Back during the Clinton years, we often heard liberal reporters state that the press and public should stay out of a president's personal life. Fast-forward seven years later to today at the UN when Reuters News Service photographer Rick Wilking snapped a picture of a note President Bush was writing to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice which stated: "I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible."

How about that right to privacy?

UPDATE 09-15. This story has been updated.

The media continue to use the 60th anniversary of the United Nations as a platform to criticize U.S. foreign aid as “second lowest of any wealthy country.” This is part of an ongoing, celebrity-filled push to get the United States to give billions of dollars in aid – totally ignoring the massive contributions already made by American charities.

The General Assembly has been debating what are called U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which attempt to mandate that each industrialized nation give 0.7 percent of its Gross National Product to foreign aid. The media have used the event to misrepresent U.S. foreign aid and to highlight celebrities like actress Angelia Jolie, an outspoken supporter of increased taxpayer-funded aid.

ABC’s “Good Morning America” interviewed Jolie September 13, along with with Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of the U.N. Millennium Project. Sachs is author of “The End of Poverty,” in which he indicted the United States for supposedly lagging behind other countries in aid for the poor. The two have produced a documentary about a trip to Kenya that is being shown on MTV on September 14.

Republicans were able to gain power during the mid 90’s in part by promising to abolish welfare as we know it. However, as these reformers once motivated by the idealism of their convictions have grown accustomed to the perks of public office, they are no longer quite so eager to bring about the abolition of these programs as they are to expand entitlement programs to create whole new levels of dependency.

One of the surest ways to maintain one’s hold on power, to extend the scope of government, and to minimize criticism of one’s pet projects is to couch these in terms of defending some venerable institution. Environmentalists have so mastered the technique that now those daring to question this movement are characterized as being in favor of dirty water and bunny massacres.

As a nation founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, most Americans view marriage and family as one of the building blocks of a stable social order. Thus, those brave enough to question a proposal being introduced by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback will no doubt be cast as enemies of children and families. But the things these critics are really standing up for are just as important and perhaps even more fundamental values such as self-reliance and a sense of personal sobriety that one does not always get the things one wants especially if one is not patient enough to follow the proper steps in their own time to acquire them.

Is the Reagan Revolution finally coming to an end? “Progressives” like Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift certainly would like to think so. In fact, in a recent op-ed, Eleanor contends that the wake of Katrina is the death knell for such heinous things as tax cuts and smaller government:

“If there’s an upside to Katrina, it’s that the Republican agenda of tax cuts, Social Security privatization and slashing government programs is over. It may be too much to predict an upsurge of progressive government, but the environment and issues of poverty, race and class are back on the nation’s radar screen.”

Of course, never one to suppress an opinion no matter how caustic, Eleanor couldn’t resist giving President Bush a few kicks while he’s down:

As reported here yesterday, the Associated Press thoroughly misrepresented and understated better than expected inflation data that was released by the Labor Department. Today, Reuters botched a report released by the Commerce Department concerning retail sales:

“U.S. retail sales dropped by a larger-than-expected 2.1 percent in August, the sharpest drop in almost four years, after car purchases collapsed from July's near-record level, government data showed on Wednesday.”

Unfortunately, Reuters chose not to inform its readers that the drop in car sales was expected for a number of reasons. First, July was a blowout month for automakers due to huge incentives. Second, August is historically a bad month for the car industry as it prepares to rollout the new model year in September.

Here’s how Bloomberg reported the same data:

CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen vented yesterday on CBSNews.com about how mum John Roberts has been during questioning, refusing to take the bait on hot-button questions posed by liberal senators. But in doing so, Cohen gives away his bias: he'd prefer a Supreme Court justice who believes in judicial activism, rather than judicial restraint:

Roberts took the so-called "Ginsburg Test" for refusing to answer Committee questions — dubiously named in honor of the 1993 Court nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to a new extreme.

He invoked it so many times, and in such an eager fashion, that they ought to do a Saturday Night Live Skit about it — a guy gets asked if he wants fries or a salad and he answers that he isn’t comfortable answering the question because it eventually may come before the Court.

To Republicans on the panel, Roberts was happy to expound upon all the many things a judge must not do, or say, or think, or resolve, when it comes to the law. He was happy to talk about how and why the judiciary must often and typically be a passive partner in the dance between governmental branches.

He thus gave succor to those on the right who hope that the newly-constituted Supreme Court will be less reluctant than its predecessor in striking down Congressional legislation or in challenging the authority of the executive branch.

The crowded blog search space may soon contract now that Google has debuted its Blog Search service. Like competing services Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, and Ice Rocket, the database relies on site notification rather than crawling. Like Feedster and Ice Rocket, Google's index uses RSS feeds as its data source.

Google's entry is still beta quality but in some informal testing, I found it had picked up a number of blogs which its competitors had ignored. Things are about to get even more interesting as blog searching becomes increasingly sophisticated. I wonder which Google competitor will bite the dust first?

In a report on the United Nations summit during the 1pm hour of CNN’s Live From, anchor Kyra Phillips confused the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, with another well-known Bolton:

Kyra Phillips: "Now, I've seen Michael Bolton sitting behind the President. Obviously not now, we're looking at different live pictures. Are we going to hear from him? Or have we heard from him?"

Richard Roth: "Well, you may -- you're not going to hear him sing. I think you said Michael Bolton, John Bolton the US ambassador-"

Phillips (embarrassed): "John Bolton. Richard, thank you so much. You're taking me back now to, what, the early '80s? My goodness."

Roth: "Yes, and this ambassador has much shorter hair."

Phillips: "And no relation, right? Maybe we should make that clear."

Roth: "No relation. Though some of his remarks has -- have caused some hair-raising reaction from advocates for some groups...."

Transcript continues below. Video available in Windows or Real.

Editor & Publisher reports on a cozy little deal made by The Washington Post and The New York Times in which the two MSM giants let each other know in advance what their most important product - the Front Page - will be, every day.

"As part of a secret arrangement formed more than 10 years ago, the Post and Times send each other copies of their next day's front pages every night. The sharing began as a courtesy between Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld in the early 1990s and has continued ever since.
"'It seemed logical, because for years we would always try to get a copy of each other's papers as soon as they came out,' Downie tells E&P. 'It made sense to both of us to make it simpler for everybody.' Lelyveld, who left the Times in 2001, declined comment."

In any other industry, this would be called "collusion" and the Times and Post editorial pages would be in high dudgeon, demanding anti-trust investigations by the Department of Justice. Go here for the full E & P report.

Can you imagine what the outrage would be if it were Microsoft and Apple exchanging their product plans every day? Or GM and Ford?

What else have the Post and Times decided to play nice with each other on? After all, it wasn't that long ago that the two papers co-owned The International Herald Tribune. Have they divided up national advertising accounts? Agreed on who would cover which government agencies aggressively? Coordinated recruiting operations? Exchanged lists of favored politicos and lists of those targeted for tough treatment?

Over at Brainster, there is an item about the media seizing on Bush's statement that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breaching of the levees." Eleanor Clift said Bush "will regret those words just as Condoleezza Rice did her comment that nobody could imagine a plane flying into a building like a missile."

But all the predictions and simulations before Katrina predicted nothing but water going above the levees, not breaking them.

One simulation was called "Hurricane Pam":

"Hurricane Pam brought sustained winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana and storm surge that topped levees in the New Orleans area. More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, state, federal and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a five-day exercise held this week at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.

The media use a new parrot-phrase when a lack of new oil refineries is blamed for rising gas costs. The talking heads are teaching people to say that no one wants a refinery near them (Not In My Backyard, or NIMBY).

Actually, many towns would welcome the jobs and economic boost a refinery would bring, and some towns have granted tax breaks to oil producers.

But what's really happening is that environmentalists send activists and lawyers to block attempts to build refineries and then claim grass-root opposition. The media, of course, goes along with this.

Without new drilling and refineries, we remain vulnerable economically and militarily, which are the REAL reasons that international anti-U.S. groups use emotional ecological issues to disguise their real agenda.

Tom Johnson, a long-time friend and colleague, forwarded to me a passage from Weekly Standard writer Christopher Caldwell observations on the tenth anniversary of the Murdoch-funded think mag:

But the attacks on the World Trade Center lowered the temperature of almost all my political beliefs to way below boiling. They revealed most political stuff as simply not worth getting riled up over. Defending the country against attack is a first-order issue. Defending the country against, say, gay marriage or affirmative action (or promoting them, as the case may be) is a second-order issue. Defending the country against, say, bias at the television networks is an irrelevancy that I would not take 20 minutes away from my novel-reading to worry about.

In another New York Times story seemingly spurred by Democratic complaints, Philip Shenon reports Wednesday: "The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that his office had received accusations of fraud and waste in the multibillion-dollar relief programs linked to Hurricane Katrina and would investigate how no-bid contracts were awarded to several large, politically well-connected companies."Of course, there's an Iraq connection: "Their comments appeared to be a response, in part, to charges from Democratic lawmakers that such a large, hurriedly organized federal relief program could produce the sort of contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have identified in the Bush administration's reconstruction programs in postwar Iraq."

"[IG Richard Skinner] said that his investigators would focus on several no-bid contracts awarded over the last two weeks to large, politically influential companies, including the Fluor Corporation of California, a major donor to the Republican Party, and the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La. Shaw is a client of Joe M. Allbaugh, a consultant who is the former head of FEMA and was President Bush's campaign manager in 2000. Another of Mr. Allbaugh's clients -- Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the giant defense contractor once led by Vice President Dick Cheney -- is doing major repairs at Navy facilities along the Gulf Coast that were damaged by the hurricane. That work is being done under a $500 million contract with the Defense Department."

Gloria Borger's Early Show recap of yesterday's confirmation hearings for Judge John Roberts was dominated by exchanges with liberal senators pressing the Chief Justice nominee from the Left on abortion, but Borger closed off her report noting that conservatives are concerned about Roberts's views on overturning Roe v. Wade: "Conservatives are listening very closely to what Judge Roberts has to say about Roe versus Wade."

Although it is obvious from her own reporting that there is an equal if not stronger liberal obsession with preserving Roe at all costs from future reversal or weakening, Borger doesn't impute any political motivations to Roberts's critics, presenting the issue, rather, as one of whether the "precedent of Roe versus Wade so strong that Roberts would not vote to overturn it," as if long-held "strong" precedents in Court history somehow innoculate themselves from reversal on constitutional grounds when a future Court decides the reasoning of the precedent was grievously flawed (as the Court did in Brown v. Board of Education in reversing Plessy v. Ferguson).

The Washington Post reported today on the Virginia gubernatorial debate between Republican Jerry Kilgore and Democrat Tim Kaine, noting how Kilgore "faltered under a series of questions by moderator Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press."

Russert asked Kilgore whether he would sign a bill to outlaw abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Kilgore called the question hypothetical. Russert followed up by asking if he would veto a tax hike. He said he would. "That's a hypothetical question!" Russert said, "prompting laughter from the luncheon crowd of more than 500 Northern Virginia business executives," the Post reports. The story then quotes poli-sci professor/pundit Larry Sabato: "Kilgore was nervous and tense. He sounded bad. He argued badly," said Sabato, who will moderate the last gubernatorial debate next month. "This was Kaine's best performance ever." The Post doesn't really note that Northern Virginia business executives in this crowd want higher taxes for better roads and better business for them.

Appearing in today's Boston Globe...

MOHAMMAD-MAHMOUD OULD MOHAMEDOUTime to talk to Al Qaeda?

September 14, 2005

AS THE WAR between the United States and Al Qaeda enters its fifth year, the nature of the armed, transnational Islamist group's campaign remains misunderstood. With the conflict viewed largely as an open-and-shut matter of good versus evil, nonmilitary engagement with Al Qaeda is depicted as improper and unnecessary.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/14/time_to_talk_to_al_qaeda/

Call me idealistic, but I somehow always expect that correspondents, videographers, and editors -- especially those on network shows -- will learn to hold themselves to higher reporting and promotion standards in the inteest of ojectivity. Of course, I nearly always wind up asking myself, "What were you thinking?"

Perhaps, though, it would just be easier to ask the folks on CNN and Reuters the same thing. Twice today, I saw them employ typical promotional manipulation tactics of George Bush's taking responsibility for the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and wind up changing the context of his so-called accountability.

In the first instance, Reuters used the headline 'BUSH: I TAKE RESPONSIBILITY.' But in reality, what he really said was, "...government failed at all levels, Federal, state, and local. TO THE EXTENT THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DIDN'T FULLY DO ITS JOB RIGHT, I TAKE RESPONSIBILITY," adding that he wants a full report on the breakdowns and where they occured so he presumably knows what "the extent" IS.

Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington 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.

Click here for previous strips.

There were some gruesome findings yesterday in New Orleans.

Some were discovered in a hospital. Others in a nursing home.

Yet, this didn’t stop New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd from continuing her bitter evisceration of our president.

No, not a moment’s mourning for this crusader. Not a second to consider the innocents that were lost in these medical facilities, or the friends and family members who are grieving.

Instead, Ms. Dowd gets more and more vitriolic and venomous with each passing day. Just listen to her apparent glee as she announces the increase in the hurricane fatalities while linking responsibility to the White House:

[Brent Baker posted this item on behalf of MRC President Brent Bozell to provide for a discussion on his blog page about his TV appearance.] On Tuesday's NewsNight, CNN anchor Aaron Brown set up an interview with Bozell by complaining that “we were called a 'race-baiter' by a conservative media Web site. Needless to say, we don't agree, which made our conversation with the piece's author, Brent Bozell, that much more interesting tonight.” Brown pleaded to Bozell: “Why do you call me, little old innocent me, you know, why do you call me a 'race-baiter' for asking the question [clip from an earlier show]: 'Do you think black America is sitting there thinking, “If these were middle class white people, there'd be cruise ships in New Orleans, not the Superdome”?"

In fact, the “race-baiter” formulation did not appear in Bozell's column, but was in a September 3 NewsBusters headline: “Race-Baiting by Blitzer and Brown; Race Raised by Williams and Koppel.”

Excerpts from the previous NewsBusters item and Bozell's column with which Brown took exception, plus a transcript of the September 13 CNN interview follow.

Video Excerpt #1: RealPlayer or Windows Media
Video Excerpt #2: RealPlayer or Windows Media