Over the past several days I've received a number of emails from people regarding the subject of my previous article (1), in which I advanced the idea of creating a 'Conservative Convention' in the coming year, for the purpose of sending a "wake-up call" to the leaders of the Republican party prior to the 2008 presidential election.

While I expected a more than a few people to respond to my idea, I never thought that so many of my readers would misinterpret the essence of my proposal, and I have only myself to blame for that. Indeed, I was far too vague in my initial presentation to reasonably expect that many of the folks who read it would truly understand what I had in mind when I wrote it.

Most of the people who responded to me about my piece seemed to think that I was chiefly concerned with creating a conservative third-party, since political conventions are traditionally held by formal parties, and their common aim is to nominate presidential candidates.

Anyone who pays even scant attention to the news cannot have helped but see that CBS news correspondent, Kimberly Dozier, was severely injured by one of those insidious IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) that have been responsible for so many of the casualties to coalition forces and common Iraqi citizens in Iraq over the last few years.

Ms. Dozier is certainly brave enough for taking the call to go to Iraq and attempt to learn what it is like there and to file her stories from that turbulent region. There is certainly no reason to laugh at her injuries. It is also sad that members of her news crew were killed by the same explosion. We see the names of those men in every report about this incident. Cameraman, Paul Douglas, and sound man, James Brolan, lost their lives in pursuit of the story that day. Brave souls all, regardless whether you think their work is ultimately good or bad.

In reporting on President Bush’s nomination of Henry Paulson as his new Secretary of the Treasury, CBS’s Jim Axelrod on Tuesday night suggested that "the administration needs a salesman,” citing how “no matter how much they trumpet 5.3 percent economic growth in the first quarter, 5.2 million more jobs since August 2003, or unemployment down to 4.7 percent, there's another number to contend with. In the most recent CBS News poll, just 34 percent approved of the President's handling of the economy.” But might not part of the problem lie in lack of media attention to the booming economy? For instance, Axelrod’s citation of the 5.3 percent GDP growth in the first quarter, the fastest rate in two-and-a-half years, was the first on the CBS Evening News which ignored it when the number was announced last Thursday.

Earlier is in his story, Axelrod snidely marveled at why anyone would want to join the declining Bush administration: “Leaving a job that paid him $38.3 million last year in salary, stock, and options, to take one that pays 175 grand, and to join the last two and a half years of a struggling administration, the question isn't why the White House would want him, but why he would want the job?" (Transcript follows)

Does Osama bin Laden read the work of left-wing media figures and bloggers? It's quite possible, argues Brendan O'Neill:

When Al Jazeera broadcast Osama bin Laden's latest audiotape in January, it provoked the same sense of déjà vu as Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, recently published by the leftist publishing house Verso.

The book is a collection of every public utterance made by the Al Qaeda leader from 1994 to 2004. According to The Observer's excitable reviewer, it shows that he is a "charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician." To me, however, there was something irritatingly familiar rather than surprisingly eloquent about his tone and turns of phrase.

Then it struck me: Bin Laden is a blogger. Not literally, of course, but he certainly speaks the language of the blogosphere. He references Robert Fisk and Michael Moore, those darlings of the anti-war Web. His latest statement recommends that people read Rogue State by William Blum, whose e-mail newsletter, Anti-Empire Report, is frequently republished and discussed in the left-wing blogosphere.

It got a little crazy in the 8:30 half hour of "The Early Show" on CBS as co-host Harry Smith, hosted a segment on "organic furniture." Smith interviewed Susanna Salk, a special projects editor for "House and Garden" magazine. The segment focused on "green" fashion and the benefits of hemp. Why is this a big deal? Hemp is monitored by the DEA because it resembles marijuana and as USA Today reported, "The DEA says allowing farmers to grow hemp in the USA would undermine the war on drugs."

Smith acknowledged the relationship between hemp and marijuana:

"And every time you say hemp, people are going to giggle because they think they can smoke their chairs."

Last week the press was full of reports on Senator Hillary Clinton's "major speech on energy." A typical report was carried in the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer, picked up from the wire service of the New York Post. But from the evidence in the national press coverage, it does not seem that a single reporter leaned back in his chair and actually thought about what she said on the critical issue of nuclear energy.

The main point of Senator Clinton's speech (other than that she is positioning herself to run for President), was that our national energy policy is trapping us into bad decisions internationally. She said, "Right now, instead of national security dictating our energy policy, our failed energy policy dictates our national security."

Over the weekend, Iraq's foreign minister, Hoshyar Zibari, and Iran's foreign affairs chief held a meeting to discuss, among other things, Iran's nuclear program. Afterward, the two held a press conference. CNN reported on the conference but instead of reporting that Iraq wanted Iran to guarantee its program was for peaceful purposes, the network implied that Iraq was backing its neighbor entirely.

Omar at Iraq the Model caught CNN in its error. Here's what CNN claimed Zibari said:

Iran doesn't claim that they want to obtain a nuclear weapon or a nuclear bomb, so there is no need that we ask them for any guarantee now.

Here's what he actually said, as translated by Omar from the Arabic original:

We respect Iran's and every other nation's right to pursue nuclear technology for research purposes and peaceful use given they accept [giving] the internationally required guarantees that this will not lead to an armament race in the region.

The Sunday before Memorial Day, reporter Kate Zernike allowed Sen. John Kerry to refight his own personal Vietnam War against the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ("Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss"). The Times puts the battle on the front page, and judging by the respectful tone of the story, seems to think the pro-Kerry forces vanquish the Swift Boat Veterans.

"John Kerry starts by showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: 'Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia.' He moves on to the photographs: his boat leaving the base at Ha Tien, Vietnam; the harbor; the mountains fading frame by frame as the boat heads north; the special operations team the boat was ferrying across the border; the men reading maps and setting off flares."

A Reuters employee expressed his/her frustration at a blog posting on Little Green Footballs entitled Swedish Muslims Demand Shari’a. The Reuters individual had found the LGF item from one of the comments posted underneath a Muslim essay praising the "Da Vinci Code" on the Guardian website.

Early yesterday morning at about 3:00 am on the West Coast, someone in Britain connected to the Internet and browsed over to this article at the Guardian by Inayat Bunglawala, media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain: This code could open doors.

Bunglawala’s piece (about the Da Vinci Code) is in the section of the Guardian site where readers can comment, and someone posted a link to LGF as a rebuttal to Bunglawala. Our Swedish British visitor clicked that link, leading him/her/it to this post: Swedish Muslims Demand Shari’a.

Liberal bias is nothing new to the weekly PBS program, This Week in California.  When reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle typically represent the right side of the political spectrum on the show's panel, viewers pretty much know what they're in for.

But the May 19 show took bias to a new level by shamelessly promoting Republican congressional candidate Pete McCloskey over his opponent.  Former U.S. Rep. Pete McCloskey is going up against incumbent Rep. Richard Pombo of Tracy in the upcoming GOP primary for California's 11th Congressional District.

Because of Pombo's position as Chairman of the House Committee on Resources and his vocal opposition to various environmental restrictions, he has become enemy number one to California's environmentalist movement.  Pombo is also being investigated for allegedly receiving funds from indicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the Indian tribes he represented.

A bit of political gender-bending on this morning's Today, as ostensibly conservative radio talk show host Michael Smerconish called for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq while the normally hyper-partisan James Carville did anything but ride to the defense of his fellow Democrat, Congressman William Jefferson, apparently caught with his hand in a $100G cookie jar.

The pair were Katie Couric's guests largely for purposes of discussing the investigation into the possibility that Marines killed numerous Iraqi civilians in cold blood in the city of Haditha. Carville sought to exploit the subject for all its political worth, coming close to excusing the Marines who were directly involved for purposes of condemning those higher up the chain of command.

Mary Claire Kendall writes in Human Events that the "Da Vinci Code," despite all the media hype, has not performed as well as Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." "Passion" made it into the list of top ten all-time grossing films, while "Da Vinci Code" will not. "Passion" also had a fourth of the production budget of "Da Vinci."

"The Da Vinci Code" made $102,481,037 in the first week. But says Kendall:

Now, $102.48 million is not exactly chump change. But, when you consider Ron Howard risked $125 million of Sony’s money making the film and another $125 million marketing the film, it’s underwhelming.

The comparison to The Passion of the Christ, dramatically depicting the last three days of Christ’s life on earth—faithful to the Gospels—is illustrative.

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about what he thinks the Bush administration should do to improve the flow of information to the public. One of the items he proposes is a "Bloggers Briefing" for "stand-alone" and citizen journalists.

If he’s a believer, Tony Snow should be taking Bush’s case to the world, and seeking opportunities to make that case. That means more briefings. Not cutting back but building on.

Snow is the head of an operation. That operation includes able assistants. There are extremely competent people across the government, outside of Snow’s office, who in their areas of knowledge can also brief the press, answer critics, and bring policy to life.

Reporters like to think of themselves as brave truth-tellers who can cut through the rhetoric and evasive maneuvering of politicians. But sometimes, they sound like they're trying to assist politicians in their evasive manuevering. Exhibit A is Tuesday's front-page Hillary article in the Washington Post.

It's headlined "Clinton Is A Politician Not Easily Defined: Senator's Platform Remains Unclear." Reporter Dan Balz began by insisting that "Hillary Rodham Clinton has fashioned a political persona that generates intense passions but defies easy characerization." Take a Republican as conservative as Hillary is liberal -- say, Sen. Rick Santorum -- and imagine how liberals would fall down laughing if you characterized Santorum as "not easily defined."

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I've often read that plants grow better when exposed to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.

Yet, when the Associated Press mentions the subject, what it says is: Global warming boosts poison ivy.

The AP report, as published May 29 by the Boston Globe, begins:

Another reason to worry about global warming: more and itchier poison ivy. The noxious vine grows faster and bigger as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rise, researchers report Monday.

And a CO2-driven vine also produces more of its rash-causing chemical, urushiol, conclude experiments conducted in a forest at Duke University where scientists increased carbon-dioxide levels to those expected in 2050.