In Newsweek, Allison Samuels hypes the latest music from Ice Cube. Over a full-page black-and-white photo of the rapper, his latest “social commentator” lyrics from his song “Why We Thug” are highlighted boldly in capital letters:

“Since I was little not a damn thing changed / It’s the same ol’ same / Bush runs things like Saddam Hussein.”

Most of these words are in green, but “Bush” and “Saddam Hussein” are in white letters for emphasis. Newsweek’s Samuels is giddy: “He was a savagely angry (and wickedly witty) social commentator on N.W.A.’s late-‘80s benchmarks ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and ‘F—- tha Police’…Cube’s new album may be the his best since the searing ‘Amerikkka’s Most Wanted’ in 1990.” Samuels lauds this junk as part of “rap’s long tradition of politically righteous anger.”

At a fundraiser (the only place you'll likely find a Clinton in an election year) Bill Clinton told how he and Al Gore "were right about global warming" to a crowd shouting "four more years." It is undertermined why the crowd, ignorant of the 22nd Amendment, wants four more years of doing nothing about global warming.

In the short Associated Press article by Brendan Farrington, he writes: "as Tropical Storm Alberto threatened to strengthen into the ninth hurricane in 22 months to affect Florida..." What he fails to mention is that:

• 10 hurricanes per year is normal, and Florida is the biggest target. In 1933, there were 21 hurricanes, apparently this was the height of global warming.
• "Global warming" actually causes hurricanes to be less powerful.
• In 1965, there was a decrease in hurricanes, at the time scientists claimed this was because of the coming "global cooling."

In the ongoing left-wing saga of “They Stole The Election From Us,” New York Times columnist Bob Herbert (hat tip to Raw Story) wrote Monday another gratuitous piece about how George W. Bush swiped the 2004 election from John Kerry.

This stuff is really delicious. But, I caution the reader to not have food or drink in his or her mouth while reviewing this information, for uncontrollable laughter can erupt at any moment and without warning:

“Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.], in his long, heavily footnoted [Rolling Stone] article (‘Was the 2004 Election Stolen?’), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.”

Now, remember folks…the key, much as it was in Florida, is to count all the votes. Of course, most of us remember what that looked like. Comically, the article continued: “No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked.” Actually, Bob, this is a great point you make. Why is it lost on you?

Not recognizing the irony, Herbert continued:

MSNBC surprised everyone Monday with its announcement that the struggling channel will now be headed by an executive tag team of "Today" chief Phil Griffin and one of its own show hosts, Dan Abrams.

The appointment of Griffin didn't exactly come as a surprise; last week's scuttlebutt had him being given the top spot. Abrams's elevation did. It also gives insight into what MSNBC's strategy to avoid being known as "electronic journalism's version of the Chicago Cubs."

Some key facts:

• Griffin, known officially as "executive in charge," is also keeping his title as executive producer of NBC's "Today" show.
• Newly dubbed "general manager" Abrams will keep his job as NBC's top legal affairs analyst but will be giving up his current main job as host of the courts-heavy "Abrams Report."
• Griffin will not move his offices over to MSNBC's far-flung New Jersey location.
• NBC is in the process of buying out its partner Microsoft's stake in MSNBC entirely. It's already the majority owner.

For Aaron Barnhart, the verdict seems in: "They're letting him keep his network job. Which tells you something about what a high priority fixing MSNBC is over there at GE."

UPDATE 20:54. My take: That Abrams was brought in as Griffin's deputy indicates that there may be relatively major changes in the near future, with a team comprised of a newsie and an exec, it will be harder for competing factions within the organization to resist management. Abrams's hiring also likely means that MSNBC is going to approach news with more irreverence, and give greater latitude to anchors to express their opinions and show emotion (i.e. be more like human beings instead of talking infoheads). [Abrams not getting the top spot also shows that upper management views this as a test of sorts for him. If he pulls it off, expect him to move up the NBC ladder.]

Looks like Chris Matthews really isn't sure who the good guys are in Iraq. Over the weekend on his syndicated show Chris Matthews speculated that after Haditha the public may realize: "that we might be the bad guys." After brushing over the success of killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Matthews asked the panel about the political damage done by Haditha:

Chris Matthews: "Let me talk about Haditha or ask you to talk about Haditha. It seems to me a lot of people would like to have some reason to get out of Iraq. We can't win is a good reason. There's too much bloodshed would be a good reason. But on the other hand, the difficulty of the task is an argument for a lot of people to stay in. ‘We know it's tough,' the President says. ‘We know we're taking casualties, but we gotta win this one and these people are sacrificing their lives and their family members for this work. All the more reason to stick with the fight.' But there's one thing that turns people off. The sense that we might be the bad guys. My Lai, Haditha. In your reporting for Time, do you think Haditha is gonna measure up to one of those pivotal moments where ya say, ‘This war smells bad, it tastes bad. We're getting into situations of counterinsurgency, which are brutal. We don't want to be there.'"

On this Sunday’s "Face the Nation" on CBS, Bob Schieffer once again turned to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for analysis on developments in Iraq, the overall war on terrorism, and the Israel/Palestinian peace process.

Among the claims Friedman made were claiming that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was the "anti-Statue of Liberty." That America is alone in Iraq, discounting the contributions by the British and other coalition partners. And that he doesn’t "really want to blame America" for the inability of the Israelis and Palestinians to come to a workable peace agreement.

Friedman began by seemingly eulogizing Zarqawi. He focused on how effective Zarqawi was as a terrorist, but doesn’t offer praise to our troops or thanks that he has been removed from the equation in Iraq:

The National Center for Policy Analysis writes about the rise of "docu-ganda" films, movies that are portrayed as "just the facts" filmmaking, but actually have an agenda and make no attempt to carry both sides. In this way, they are like the news media. Both docu-ganda filmmakers and news reporters strive to be thought of as dispassioned observers, and want to be regarded as speaking with the "voice of God."

Documentary films promise to tell an "untold" story, but is it the full story, asks Daniel Wood of the Christian Science Monitor?

Don't count on it; the days when "documentary" reliably meant "inform the audience" are over. Today, makers of such films feel little or no obligation to heed documentary-film traditions like point-by-point rebuttal or formal reality checks, says Wood.

Not that there's been any doubt as to the politics of NPR and PBS - home to world-class Republican haters such as Bill Moyers. Still, it's instructive to see just who has launched a massive organizing effort to ensure continued taxpayer funding of the two organizations. Turns out . . . it's none other than the far-left MoveOn.org.

Here's a mass email sent out today by Move-on:

From: Noah T. Winer, MoveOn.org Civic Action
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 12:27 PM
To:
Subject: Deadline tomorrow! Re: Save NPR and PBS (again)

This certainly goes way beyond the vitriol we’ve seen in the past week concerning conservative author Ann Coulter, and may be a new low in media response to, well...anything.

On Monday, Advertising Age magazine’s Simon Dumenco wrote an article imploring Coulter to kill herself.

Dumenco -- who refers to himself as “The Media Guy” -- did a bit in this week's column called "WIKYpedia" wherein he “asks repeat offenders in the media world to give us a break already.” The joke went something like “would it kill you to stop it?”

Dumenco finished this piece: “Would it kill you, "Godless" author Ann Coulter, to do us all a favor and kill yourself? (Oh, well, yeah, I guess it would kill you.)”

He continued:

On Monday’s "Good Morning America," co-host Charles Gibson interviewed Rep. John Murtha, the perfect opportunity to press him hard on how Zarqawi might not have been defeated if our troops had gone "over the horizon," as CNN’s Carol Lin suggested the other day. But that didn’t happen. MRC's Brian Boyd reports Gibson calmly set him up to turn the entire good news around into more grist for getting out of Iraq ASAP. It began with Charlie playing up Murtha’s military credentials (oops, left out those controversial medals):

"We're going to turn now to Congressman John Murtha, who has been a very outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. A combat veteran; spent 37 years in the Marine Corps, himself; and he's joining us this morning from Johnstown, Pennsylvania."

The news magazines are having trouble mustering much enthusiasm for the defeat of Zarqawi. U.S. News & World Report, which featured Zarqawi only at the top of the cover, carried an article from White House correspondent Kenneth Walsh titled "A Bit of A Bounce."  Walsh didn't have any actual polling data, but noted at the article's beginning that Zarqawi and the election of Rep. Brian Bilbray were bright spots. Walsh ended, however, with liberal historian Robert Dallek (no label, of course), who wasn't budging from his stubborn take that Iraq is Vietnam:

Zarqawi's death may be a PR coup, but Dallek and other scholars argue that the U.S. occupation increasingly resembles U.S. involvement in Vietnam, an exhausting morass that haunted the country for a generation.  Until there is real improvement in Iraq, they say, Bush's presidency will probably remain a troubled one.

Everybody knows America is engaged in a great war on liberalism. Liberals are to be given no quarter in this battle for the soul of this great country. Their alliance with the terrorists is the greatest danger we face as a nation going forward. Everybody also knows that Eleanor Clift is one of the field commanders of this islamo-libero-fascist alliance. Then why, in his blog entry on June 10th, did newsbusters contributor Noel Shephard leap to her defense? It was Bill Clinton’s fault we were attacked on 9/11. It’s the liberal media’s fault we are having a difficult time in Iraq (We are not Losing!) Liberals love to blame America for the terrorist threat we face, which is ironic, because everybody knows the terrorist threat is really their fault. In this context, any defense of any liberal mouthpiece is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It doesn’t matter what they say. It cannot be doubted that the intent of all liberal speech is to tear down the United States. If Clift says the death of Zarqawi is good, that’s probably just liberal code for a call to jihad against the American military. If she says democrats are having trouble, it’s probably some secret code to some terrorist cell in Albuquerque to attack a federal building. Mr. Shephard’s bleeding heart apology of Ayatollah Eleanor’s column is evidence of his liberal media bias, but worse, it is evidence of the lengths that this traitor amongst you will go to to spread the liberal message of hatred and terror.

The writers of The New York Times apparently think that every day's a good day to bash the Bush administration. And any hook will work, whether it's factually correct or not. Today's example comes from yesterday's Times, and Niall Ferguson. He's got a long piece about the burgeoning Federal debt.

Well, I'm all in favor of concern about the debt, because I'd rather have a lower debt than a larger. (I rather suspect that, as a matter of policy, the New York Times would not agree with me on the proper means for lowering the debt, but we'll leave that aside for the moment.)

So, what exactly is Ferguson's take?

Since becoming president, George Bush has presided over one of the steepest peacetime rises ever in the federal debt. The gross federal debt now exceeds $8.3 trillion. There are three reasons for the post-2000 increase: reduced revenue during the 2001 recession, generous tax cuts for higher income groups and increased expenditures not only on warfare abroad but also on welfare at home. And if projections from the Congressional Budget Office turn out to be correct, we are just a decade away from a $12.8 trillion debt — more than double what it was when Bush took office. [emphasis mine]

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "this is obviously some strange usage of the word peacetime that I wasn't previously aware of." Even if you want to describe the 1990s as "peacetime" despite the fact that we had troops active in Iraq (and Somalia and Bosnia), it is difficult to comprehend how someone could describe the period since 9/11 as "peacetime." After the United States was clearly attacked, we have responded militarily, removing the governments of two different nations in the past 5 years, with all of the military costs that those operations have required. There's no legitimate usage of the word "peacetime" in that context. The only reason that you would use that word is to make a false comparison that makes the Bush administration's performance look worse than it has been.

How unusual to see something like that in the New York Times...

At National Review Online today, Byron York wrapped up his coverage of the Yearly Kos convention by noting that one thing was missing in the coverage of Markos Moulitsas, the nation's top foamy-mouthed leftist blogger at the center of the Daily Kos:

While his writings—and the controversies they have caused—are an old topic in the blogosphere, they have remained largely unexamined in major media outlets. For example, one of Moulitsas’s most famous statements, involving the brutal murders of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004—“I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”—has been the target of extensive criticism on conservative blogs and in conservative media outlets, but, according to a search of the Nexis database, has never been mentioned in the Washington Post. (It was quoted, once, in the New York Times, deep in a September 2004 feature story on bloggers.) Nor has it been reported in any major newsmagazine or been the topic of conversation on any major television program.

The same is true for other things Moulitsas has written. For example, in January of this year, Moulitsas reflected on the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror:

With more people now going to the internet for news, forecasters predict tough times ahead for newspapers. Reports Reuters:

The U.S. newspaper industry is likely to face a "somber" second half of the year, with circulation and advertising revenue remaining under pressure, according to an analyst's report released on Friday.

The report casts doubt on any hopes of a major recovery for an industry that has seen share prices fall by 15 percent in the last 12 months amid declining readership and a migration of advertising dollars to the Internet.

"The environment will get harder for newspapers before it gets better," according to Deutsche Bank analyst Paul Ginocchio. "And we're not sure when it is going to get better."

Congress to hold hearings into OKC Bombing.

10 years later and finally someone is getting it right.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060610153618968

Please, let's not wait another 10 years to discover the truth about 9/11 as well!!

I know this is a conservative blog site, so my intentions are not to cause "tention", but only to present alternative arguments to what we have been "told." Check out this link as well for an interesting read. Did you know that in 1975 one of the towers burned for 3 hours??

http://www.total911.info/2005/04/1975-wtc-fire-burned-six-floors-for.html

You were saying?

Associated Press media writer David Bauder reports that Al-Jazeera International, the new English-language version of the original Al-Jazeera, is having more trouble than expected in placing the channel into American homes.

The English-language Al-Jazeera International TV network faces enough hurdles to make Olympic champion Edwin Moses tremble.

It has missed its launch date and won’t set another, has no public commitments by anyone to show it in the United States, saw its closest competitor beat it to the market and is the target of a pressure campaign by a group hoping it never airs here.

Al-Jazeera International’s operators are nonetheless pressing forward with plans to create a worldwide news operation, despite a name that immediately raises hackles in the West.

Media reporter turned columnist David Carr quotes the now-notorious comment out of Ann Coulter’s new book regarding the media-lionized “Jersey Girls” who lambasted Bush for failing to stop 9-11, then huffs in his Monday column:

"That typical Coulter sortie was hardly a misstep on some overamped talk show. That doozy of a sentence was written, edited, lawyered and then published.”

Two New Jersey state Assemblywomen, Joan Quigley and Linda Stende, want Ann Coulter's new book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," banned from all book stores in New Jersey. So much for free speech for opposing views.

Say the Assemblywomen:

"Ann Coulter's criticism of 9-11 widows, whose only desire since the attacks have been to repair their shattered lives and protect other families from the horrors they have experienced, is motivated purely by petty greed and hate," the two Democrats complained.

"Coulter's vicious characterizations and remarks are motivated by greed and her desire to sell books . . . She is a leech trying to turn a profit off perverting the suffering of others."

"No one in New Jersey should buy this book and allow Ann Coulter to profit from her hate-mongering. We are asking New Jersey retailers statewide to stand with us and express their outrage by refusing to carry or sell copies of Coulter's book. Her hate-filled attacks on our 9-11 widows has no place on New Jersey bookshelves."

All hell broke loose, to coin a phrase, on Fox News this weekend when host Julie Banderas told one of the most hated cultists Shirley Phelps-Roper to go to hell. A discussion about protests at the funerals of fallen American soldiers turned into an astonishing shouting match on national television. Watch the FNC host deliver Phelps-Roper a slam dunk. Video courtesy of Michelle Malkin. Transcript WND:

“What would you do if you had a son in the military?” an outraged Banderas asked. “Would you damn him to hell as well? Because you’re gonna join him there if you had a son!”

“I have eight sons and I have three daughters,” responded Phelps-Roper, “and none of them would dare, dare fight for a nation who has made God their No. 1 enemy.”

Banderas engaged in a heated, rapid-fire, name-calling exchange with Phelps-Roper, which included: Banderas: “The Bible says ‘the fear of the Lord is hatred of evil,’ [from the Book of] Proverbs. ‘Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.’ Perverted speech like yours: ‘God hates fags.’ You are preaching absolute B.-., and you know the final letter.”
Phelps-Roper: “If you don’t tell them that this nation is full of idolatry, full of adulteries …

Banderas: “Full of insane people like yourself, ma’am.”

Here's a strategy for pro-life activists: start talking up the fact that humans share 90% [or whatever the number is] of their DNA with seals. It might win you more sympathy from the MSM. For while the liberal media love to celebrate 'a woman's right to choose', they go all weepy at the prospect of baby seals biting the dust, er, ice.

The Today show was at it again this morning with a segment on the baby seal harvest in Canada, complete with the predictable footage of those cuddly baby seals at the mercy of heartless hunters. 'Today' even warned us that "what you are about to see may be disturbing to some people."

Talk about you're damned-if-you do moment . . .

What have the Dems and their MSM echo-chamber been clamoring for, nay, demanding, when it comes to Iraq? Why, a troop withdrawal, of course. Yet there was Matt Lauer on this morning's Today, fretting that President Bush might . . . withdraw troops.

Lauer's lament came in the course of his interview of former General Barry McCaffrey, looking ahead to the Iraq summit that Pres. Bush is holding at Camp David beginning today with his top national security advisers.

Said Lauer:

" Do you worry about a political side of this, that the administration may pull a substantial number troops out of Iraq just prior to November's mid-term elections simply to sway public opinion?"