Hiatus

Various

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Huh.

I meant to put something up a while ago; suffice it to say, things are very busy here at the Resistance, and between the ongoing move to the blasted dairy heath that is Wisconsin, teaching the roommate how to drive (something that, oddly enough, 95% of the people on the road never bothered to learn), packing, sorting, packing, sorting, tending to the seasonal needs of my army of plants, etc, it's been crazy.

So the blog is on hiatus. While it's off the accursed roommate is going to help with a shiny new art style, recoded template, and the like.

I also plan to start a blog for a certain comic eventually. Plus we're working on a secret project that will bring Western Civilization to its knees.

Keep an eye out for that one. It'll be hilarious.

In the meantime, I might make a sporadic post here or there. Who knows?

Until then.

JJS

Science Update

I Have Nothing Interesting To Say Here

Ancient Swede
So there's a new World's Oldest Tree, which has taken the throne from those uppity Bristlecone Pines in America.

The world's oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.

Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.

That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.

"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.

That is oooooooooooooold.

Don't expect intelligent commentary here. I just got up from a nap.

Apparently this tree is way older than they thought they had arrived here, and the article mentions something about them being climate change bellwethers, so I'm guessing what they mean is that the last ice age in Sweden ended earlier than they thought, or something. It's sparse on the details. Ancient history seems to be impacted by this lonely survivor, regardless.

Source: Raw Story

Cold
The coldest star ever found has been located. It's only 660 degrees at the surface -- cooler than Venus.

April 11, 2008 -- A dim, lonely, weakling star with the lowest stellar temperature yet recorded has been found just 40 light-years from Earth.

The brown dwarf star is between 15 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter and has a surface temperature of a mild 660 degrees Fahrenheit (350 Celsius) -- about the surface temperature of the planet Mercury at the equator and much cooler than the surface of Venus.

The spectacularly unspectacular object is of special interest because it falls right smack in the middle of the final frontier that divides mega-planets from the puniest stars. Stars in that realm theoretically qualify as an entirely new stellar type -- what's called a Y class dwarf.

The article mentions the possibility of even colder stars, stars perhaps cool enough to have liquid water in their atmospheres.

It's likely, says Burgasser, that as more of these even cooler dwarfs are found, there likely will be some that are a couple of hundred degrees cooler than CFBDS0059. That means any water in there atmospheres will condense into droplets of water vapor, which would make these dwarfs dramatically different than their L and T dwarf brothers.

In brown dwarf atmospheres, water is generally in gaseous state, while in giant planets it condenses into water ice. So an even cooler dwarf would truly be on the verge of being more of a hot, giant Jupiter than a star.

That's amazingly odd. Imagine if there is a star out there somewhere just warm enough to keep water liquid. You could have life as we know it living on a *star*.

Wacky.

Source: Discovery Channel News

RFI-Death
So an engineer who suffered through radiation therapy thought he had a better way to do it -- and it seems like he was on to something.

A promising new cancer treatment that may one day replace radiation and chemotherapy is edging closer to human trials.

Kanzius RF therapy attaches microscopic nanoparticles to cancer cells and then "cooks" tumors inside the body with harmless radio waves.

Based on technology developed by Pennsylvania inventor John Kanzius, a retired radio and TV engineer, the treatment has proven 100 percent effective at killing cancer cells while leaving neighboring healthy cells unharmed. It is currently being tested at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“I don’t want to give people false hope,” said Dr. Steve Curley, the professor leading the tests, “but this has the potential to treat a wide variety of cancers.”

Modern cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy have proven remarkably effective at treating many cancers, especially in combination, but are plagued with toxic side effects. These treatments kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones.

Kanzius RF therapy is noninvasive, and uses nontoxic radio waves combined with gold or carbon nanoparticles, which have a long history of medical use.

Essentially, you take nano-particles of gold, coat them in a chemical that only cancer cells absorb, then inject it. The cancer takes up the chemically coated gold. Then you blast the area of the body with a radio source.. the gold absorbs the radio waves, heats up, and kills whatever cells it's in. But if you had the right chemical, it's only inside cancer. Voila! Perfectly targeted radiation therapy.

Very nice.

Source: Wired

Chimeratech
I'd heard about a technique like this to create genetically modified animals but I guess this is the first time someone's thought about using it as a backdoor to cloning without Dolly-esque age symptoms.

The mice were made by inserting skin cells of an adult animal into early embryos produced by in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Some of the resulting offspring were partial clones but some were full clones – just like Dolly.

Unlike the Dolly technique, however, the procedure is so simple and efficient that it has raised fears that it will be seized on by IVF doctors to help infertile couples who are eager to have their own biological children.

...

The experiments on mice demonstrated that it is now possible in principle to take a human skin cell, reprogramme it back to its embryonic state and then insert it into an early human embryo. The resulting child would share some of the genes of the person who supplied the skin tissue, as well as the genes of the embryo's two parents.

These offspring are chimeras – a genetic mix of two or more individuals – because some of their cells derive from the embryo and some from the skin cell. Technically, such a child would have three biological parents. Human chimeras occur naturally when two embryos fuse in the womb and such people are often normal and healthy. Dr Lanza says there is no reason to believe that a human chimera created by the new technique would be unhealthy.

Furthermore, studies on mice have shown that it is possible to produce fully cloned offspring that are 100 per cent genetically identical to the adult. This was achieved by using a type of defective mouse embryo with four sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two.

This "tetraploid" embryo only developed into the placenta of the foetus and when it was injected with a reprogrammed skin cell, the rest of the foetus developed from this single cell to become a full clone of the adult animal whose skin was used.

I fail to see the horror here. The clone would be genetically identical to their parent, or whoever donated the cells. So... what, exactly? Granted, you'll probably get some creepy Jim Jones/Koresh type making his own little Clone Army, but is that really substantially worse than the current situation, where they just marry a couple dozen 10-14 year old girls?

From a safety perspective I oppose using a technique like this on people until we have all the bugs worked out, of course. But I can't find any ethical reason per se to hate *the clones*. They'll just be additional people. Despite what sci-fi movies might say, they won't be any more soulless or murderous than the rest of us, or at least, their donor-parent.

Source: The Independent

Bollocks
Apparently the new CEO of Virgin Media doesn't understand either the law, or the proper method to do business.

Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media (my ISP at home in London, along with BT) has announced that he considers Net Neutrality to be "a load of bollocks" and he's promised to put any website or service that won't pay Virgin a premium to reach its customers into the "Internet bus lane."

Cory Doctorow has started a campaign to switch from Verizon in response. Normally I think he's had a bit too much dandelion tea, but he's right on this issue. I'm just not sure it goes far enough.

See, telecoms are protected from being sued for what they host/serve on the basis of what's known as the Common Carrier provision. Essentially, the Supreme Court decided back in the days of big railroad that you were protected from lawsuits and a lot of regulation as to what you carried, as long as you carried cargo more or less impartially to all who asked and paid. This concept of an undiscerning, very low-barrier to entry transportation entity has been carried over to the telecoms, who can't be sued for, say, a mobster ordering a hit via cell phone, or a hacker using the net to breach a hospital's mainframe, just because they provide the service over which it was done.

Truthfully, until very recently, it was impossible to track that volume of information, so without common carrier it would have been legally impossible to run a telecom.

But here we have the big telcos who want to have it both ways; they want to be legally protected from their customers' actions, and they want to be able to regulate them too. That's just not kosher; you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're in the business of regulating your customers and what they can access, then you should be liable for their crimes, infringement, what have you. Every mp3 downloaded, every stolen program or game, all of it, your liability.

I think the EFF or ACLU should sue any telco that steps over the line for any and all illegal activity on their network. If we bloody their noses, maybe they'll realize that the old way really is the best.

Sources: Boing Boing
Wikipedia

Upas
Another plant I want to own someday: the Upas tree.

Antiaris toxicaria (Upas or Ipoh) is an evergreen tree in the family Moraceae, native to southeastern Asia, from India and Sri Lanka east to southern China, the Philippines and Fiji; closely related species also occur in eastern Africa. It produces a highly poisonous latex, known in Java as "Upas", from the Javanese word for "poison".

...

The name of the upas tree became legendary from the mendacious account (professedly by one Foersch, who was a surgeon at Semarang in 1773) published in the London Magazine, December 1783, and popularized by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants (The Botanic Garden, pt. ii.). The tree was said to destroy all animal life within a radius of 15 miles or more.

Sadly it's apparently a large tree, so this will have to wait until my compound is complete.

Source: Wikipedia

Slither
This story's been going around, it even made it into Atomic Age humor last night.

EUGENE, Ore. -- A 12-foot snake attacked a female employee of a pet store, prompting assistance from police, firefighters and emergency personnel Thursday.

Sergeant Ryan Nelson had never tangled with a snake larger than a garter snake before Thursday.

All that changed, however, when he responded to a 911 call at 3:41 p.m. to find a woman in a Eugene pet store completely wrapped by a 12-foot Burmese python that was slowly constricting around her, police said.

Nelson saw the woman was in grave danger and feared for her life. But as he pulled out his knife in
preparation to save the woman, matters got more difficult.

She pleaded with Nelson not to injure the snake.

Long story short, everybody lives, though the snake loses a few teeth when they had to pry it off. This is very odd behavior for a constrictor -- they generally are very docile sorts, and don't even consider attacking anything too big to consume. The only way they have to attack something is to grapple with it, as seen here, and if that something is too big, it could easily, say, rip them to shreds. The woman could have killed the snake herself, no problem, but didn't want to. Evolutionarily, hyperaggressive constrictor snakes are a bad move. So I sort of wonder what happened to get this poor snake so angry.

Source: Fox 12 Oregon

London Smells
Apparently all of London smells like crap.

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.

The agricultural odor is inescapable in central London and smells vaguely of farmland or even garbage.

Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.

"You can't say it's going to smell for two days, but the wind is coming in from the same direction," said Chris Almond, a forecaster with the Met Office, Britain's weather service.

"It's not really until Monday, Tuesday that we'll see a change in the wind direction, with a more marked improvement in air quality."

He said the smell had probably been stagnating in those countries for a few days, resulting in a more pungent aroma once the winds brought it to England.

There's even a monstrously boring political sideline to this story, but I can't bring myself to care, beyond the hilarity that an entire city reeks of cow crap.

Well, it's hilarious because I don't have to live there.

Source: CNN.com

Cold Storage
Another one of those stories about how people can survive long durations without oxygen if you get them really, really cold.

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A gust of wind blew a 2-year-old in a stroller into Lake Michigan, where the boy remained submerged for at least 15 minutes before being pulled out unconscious but alive.

The child's grandfather, who had been pushing the stroller on the lakeside Friday afternoon, jumped into the harbor to try to save the boy, the Chicago Fire Department said.

...

The toddler was strapped in the three-wheeled jogging stroller about 10 feet below the surface of the 42-degree water before rescue divers pulled him out.

They should be thankful it was so cold. If the water had been warm and he'd been without O2 for that long he'd be a corpse.

But thanks to the miracles of hypothermia, his brain may well have survived, on ice so to speak, without the lack of oxygen killing all his neurons. That sort of thing happens with these exposure cases sometimes. Hopefully it will here too.

Man strollers are windy death traps though. Mythbusters had the same thing come up in a test of whether trains could blow/suck people on to the tracks. The stroller + dummy combo just went sailing down the rails after the train.

Source: CNN.com

Mainstream Media Megapost

Heads in the Sand

How's that Surge Working Out?
The news media hates to cover the war they helped sell, but you'd think this sort of story would be significant.

BAGHDAD — A company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions on Tuesday night in Sadr City, defying American soldiers who implored them to hold the line against Shiite militias.

The retreat left a crucial stretch of road on the front lines undefended for hours and led to a tense series of exchanges between American soldiers and about 50 Iraqi troops who were fleeing.

...

Tuesday’s desertions in Sadr City, although involving a particularly hesitant Iraqi unit, left many of the Americans soldiers wondering about the tenacity of their Iraqi allies.

“It bugs the hell out of me,” said Sgt. George Lewis, Captain Veath’s platoon sergeant in Company B, Third Platoon, First Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment. “We don’t see any progress being made at all. We hear these guys in firefights. We know if we are not up there helping these guys out we are making very little progress.”

Company B moved into Sadr City at the end of March as part of a broader effort to secure the southernmost portion of the densely populated Sadr City.

That area has been used by militias to fire 107-millimeter rockets toward the Green Zone. The Americans’ mission is to stop the rocket firings and help the Iraqi government establish a modicum of control.

Some Iraqi soldiers have fought hard. American soldiers have been regularly coaching them on how to protect their patrol bases, conserve ammunition and evacuate their wounded.

One big problem is that the Iraqi troops have responded to militia gunfire with such intense fusillades that the soldiers have endangered civilians, American soldiers and even their own forces. The barrage of Iraqi Army fire has become such a regular occurrence that some American soldiers are worried that militia fighters have tried to insert themselves between nearby Iraqi units to induce the Iraqi soldiers to fire on one another.

...

The Iraqi convoy drove off, and the Americans began to scramble to find a new Iraqi unit to plug the gap. Senior Iraqi commanders hurried to the scene and a special Iraqi reconnaissance unit was ordered to advance up the road. With the help of an American bomb-clearing unit, Stryker vehicles and attack helicopters, the Iraqis rumbled north, spraying rounds as they went. According to the last reports monitored by Company B, the Iraqis were stopped short by several roadside bombs, and planned to resume the push in daylight.

The furious Iraqi fire on their drive toward the abandoned base endangered the American soldiers who were bringing supplies to one of their platoons, and an American officer issued a plea over the tactical radio.

“They are lighting up everything,” he said. “Tell them to knock it off.”

So the 'elite' Iraqi unit that we had to scramble to find to plug the hole left by the deserters was also completely out of control.

This after mass defection and desertion during the Siege of Basra (which we lost, btw, not that the American media reports our military defeats).

Oh yeah, they're standing up so we can stand down, or whatever the new buzzphrase is.

Source: The New York Times

Bitter
The big fake 'bash the Democrat' story of the week this week is the intense, almost Talmudic parsing of the exact words Obama used to describe the frustration that working class people feel, and the ways in which conservative splinter factions divide and conquer the resulting electorate.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Saturday defended labelling struggling working-class voters "bitter," insisting they have every reason to be frustrated.

"I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana ... who are bitter," he said at a rally Saturday.

"They are angry. They feel like they've been left behind," he said of those hit by tough economic times. "That's a natural, natural response."

...

"So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said, according to a transcript published by huffingtonpost.com.

Gee, you think?

You think that small town people with no hope and no future might be easy prey for opportunistic churches, lobby groups, what have you?

Nahh!

Senator Clinton, of course, always looking for a chance to kneecap Obama even if it puts McCain in the White House, jumped on this in the usual unseemly manner.

Clinton jumped on his statement as condescending.

"I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small-town America," she said at a rally in Indiana Saturday.

"Senator Obama's remarks are elitist and are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans. Certainly not the Americans that I know."

Speaking of McCain...

De facto Republican nominee John McCain's campaign also hit out at Obama's remarks.

"It shows an elitism and condescension toward hard-working Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking," McCain advisor Steve Schmidt told The New York Times.

"It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans."

Honestly, does she use the same speechwriters as McCain?

Obama, and this is to his credit, refused to retract the statement.

But Friday, Obama said he knew very well the struggles of middle-class voters.

"No, I'm in touch. I know exactly what's going on ... People are fed-up," he said.

"They're angry and they're frustrated and they're bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that's why I'm running for president of the United States of America."

So that's the state of that one. The polling after what the American press is 'cleverly' calling Bitter-Gate shows that Obama hasn't taken a hit for this at all. Perhaps because people realize that he's telling the truth. More likely because they're apathetic and divided to begin with.

Source: Raw Story

The Hits Keep On Coming
Of course, not content with the failure of their non-story to grow legs, the media kept finding new ways to flog it.

In his New York Times column today, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks sound like Karl Marx’s “famous statement about religion.” On the Brian and the Judge radio show today, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano asked Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) if Obama is “a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case?”

“I must say that’s a good question,” replied Lieberman, before stepping back to say that he would “hesitate to say he’s a Marxist”

Ahh, Short Bus Lieberman, the man who ran against a Democrat and lost in the primary, so he cheated his way through a general election (with 300k in bribes still unaccounted for), then extorted chairmanships of important committees to keep the Dems in the majority on paper in the Senate, then refused to do any actual work in this committees so that his buddies in the Bush administration could rest easy.

THAT Lieberman. I'd forgotten that asshole.

Then we have Karl Rove going on Fox to abuse the English language.

Yesterday, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol claimed that Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL) now-infamous “bitter” remarks were Marxist in nature. On Fox News’s Hannity And Colmes last night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove echoed Kristol’s over-the-top characterization, saying “it was almost Marxian“:

ROVE: I don’t find a lot of people in rural America, I certainly don’t find the dominant view to be — “I’m so bitter that I’m going to hold on to my gun or I’m gonna” — You know, it was almost Marxian in this they cling to their religion. I mean, you know, it’s sort of like it’s the opiate of the masses.

Hey, you braindead bucket of pus, it's 'Marxist'. 'Marxian' isn't a word, though it might be the title of a videogame from the 80s.

CNN Headline news continues of course to be a class act on the issue as well.

Even before Obama’s poorly worded comments last week, many on the right have been making a concerted effort to cast Obama as a socialist and a Marxist. For months now, right-wing talker Glenn Beck, who also hosts a show on CNN Headline News, has been referring to Obama as a “socialist“:

I hope it doesn’t matter to Barack. But he has heard the message of Jesus that shared prosperity is the thing to do. Hope, change, Marxism. This guy is a socialist and all you have to do is listen to his words.

So you see. Obama's a Marxist, for daring to note that people either a: want hope and change and are optimists or b: are frustrated and pessimistic.

What a dilemma, American press!

Sources: Think Progress (Marxist)
Think Progress (Marxian)

Math is Hard, Let's Vote McCain!
The press as a whole might as well wear his damn campaign buttons on air.

Summary: On MSNBC Live, Mika Brzezinski said that Sen. John McCain "wants to eliminate the federal gas tax -- that's about 20 percent of the cost." Later, Monica Novotny said McCain is "proposing suspending the federal gas tax for the summer, potentially cutting prices by nearly 20 percent." In fact, the federal gas tax -- 18.4 cents per gallon -- comprises only 5.4 percent of the current average cost of regular gasoline.

Yeah, I know when I gas up the car and pay 3.45 a gallon, it's not the first 3 dollars and twenty-seven cents that makes me cringe, it's that last 18. BECAUSE I AM A MORON, DUR

I honestly think part of the problem here is that these people are so out of touch they haven't had to gas up their own cars in a few years, and so can't honestly remember whether gas is 1 dollar a gallon or 3 half the time.

Source: Media Matters

Southern-Style Bigot
Hey I know, here's a story we can avoid: a Southern (ok, Kentuckian, but they want to be Southern) bigot called Senator Obama 'boy' at a fundraiser!

No reason to report on that! Everyone knows racism in America is dead.

Rep. Geoff Davis was speaking to about 400 donors at a fundraiser in Kentucky, when he said of Obama, "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button."

It gets better, because he was talking out of school about a classified exercise!

It also appears Davis may have released classified information in the exchange.
He said in his remarks at the GOP dinner that he also recently participated in a "highly classified, national security simulation" with Obama. "I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

Now, I know Republicans tend to be retards, so I'll spell this out for him.

'Highly Classified' means SHUT YOUR GODDAMNED PIE-HOLE IN PUBLIC YOU IGNORANT SHEEP RAPING HICK! IF YOU CAN'T RESIST TALKING ABOUT IT, FIND A COCK TO SHOVE IN YOUR MOUTH!

You just have to know how to talk to these guys.

Source: Raw Story

Donuts
Amazingly, the same week that saw Obama called a Marxist, 'boy', and an elitist snob also saw him compared to Osama Bin Laden.

Again!

So much for the liberal media.

John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation's newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist.

At a luncheon for the editors hosted by the Associated Press, AP Chairman Dean Singleton quizzed Obama about whether he would send more troops to Afghanistan, where "Obama bin Laden is still at large?"

"I think that was Osama bin Laden," the candidate answered.

"If I did that, I'm so sorry!" Singleton said.

"This," Obama told the editors, is "part of the exercise that I've been going through over the last 15 months."

Of course, Milbank then goes on to the BItter-Gate thing because he thinks it's clever. Still, at least he covered what should be, in an rational world, a scandal of epic proportions. So-called 'journalists' sucking up to a Presidential candidate in the most screaming fangirl way imaginable, short of actually asking him to sign their bodies with a marker.

McCain's moderators, the AP's Ron Fournier and Liz Sidoti, greeted McCain with a box of Dunkin' Donuts. "We spend quite a bit of time with you on the back of the Straight Talk Express asking you questions, and what we've decided to do today was invite everyone else along on the ride," Sidoti explained. "We even brought you your favorite treat."

McCain opened the offering. "Oh, yes, with sprinkles!" he said.

Sidoti passed him a cup. "A little coffee with a little cream and a little sugar," she said.

Hey, lady. You can stop trying so hard. We know McCain is an adulterer, he'll surely fuck you after the press event.

Jerks.

Source: The Washington Post

ORLY?
Of course this time around the press is being solidly lambasted for being so obviously in the tank for McCain, and they're getting sort of defensive about it. Note the tone here.

Both Democratic presidential candidates on Sunday night appeared at a CNN "Compassion Forum" at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania.

Messiah College describes itself as embracing an "evangelical spirit rooted in the Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan traditions of the Christian Church."

As such, its "community covenant" states that members of the Messiah College community "avoid such sinful practices as drunkenness, stealing, dishonesty, profanity, occult practices, sexual intercourse outside of marriage, homosexual behavior, and sexually exploitative or abusive behavior."

In the past, Republican presidential candidates have been criticized for speaking at universities where certain religious beliefs are considered bigoted, most notoriously when then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 spoke at Bob Jones University, where anti-Catholic dogma was taught and inter-racial dating banned.

Messiah counsels its gay and lesbian students to seek the help of controversial organizations that use Scripture and behavioral exercises to coach them to stop acting on gay feelings and impulses.

It's not difficult to imagine a big outcry among liberal activists if, say, Republican presidential candidates attended such a forum hosted by, say, Fox News at such a university.

You're quite right, it's not hard to imagine. Unfortunately, when McCain goes to speak at one of these odious 'colleges' like Bob Jones, you people studiously refuse to cover it. When he courts the endorsement of Hagee, a whacko anti-Catholic bigot who wants to bring about the End Times by destroying Israel, you studiously ignore it.

You will, however, write a speculative piece on how liberals must be hypocrites, then bookened it with an anonymous letter from a reader taring into the liberals for not being upset.

Anonymous smears? Faux outrage? Defensive, passive-aggressive reporting?

Yes, it is indeed the Mainstream Media.

Source: 'Political Punch' at ABC News

Punchy
Of course, Jake Tapper has more fake scandals to peddle.

In an interview with the Charlotte Observer, Johnson says that former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro was right.

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she said, just before the resulting firestorm forced her to step down as an adviser to Obama rival Hillary Clinton.

"What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant (is) if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called 'Jerry Smith' and he says I'm going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote? And the answer is, probably not. Would he also start out with the excitement of starting out as something completely different? Probably not. He would just be a freshmen senator ...

But of course, that's not the whole story on Ferraro, who has a history of bashing black candidates, and said Obama was 'lucky' to be black, which is a whole different story.

Tapper undoubtedly knows this and doesn't correct it. I'm not sure why, but doing his job is probably too much to ask at any rate.

Source: 'Political Punch' again

Hunger for the Trivial
If you ever have any doubt that our press hungers, thirsts, lives and dies for the trivial and the stupid, steadfastly refusing to inform people or do any real work, then this should put that doubt to bed forever.

Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.

This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.

We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he'd recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.

As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.

Yes, that's right, Jake Tapper, bloodhound-human hybrid, is on the case!

Obama ran off before I could ask him if he'd just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.

They denied it. He'd quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette.

But I knew what I'd smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he'd had a cigarette.

They reported back that he had told them he hadn't had a cigarette since he quit.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.

Except….last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.

“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else.”

Now I wonder about last August.

Oh yes, this is a conspiracy right up there with Iran-Contra, Watergate, the Gulf of Tonkin and the right-wing coup against FDR. Please, Tapper, continue!

It's not a big deal in the scheme of things -- the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis -- indeed, it's miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.

Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we as a nation are confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

Not corny so much as self-serving, egotistical, arrogant and wrongheaded. But thank goodness we have you to make sure the path our politicans lead us on is the 'right one'.

IT IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU, JAKE TAPPER, TO SAVE US FROM OUR CHAIN SMOKING SELVES

Source: Same as above. Home of the Idiot.

NYT
Not that ABC is alone in refusing to cover important stories in favor of trivial nonsense, of course.

Even the New York Times gets in on that sweet ignoring history action.

Meanwhile, Fair reports on the NYT's excuse for failing to cover the hearings.
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt has offered a response to media activists who wrote to the paper about its non-coverage of last month's Winter Soldier hearings. Hoyt's explanation is that reporters at the Times had "not been aware of the group or its meeting," but likely wouldn't have covered it if they had been aware of the event.

The idea that the Times was unaware of Winter Soldier is remarkable; the paper's D.C. reporters were repeatedly sent press releases about the events, the same ones that other media outlets received that did manage to cover the event, ranging from Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! to the New York Times' corporate sibling the Boston Globe.

Yes, who needs to cover a major meeting of Iraq war vets discussing at length the atrocities they and others committed in the name of our country's imperial ambition?

Atrocities like these:

Soldiers and vets told how superior officers instructed them on the official ways to torment and beat detainees. Andrew Duffy, a medic who served on the trauma team at the Abu Ghraib military prison, put it this way, "You can't spell abuse without 'Abu.'" They were told to use the term "detainee" because, unlike "prisoner of war," there are no laws protecting detainees. While he rocked back and forth in his seat nervously, Mathew Childess, a Marine infantryman who served two tours in Iraq, referred to beating detainees and "breaking fingers." When a particular detainee begged for food and water, he took the man's hat, wiped himself with it, and stuffed it into the man's mouth.

Breaking fingers? Denying food and water?

Nah! Total non-story! Quick, did Obama say anything we can label elitist today?

Source: The Impolitic

Eye in the Sky
Speaking of stories that the press would never even consider covering in depth, El Presidente is prepping a new spy satellite network solely dedicated to watching what American citizens do on American soil.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

...

But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.

Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.

"I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration," said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. "I won't make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program."

Pfft, Harman, calm down. It's not like the Bush administration would ever LIE to us or violate our rights in secret!

Source: The Washington Post

Debatey
It wouldn't be a post on the near-total wasteland that is the American press if it didn't mention the 'Democratic' debate from Wednesday. A debate that focused, not on issues like the economy, the housing collapse, the failing infrastructure or the war in Iraq, but rather on whether Obama was patriotic enough, whether his pastor (a former Marine) was patriotic enough, and whether, gasp, someone might raise the capital gains tax back up to approximately the level that actual working people pay on THEIR taxes.

A shocking concept.

Basically, the debate went 56 long minutes before a single policy question, and then only asked one more over the rest of the two hours of time suck. They found time for every petty, pointless issue, every campaign 'gaffe', to grill Obama over what, exactly, 'bitter' means, and the like. But no time for the housing fiasco, no time for Afghanistan, no time for our bridges that are literally falling down or our planes that are being grounded en masse for safety violations. Nothing. We got one question on Iraq and one question on.....gas prices. Which really are one issue. There was saber rattling on Iran, but no serious discussion of how, say, we've screwed up that country, and any action we take toward them now will only be seen as aggression by the world community, or how they're a complete non-threat, and the like.

Yeesh. What a mess. By the end the audience was booing the moderators, and with good reason.

Source: The Philadelphia Daily News (Attytood blog)

Plutocrats
Charlie Gibson was particularly upset about the capital gains tax during the debate, and it's easy to see why; he's rich, and must not like paying taxes so that the rabble can have their social programs, education, and so forth.

What's even more interesting is that he labors under the misapprehension that ordinary Americans are rich as well. From back in January:

Summary: During the ABC News-Facebook debate, moderator Charlie Gibson suggested that the Democratic presidential candidates' proposals to roll back or let some of President Bush's tax cuts expire would affect middle-class families, adding, "If you take a family of two professors here at St. Anselm, they're going to be in the $200,000 category that you're talking about lifting the taxes on." According to the U.S. Census, however, the median income for a U.S. household is $48,451, and the mean household income is $65,527; and only 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more.

The man is completely out of touch. It's similar to how nobody on tv seemed to know how much a gallon of gas cost these days; they also have no idea what the 'little people' make in a year.

Which might go a long way to explaining how wrong-headed they are on every meaningful economic policy.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein provides a helpful graph showing just how, in fact, completely out of touch Charlie is with his hypothetical 'middle class' family scenario.

These people are shockingly ignorant.

Sources: Media Matters
Ezra Klein

The Media's Greatest Hit(Job)s
Just in case anyone was wondering if Republicans and Democrats face differing standards in the American media, I thought a couple of examples of great distortions from our recent past by the corporate press would prove illuminating.

First, a small taste of the sort of press abuse that helped turn Hillary Clinton into what she is today: a hyperaggressive, defensive and self-destructive Presidential candidate.

The gist of this is the following: in the 90s, when Hillary was considering a move to New York, she was labeled a phony for declaring herself a Yankees fan. The press hopped all over her, and repeated accusations that she was lying, without proof, ad nauseam.

In June 1999, the New York Yankees were coming to the White House to be feted for the previous year’s World Series win. On the Today show, Hillary Clinton told Katie Couric that she had been a fan of the Yankees along with the Cubs when she grew up in Chicago.

To this day, there is no reason to doubt this statement. In 1993 and 1994, in fact, the Washington Post had published two separate profiles which alluded to Clinton’s youthful love for the Yankees. “I needed an American League team,” Clinton told Couric. “Because when you're from Chicago, you cannot root for both the Cubs and the Sox.” None of this was ever worth talking about. But the pre-existing evidence plainly suggests that what Clinton said was accurate.

None of this was worth talking about—except within the “press corps.”

You see, in June 1999, the press corps was busy reinventing Al Gore as the world’s biggest liar. They hated Hillary Clinton’s husband—he had gotten ten blow jobs; they hadn’t—and they were now directing their fury at everyone found in his court. Two Post profiles plainly suggested that Clinton had been a Yankees fan. But the insider press corps was up for some fun. It started in the new York Times, with this report by Katherine “Kit” Seelye:

SEELYE (6/11/99): “The fact is, I've always been a Yankees fan,” the First Lady, who was born and bred in Chicago, asserted this morning to Katie Couric on NBC's "Today Show" in anticipation of the championship team's visit to the White House this evening. When the puzzled Ms. Couric said she thought Mrs. Clinton was a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, the First Lady, in a classic Clintonian gesture, quickly claimed loyalty to the Cubs, too.

It goes on and on and on from there. They spilled gallon upon gallon of ink coming up with new 'creative' ways to label her a liar, when the evidence suggests that she, in fact, always was a Yankees fan.

By now, it was a Clintonian lie. “Talk about building a mountain out of a molehill, Sam Donaldson said, interrupting Will—though he himself plainly implied that what Clinton had said was a stretcher. Moments later, Roberts put her cosmic inanity on full display. She explained who it was she most pitied:

ROBERTS: I must say the part that made me sad was Joe Torre standing there [at the White House]. I'm a great admirer of Joe Torre and for him to be used in this way, it was a little—

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I think you'll see her sitting at court side between Spike Lee and Matt Dillon in the Knicks playoffs coming up. But her much bigger problem is the news in the, the New York Times, this morning, whether or not Ken Starr is going to be issuing some sort of a scathing report. I think—

WILL: I'm sorry, that's part of the same thing. This is not a mountain out of a molehill. They can't tell the truth!

“They can’t tell the truth,” Will said—as his panel kept failing to tell the truth. (This is a very familiar pattern from this lunatic era.) But you know what this was really about. At the end, a tut-tutting Cokie was required by law to go there:

ROBERTS: Yes, you should stick with your team. It's one of those loyalty issues.

WILL: And your state.

ROBERTS: Well, and then there's husbands. Well, Sam and I will be back in a moment.

Hiss! Hiss-spit! Hiss-spit! Mee-ow!! And don’t worry—the gasbag gang was just getting started.

Ha! See, you can't trust Hillary, because she exercised different judgment than Cokie Roberts would have in her own marriage.

And everyone knows, Cokie is God.

Unfortunately for America, the press had bigger fish to fry, and moved on from calling Clinton a liar to calling Al Gore one, in order to sink his Presidential ambitions.

Their all-time greatest example of his 'lies'?

That he said he 'invented the internet'.

Internet of Lies

Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.

Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet.

Ah, but was he in fact responsible for doing so?

Sadly, Yes!

It is true, though, that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (although he did not, as is often claimed by others, coin the phrase himself) when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet, and he sponsored the 1988 National High-Performance Computer Act (which established a national computing plan and helped link universities and libraries via a shared network) and cosponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 (which opened the Internet to commercial traffic).

So Al Gore sponsored the bill that linked universities and libraries to the proto-Net, and cosponsored the bill that opened the Net to commercial traffic.

But he had nothing to do with it and is a big fat liar, of course.

This sort of thing will always happen to Democratic candidates for President. Our press is made up of a bunch of self-entitled elitists who resent, to the point of pathological loathing, someone from their class who votes against their interests. Witness the disgusting spectacle Wednesday night where the CAPITAL GAINS TAX got time in the Democratic debate but not the mortgage crisis, the environment, or healthcare.

Because the moderators are themselves very, very wealthy, and as very wealthy people, the capital gains tax is important to them. And important to keep low.

Repugnant fools.

Sources: The Daily Howler
Snopes