Lester wants to justify skewing still further left.

I'm throwing the flag on Lester. Go take a look at the trail of articles at Texas Rainmaker.

Crisis? What Crisis?

Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher, says the US is in "a crisis almost without equal". He argues that everyone seems to be in despair because Bush has another 33 months in office. His argument that , "Facing a similar problem, voters had a chance to quickly toss Jimmy Carter out of office," is - quite frankly - bogus. Which I am quite sure he knew when he wrote it since Carter did not get a second term. He cites Nixon, who quit rather than face the dishonor of an impeachment. Yes, Nixon, for all his flaws, still did the right thing.

But elections are not held retroactively. Nor should they be. Mr. Mitchell seems to think all this is new. All this angst and uproar is almost unprecedented.

Bull.

This has been going on for a very long time, and if Mr. Mitchell was honest, he'd admit it. I distinctly remember the night I stopped watching CBS news. Dan "Fake, but I'll get away with it" Rather, solemnly and sonorously pronounced, "Tonight, President Reagan's ship of state appears to be sinking." As has always been the case, Danny boy was wrong. (I never watched CBS News again after that night.)

So is Mitchell. The press didn't much care for Harry Truman and announce his defeat, famously - and totally incorrectly. The press didn't much like Eisenhower, especially in his second term. The press didn't bother to report Kennedy's indiscretions even though they pretty well knew about them, by all reports. The press gave Johnson a pass in his first term and turned against him in his second (while it was his first elected administration, it was still his second in reality). The press villified Nixon during his second term and actually brought him down. The press destroyed Ford when he tried to get elected. The people figured out that Carter was a absolutely horrible president almost as soon as he was elected. The press did it's damnedest to take Reagan down in his second term. The press did take George H. W. Bush out after only one term, even though he had won a war. The press gave Clinton a pass, even though he committed arguably worse offenses than Nixon.

And we reach here and now. The press hated that Bush won Florida, especially after they called the election early. Then 9/11 gave Bush some breathing room and he did pretty well, considering. The press really hated that he won a second term. So they have been hounding after him.

This is different than any of the past presidencies how?

Throwing the flag on this one, Mr. Mitchell. You know why. This is exactly media business as usual, no crisis.

Throw Flag On This One.

The ‘Bull$hit’ flag.

A poll of immigrants shows the majority have growing fears over the tone of the immigration debate, says the AP. We’re told with a straight face that this poll denies the allegations that legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration.

Get this:

"The poll was conducted by the firm Bendixen & Associates between Feb. 24 and March 21. Researchers said they interviewed 800 legal immigrants in 47 states who were reached by random digit dialing in communities with large numbers of immigrants. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.4 percentage points".

They used a random dialing program and reached a 100% legal immigrant sample. I see.

So, someone calls you up, identifies themselves as a pollster then asks if you are in the country legally. Let’s just say I was an illegal and some unidentified person claiming to be a pollster calls and asks if I’m in the country legally. How freaking stupid would I be to tell them I was an illegal?

This is easily the worst polling methodology I have ever heard of. This poll is total garbage.