With the exception of a few lines, this October 7 Christian Science Monitor story by Warren Richey about Harriet Miers could have been written by the White House. Its thesis is that prior judicial experience is not a reliable indicator of how well an individual will do as a justice if appointed and confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court. Among a number of reasonably thoughtful quotes from academics, however, this line stands out:

Snobbery is no small part of the debate over Miers, analysts say.

The "analysts" who said this are not identified, however, and the only support for a "snobbery" element to the debate is this line:

ABC, CBS, NBC skip $40-billion catastrophe at mortgage giant.

     Network news continues to ignore the ongoing $40-billion crisis at mortgage giant Fannie Mae, despite new accounting problems and a recent one-day stock drop of 11 percent.

     Print media, led by The Wall Street Journal, have pointed out the many flaws in the Fannie Mae operation. A September 29 Journal piece said that investigators had “found new accounting violations, including evidence that the company may have overvalued assets, underreported credit losses and misused tax credits…”

     That report and others received no network news attention. In the six months from April 5 to Oct. 5, 2005, the three broadcast networks combined mentioned Fannie Mae just twice even though the stock has dropped almost $30 billion in value during 2005. One of those reports was a passing mention of Fannie Mae mortgages and the other was a spirited defense of the company by liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) complaining that “you have the administration in an ideologically driven attack on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” In the June 12 report from “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Frank went on to criticize “free market fundamentalism going after the two institutions that have done a great deal to make the 30-year mortgage possible through the secondary mortgage market.”

     Frank’s comments were an attempt to camouflage the massive wrongdoings at Fannie Mae, including $10.8 billion in overstated earnings – and that doesn’t count the new accounting problems. During the six months that the networks ignored the firm, it has been the subject of congressional hearings, appointed a new chief executive and twice failed to meet deadlines for its earnings reports. In addition, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned that the size of Fannie Mae posed a threat to the economy.

     None of that was aired on the network news shows.

     This is consistent with findings of an April 4, 2005, Free Market Project study about Fannie Mae media coverage entitled “Government Sponsored Enron.”  That analysis found broadcast news covered the Enron debacle far more than the crisis at the mortgage leader, even though Fannie Mae’s accounting problems were 19 times the amount of Enron’s. Fannie Mae, a Government-Sponsored Entity, has a special congressional charter, special tax breaks and an implied taxpayer-funded bailout if things go wrong.

     In fact, the networks are still discussing Enron far more than Fannie Mae. The Enron fiasco has become network shorthand for business corruption, cropping up at least 33 times in six months.

     Enron has been linked consistently with every kind of corporate misconduct. New York Times reporter Judith Miller went even further on the July 6 “Good Morning America,” saying, “From Watergate to the financial scandals of Enron, to the abuses that took place in Abu Ghraib prison, all of these stories required confidential sources.” The August 3 “CBS Morning News” also told viewers of “another settlement for investors burned by the Enron collapse.” None of these stories discussed the more current – and more expensive – catastrophe of Fannie Mae.

     Unlike the broadcast networks, both Fox News and CNN acknowledged the Fannie Mae problem. Fox was the only network to do a complete story on the issue. CNN addressed the topic twice, once in a brief about Greenspan’s criticism of the company. The other time was in a June 15 “Judy Woodruff’s Inside Politics” story about “the revolving door between key White House jobs and big business.” Rather than use that opportunity to point to the huge controversy at Fannie Mae, where several key Clinton staffers once found a home, reporters Suzanne Malveaux and Dana Bash downplayed that and highlighted problems for Bush.

     Malveaux simply said, “Clinton budget director Franklin Raines left the White House for Fannie Mae, a private mortgage giant backed by the government.” According to the October 5 Washington Post, Raines and former chief financial officer J. Timothy Howard are being sued by Fannie Mae shareholders after “they were forced from Fannie Mae last year amid allegations that they flouted accounting rules to boost earnings, which in turn triggered millions of dollars in bonuses for themselves and other top executives.”

     However, the reporters didn’t mention that. Instead, Bash followed Malveaux’s mention of Raines with this: “But energy ties of Mr. Bush and of the vice president has created a perception problem from day one here about the president’s environmental policy.”

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, on Tuesday night, quoted and played some video from a September BBC interview with actor Donald Sutherland, including a tearful rant against President Bush and American conservatives: "We have children. How dare we take their legacy from them? How dare we? It's shameful what we are doing to our world.” Scarborough read how Sutherland, who plays the villainous Republican Speaker of the House on ABC's Commander in Chief, charged that Bush and GOP leaders “only care about profit. They will destroy our lives. And so it's something you have to care about if you're passionate about the lives of our children because we've stolen their future.” I tracked down the BBC's September 27 posting of a 25-minute RealPlayer video of the interview aired on the September 16 HARDtalk Extra and when asked about “mean-spiritedness" in U.S. politics, Sutherland bemoaned the censoring of Kanye West from NBC's re-play of the fundraising concert, as well as how, after the Dixie Chicks were critical of President Bush, a radio chain supposedly “organizes a purchase of all of their CDs and then has tractors running over them in Detroit. I mean, we're back in burning books in, wherever, in Germany."

Video: Real or Windows Media

All scientists opposed to the theory of the green house effect were paid by the petrolum companies if I remember right reading in Scientific American many years ago.  They only publish peer- reviewed and approved articles.

I have a plot of US tornadoes , they were 100 or so per year in the 1910s raising to 1200-1400 in the end of the 90's. Then Bush ordered silence on their numbers or did he ?

I got interested in the trend  in hurricanes so  I gathered data from  the web best sites to plot the number my self, obody wants to hel you see.. Amaizingly  analyzing the numbers in Excell  by whatever  method gave  me a total statu quo, meaning absolutly no movement. I do not beleive it at all, the chances of having no changes is less than 1% according to my serious math noze. So they have the nerves to cheat on the numbers ? 

It is said that justice is blind meaning since we are all created equal in the eyes of God we should be treated the same when it comes to the application of the law. It, therefore, follows that evil deeds are not made any more heinous when perpetrated by members of one particular ethic group or upon members of a particular ethnic group.

Ashame the mainstream media does not aspire to this standard when it comes to reporting these horrors transpiring on the underside of life. For often crimes inflicted upon minorities by members of majorities receive much more condemnation than crimes inflicted by minorities upon members of the majority in order to adhere to their prewritten script of the American as world oppressor.

News organizations across the nation were quick to report on a horrible incident in Tifton, Georgia where a number of migrant workers were killed and a woman raped by three scumbags that made a career of robbing these day laborers. Why then, has not the mainstream media been as quick to highlight the plight of a woman one state over in Florida gang raped by fourteen Hispanic transients?

The nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court has produced lots of reaction from the left and particularly from the right. There have been charges that she lacks an education from a top-rated law school, lacks a certifiably conservative background and, since she has never been a judge, might be lax in adhering to the Constitution.

And now she lacks what the Associated Press apparently considers an important factor: the financial wherewithal necessary for the position. That’s right, the AP is questioning whether Harriet Miers is rich enough to sit on the highest court in the land.

In a sneeringly elitist piece titled, “Miers Wealth Shrank During Time in D.C.,” the AP, after years of denigrating President Bush, Dick Cheney and anyone else in the Administration as rich, greedy tools of corporate America, now informs us that:

Time Magazine’s cover story for this week is called The Battle Over Gay Teens, however when one takes a few moments to examine the contents of this verbose six-page article the author, John Cloud, really is talking about the promotion and acceptance of gay teens in America.The unbelievable bias for the promotion of gay teens is absolutely amazing despite the fact that Cloud attempts to cite a few conservative or Christian viewpoints.

Here are a few blatant examples of bias that Cloud cites…

Reuters reports PBS has named departing Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler as its first ombudsman, in an act which can only be seen as a defensive political strategy against conservatives. (The liberals are even upset at this tepid step.) The public broadcasting elite has been appalled at  the naming of two ombudsmen at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting -- Ken Bode for liberals, Bill Schulz for conservatives. (Although that is a fairly quiet blog.) They prefer the NPR model (and the Washington Post model) -- one generally liberal ombudsman who rarely touches on conservative complaints, and usually finds them wanting when they're evaluated. This is Getler's record at the Washington Post. Liberal bias was not one of Getler's big issues.

My favorite supporting character in the legendary strip, “Peanuts,” is Pigpen. His unique trait is raising a cloud of dirt everywhere, even on a clean, dry sidewalk. Pigpen came to mind when I saw the White House Press Corps’ question President Bush Wednesday on his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

First, the status of the nomination. Monday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid held a nearly unprecedented press conference with Harriet Miers, just hours after her nomination. Reid said that she was an “exceptional” candidate, and “the sort of person who should be nominated.”

In short, the leader of the opposition all but endorsed the nominee.

What’s the consequence of that? Slam dunk. A home run in the bottom of the ninth. Game, set and match.

After a long delay and some unsatisfying back-and-forth between bloggers and Times ombudsman Barney Calame, Thursday's New York Times prints a Raymond Hernandez story that finally notes the Democratic scandal involving aides to New York Sen. Chuck Schumer obtaining the credit report of possible Republican Senate candidate Michael Steele, the Lt. Governor of Maryland. The piece is at best dutiful, with little juice, from the dull and uninformative headline ("Democrats Are on Defensive In Maryland Senate Race") on down.

Hernandez opens: "National Republicans, who face an uphill battle in their efforts to capture the open United States Senate seat in heavily Democratic Maryland next year, are trying to exploit potential legal problems that Democrats are now suddenly facing in that race. The Republicans are seizing on a disclosure that two researchers at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee improperly obtained the credit report of Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a Republican who is considering a bid for the Senate seat. In recent days, Republicans have sought to put Democrats on the defensive, saying the incident underscores just how concerned the opposition is to the prospect of a Steele candidacy."

After initially putting the first chapter of fired CBS producer Mary Mapes's book, Truth and Duty, on its web site, Amazon.com has apparently pulled the plug on the enterprise. Visitors to the online book retailer can no longer read the excerpt as it no longer shows up in listings for the print or audio versions of the book.

Was the excerpt yanked because of the several objectively incorrect assertions it contained, and the subsequent blog firestorm their exposition caused? Only Amazon or Mapes's publisher, St. Martin’s Press knows for sure.

To read an extensive excerpt from the book as quoted on NewsBusters, click here

UPDATE 10-06 11:05: Oddly enough, Amazon.com has now removed the print version of the book from its site entirely. This got me wondering what happened so I called and was told by a sales rep: "If it's not available from a publisher, then we pull it from the web site. The only version we're apparently going to have is the abridged audio version." Strangely, Barnes & Noble still has the hardcover available. Sounds like someone got too happy pushing the "Delete" key.

From the AP:

The avalanche of high quality video, photos and e-mailed news material from citizens following the July 7 bombings in London marked a turning point for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the head of its global news division said Wednesday.

Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC World Service and Global News Division, told a conference the broadcaster's prominent use of video and other material contributed by ordinary citizens signaled that the BBC was evolving from being a broadcaster to a facilitator of news.

"We don't own the news any more," Sambrook said. "This is a fundamental realignment of the relationship between large media companies and the public."