Last week an article came out claiming that the big brother tactics of the Patriot Act were abused to go after a poor little old college student just trying to do a paper on Chairman Mao. Apparently he had requested "The Little Red Book" and the next thing you know agents "dressed in black suits with thin black ties, 'just like the guys in Men in Black'" showed up to harass him and deliver a brow beating signed by President Bush. The gullible college jumped in on the act:

"My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think," he said. Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk. "I shudder to think of all the students I've had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that," he said. "Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless."

Yes, completely harmless, unless you happen to have been killed by him.  (more...)

Check out the Free Market Project's report on The Media's Top Ten Economic Myths of 2005.

In a somewhat sad but, unfortunately, true article, the UK Guardian Unlimited ran a story written by the Guardian's Jamie Wilson Titled: "Stars turn backs on America's troops in Iraq". 

Wilson goes on to directly charge that today’s Hollywood elites cite "danger" as well as an "anti-war stance" as to what keeps celebrities away. Wilson also cited, perhaps a bit too distressingly, that the "Show now depends on Christian hip-hop groups."

In an amazingly influential way, the New York Times article on NSA intelligence gathering last week has touched off a feeding frenzy in the press, where every outlet is rushing to get out their stories about how the Bush administration is violating the rights of average American citizens in their paranoid fantasy about terrorist enemies. The latest entry comes from U.S. News & World Report as they reveal, in news that's sure to shock America, that the government is actually taking concerns about possible nuclear terrorism seriously.

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned.

(Down at the bottom of the piece, we find out that "officials... reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. Which means that they're either lying, or putting political correctness ahead of efficiency.) In any event, this is obviously a bad thing.

Oh, you don't think it's obviously a bad thing? Well, read further.

Washington Post staff writer Jonathan Weisman had the lead story on page A01 of the paper: "Patriot Act Extension Is Reduced To a Month," with the subheading being "House Action Overcomes Senate's Longer Reprieve"

It is entirely reasonable to believe that Mr. Weisman's copy would be on the renewal of the Patriot Act itself, and the many different paths it took to get where it wound up. That would be the logical progression of thought, but alas, this is the Washington Post, one of America's foremost liberal organs.

The little Washington Post Magazine that comes with the Sunday paper had two episodes of weirdness this week. First, to promote their typically one-sided sympathetic cover story on two lesbians who felt forced to move out of "backward" Virginia as it voted to prevent so-called "gay marriage," Post reporter Michelle Boorstein signed on the Post "Discussions" site Monday at midday to answer reader questions. (The article's tilted title was "Paradise Lost: After years of hiding their love, Barbara Kenny and Tibby Middleton found a place where they felt comfortable being a couple -- until Virginia's lawmakers chased them across the Potomac." Not that they felt chased, but that they were chased, as if the legislators were running behind them with pitchforks.)