Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the White House press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

There will be a new Gaggle strip, fully colored, every weekday. Stay tuned for a list of characters.

Click here for previous strips.

Cindy Sheehan. Cindy Sheehan. Cindy Sheehan.

I only do that to satisfy what I assume is a "Cindy Sheehan name content quota" in place for any newspaper article written on any subject related to the War in Iraq, whether it's about her or not.

On the website for the Waco Tribune, you'll find an article about counter-protest to Cindy Sheehan's anti-war Crawford camporee (thanks to The Anchoress for the pointer) that's gearing up. Here's how the article describes the counter-protest:

Johnson alluded to a forthcoming caravan scheduled to arrive in Crawford next Saturday after snaking through the southwest from San Francisco. The event, called “You Don't Speak for Me, Cindy,” is being
led by a mother who has a Marine son.

Media Matters for America, a website dedicated to promoting the baseless theory that the media consistently delivers "conservative misinformation," must be stopped. They constantly lie and deceive to make it appear as though the media is lying. Usually, they are not. The website is consistently promoting Frankenesque liberal propaganda using lies and deliberate distortions.

I need volunteers to help me with my new website, Media Doesn't Matter to America. I have been running it solo but I need people who will simply drop me an e-mail every so once in a while pointing out a falsehood on their website. I will give those who submit pointers due credit for their help.

The website has gained some amount of attention but needs much more.

Here is the link: www.journalhome.com/mediadoesntmatter

Today's Washington Post features one of those headlines that make people who want to have an honest debate on illegal immigration shake their heads ruefully.

The headline reads: "Ranch Turned Over to Immigrants"

Would you know, from reading that headline that the immigrants in question were illegal immigrants and they won the ranch in a civil lawsuit?

Neither would I.

Words are important, and for the newspaper to simply identify the lawbreakers as "immigrants" is plainly inaccurate, nor it is honest for the Post to say only that the ranch was "turned over" to them.

The facts of the story are important, I think, to the ongoing national debate about illegal immigration and the headline could have reflected the story far more accurately.. There are those who do not believe that the word "illegal" is in any way essential to the debate, but it's clear that reasonable people on either side of the issue disagree entirely. It's wrong for the Post to inject its own particular bias on the issue into this headline. More importantly, it does a great disservice to people who want to debate the issue honestly and openly, without resorting to distortion.

One of the more worrying ongoing stories is the arrest of several men for involvement in a conspiracy, hatched in California's Folsom prison to attack Jewish sites and synagogues around the state. What's worrying is that one of the men apparently converted to a radical form of Islam while in prison.

For obvious reasons, some attention has been focused on the California Penal system's system for vetting clergy. The LA Times carried two stories on the subject yesterday, and as usual, the story is the dog that didn't bark. In this case, the dog that didn't ask questions about who was speaking to it.

The first story is about the general threat of radical Islamic recruiting in American prisons, and the tenor of the story is that there's really nothing to worry about:

           The left-wing organization Media Matters (MMFA) appears to have been caught red-handed in an ugly and false smear attack against Cliff Kincaid, editor of Accuracy in Media (AIM) and president of America's Survival, Inc. In an August 19, 2005, item entitled,  "AIM's Kincaid posted 'letter' from Afghan ambassador thanking him for petition to extradite Newsweek's Isikoff," Media Matters clearly implies that Kincaid fabricated a letter from an Afghan ambassador. However, every indication reveals that Kincaid did no such thing.

John Tierney, who has taken over the retiring William Safire’s op-ed slot in The New York Times, weighs in today with a  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/opinion/20tierney.html  column comparing golf to other Pleistocene interests of men. A self-confessed golf-hater, Tierney spends his 800 words ringing through a series of "men are from Mars" cliches. His sole insight, from a round of playing disc (or Frisbee) golf? Men like to look down on a savannah-like landscape and shoot something at it.

The answers.com bio for Tierney says, among other things, "Like Safire, Tierney writes from a conservative point-of-view; he has exhibited some signs of libertarianism." I haven’t seen much of his work. I hope the rest of it exhibits some signs of originality.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller drew headlines for the odd practice of writing a letter to the editor of his own Book Review. (It's almost like writing a letter to himself.) He's highly offended that anyone would suggest he doesn't have a passion for tough reporting on liberals. (Earth to Keller: how about that little Air America scandal?) The actual letter from today's paper is here. In fighting against the idea that the media is biased (at least to the left), he's joined by Bill Moyers and Eric "What Liberal Media?" Alterman. That says a lot. The original reviewer was libertarian Judge Richard Posner, who posits a liberal bias, but also could draw conservative rebuttals, with sentences like this: