My vision for this great county is:
A land where property rights are respected.
Politics are conducted according to the same kind of rules as boxing.
People are free to protect themselves.
Your hand in my pocket is a sign of intimacy, not of your greed.
People are free to succeed.
Failure is not blamed on others' success.

Life is good. Lets keep moving forward, and sharing our vision for the success of our great society.

        There has been no apology or retraction from the left-wing Media Matters (MMFA) after it was apparently caught red-handed (see original item) for falsely implying that Cliff Kincaid, from Accuracy in Media (AIM) and America's Survival, fabricated a letter from an Afghan ambassador. The day after the August 19, 2005, MMFA item, Kincaid posted scanned images (.pdf) on his site of the actual letter and the actual envelope in which the letter was received. It was an action that flat-out debunked Media Matters' implication. Kincaid also issued a public statement denouncing Media Matters for the "false and defamatory charge."

I've heard lots of people say that "pictures don't lie," which always makes me laugh.  As a photography student I understand just how much work often goes in to creating exactly the right message to be conveyed in a photograph.  And in this day and age, with all the manipulation of images, it should never be taken for granted that a picture actually represents "the truth."

Well, I have noticed recently as I flip through Yahoo slide shows another interesting use of pictures, one that I am sure is not new, and that is the choice of images to display under a given topic.  When I look at the slideshows for "Iraq War" or "London Bombings" what I see is this:  several images of pain and suffering, people in anguish over death and mutilation and other atrocities in one picture, and then in the next image a picture of a world leader (Bush, Blair) smiling and laughing, shaking hands, celebrating or otherwise looking foolish.  Next picture please:  oh more pain and suffering, awful destruction!  Loved ones blown up!  Oh the humanity!  Next slide:  Bush at a podium speaking at the VFW.  More pain and suffering, Bush smiling and waving from the top steps of a plane.  etc.

Random thoughts:

1. Another sign the Washington Post REALLY wants Cindy Sheehan to succeed. See this headline from Sunday: "Refusal to See Sheehan Is Second-Guessed: A Decision Characteristic of Bush Has the Potential to Be a Consequential Act." And....it has the potential to be forgotten by almost everybody after a while.

2. The convention of the Asian-American Journalists Association transpired over the weekend in Minneapolis. There is one way to display instead of dispel the idea of a liberal media bias: ooh, ooh, a Saturday Q&A with "legendary comic" Al Franken!

3. I wouldn’t normally pull a food critic over and ticket him for media bias, but WashPost foodie Tom Sietsema has this annoying reference to "a framed photograph of the new restaurant's chef, Peter Chang, alongside a beaming Hu Jintao, the president of China." Do the Post and other media have to present dictators as if they were actually elected presidents of something?

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine cover story was one part ‘Mad Max’ mixed with one part poor economics. The 7,400 word piece by Peter Maass was a gusher of scaremongering end-of-world predictions and claimed that an oil “crisis” is imminent. Maass filled his story with comments and views from Matthew Simmons, author of a new book called “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.” The story did its best to paint a great scary oil conspiracy and an inevitable “crisis ahead” “whether in a year or 2 or 10.”

Maass joined the growing journalism crowd by calling oil prices a “record.” Just as others before him, Maass ignored basic math and didn’t adjust the prices for inflation. Maass also referred to the threat of oil hitting $100. But then he quoted Simmons who said “I wasn’t talking about low triple digits.” Yet the same story said that oil prices would drop again. To quote Maass, “So after a brief windfall for producers, oil prices would slide as recession sets in.”

In an eyebrow-raiser, New York Times head editor Bill Keller writes a letter to his own paper, lambasting a recent Sunday Book Review by U.S. Court of Appeals judge and law professor Richard Posner, a catch-all review of several books positing media bias on both left and right (including a favorable nod to ''Weapons of Mass Distortion" by MRC President Brent Bozell).

Keller claims Posner's "market determinism" ignores the dynamics that make papers like his great, such as "the competitive gratification of being first to discover a buried story," which no doubt explains the Times' wall-to-wall-coverage of the Air America scandal (where it's been beaten locally by the New York Post, the New York Sun, and the New York Daily News).

Washington Post writer Dana Milbank, in his August 17, 2005 live chat on the topic "[Cindy] Sheehan and the Antiwar Movement," admitted for the record that when Cindy Sheehan “held a protest outside the Post a few weeks ago…for the most part, the media ignored her.” However, now that Sheehan has become an irritant to President Bush and not the media, Milbank compared her favorably with civil rights figure Rosa Parks.

Milbank began the proceedings with an opening statement that included this quip: "...let's get on with the chat and determine, once and for all, whether Cindy Sheehan is Rosa Parks [who began a legendary protest against racial segregation] or Lyndon Larouche [a convicted criminal, infamous conspiracy theorist, and perpetual Presidential candidate].”

One wonders how The New York Times can fairly cover and opine on eminent domain issues when their new headquarters is being built on land legally stolen from one private party and bequeathed to The Times.

Jon Friedman says no apologies are warranted for Sheehan circus coverage.

Believing that America can't get enough of its Protest Mom, the news media cover every aspect of her story.

And how exactly is this different from the Americans that can't get enough of Natalee Holloway's mother pleading for her daughter? Oh, but that is "emotional pornography" and "classic tabloid" journalism.

"It's definitely a happening and we can't ignore it," Keen said

How profound. But what you can se

Tell me if this surprises you. NPR is promoting the idea that rising oil prices will impact the midterm elections and, of course, will be the thing that turns the public against Republicans. If there was ever anyone at NPR who prayed to a higher being, this is what they would pray for.

How do they justify this hypothesis? Because in 1980, long gas lines "cost Carter his re-election".

1. Gas wasn't the only problem with Carter.
2. There are currently no gas lines that I know of, only high prices.
3. Things have changed significantly since 1980, especially in media and the access people have to information from more than 4 or 5 television monopolists and a band of like-minded newspapers.

The Denver Post has finally broken its silence about the developing Air America story. Only, as with the New York Times and the Swift Boat Veterans, the first mention of it is a dismissal followed by a rebuttal. Dick Kreck addresses the scandal in his radio column in today's Entertainment section.

First, the setup:

Bloggers and others are buzzing about another "story" - whether Air America benefited from loans made to its former director, Evan Cohen, by the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in New York. Conservative media, led by the shrill Michelle Malkin, are all over this story, touting it with headlines like, 'AIR AMERICA: STEALING FROM POOR KIDS?!' and wondering why the "mainstream" press isn't.

Ah yes, Michelle Malkin is "shrill". The story is a "'story'". And what's with the scare quotes around "mainstream?" The term has been around for more than a few years, shortened to "MSM" last year around this time during the campaign, when the MSM turned its back, put its fingers in its ears, and started whistling during that other non-story-story.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg is repeatedly surprised by how conservative Supreme Court nominee John Roberts really is, apparently not cognizant of all of her earlier pronouncements about his conservatism. On Inside Washington over the weekend, she declared that after reviewing memos he wrote while working in the Reagan White House counsel’s office, “he is much more conservative than I ever would have guessed. He is on the most conservative side of almost every issue within the Reagan administration." In recent weeks, Totenberg has tagged Roberts as “very conservative,” "very, very conservative" and "very, very, very conservative," as well as "a really conservative guy," "a hardline conservative" and "a clear conservative," to say nothing of being "a conservative Catholic." Three weeks ago on Inside Washington she asserted that she “was actually quite surprised at how, how very, very conservative he was.”

Complete CyberAlert item follows. For today's MRC CyberAlert.