People magazine, another publicity engine of the Time Warner empire, gives a box to Al Gore (page 35, I believe) to explain "How I'm Saving The Planet." People asked: "His film 'An Inconvenient Truth' warns about global warming. So what is Gore doing about it?"

Here are Gore's answers for the publicity box:

"1. I turn off lights in my house [to conserve energy]. We're getting sensor switches that automatically turn them off when the room is empty.

2. We got a hybrid car recently.

3. We try to live a carbon neutral life. On climatecrisis.org, you'll find a calculator which can add up the carbon dioxide you produce and give you options for neutralizing that.

4. This movie saves carbon dioxide because I don't have to fly and drive places to get my message across."

Elvis Costello in March (on VH-1) at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction concert, before playing with New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint: "I feel very lucky and very proud that music jumped to the aid of New Orleans back in September...But it’s a drop in the bucket for what is needed. There is a lot of things that I could say. I could say something like we are fighting the wrong wars in the wrong countries and not dealing with the people here that are living in this country that are not living right."

Compare that to the Sunday Washington Post mini-review of the new album by Elvis Costello and Allen Touissant, called "The River in Reverse," in which Joe Heim noted: "For creating an album linked so clearly to a city's misery, it's unfortunate that the pair have no plans to donate any percentage of the album's profits to a deserving Katrina charity."

The Washington Post's Michelle Boorstein gave readers of the Sunday paper a peek into the beauty of the traditional Latin Mass held every Sunday at St. Mary Mother of God Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.

The ringing of bells. Latin wafting high into the church rafters. Women's heads draped in lace.

There is a solemn aura to 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at Saint Mary Mother of God, a D.C. parish on Fifth Street NW where hundreds of Catholics who long for ancient ritual gather each week to celebrate what is among the most traditional and complex of Roman Catholic rites: the Tridentine Mass.

[...]

But mostly there is a powerful silence, a seriousness created by the absence of contemporary church: no responsive readings, no guitars, no congregants walking to a microphone to read from Scripture or to make bingo announcements. There is just a centuries-old script, which dictates the near-constant, intricate movements of the altar servers -- circling the altar, kneeling, pressing hands together, bowing -- as well as the position of the priest, whose back is to parishioners. Together, everyone faces East, acknowledging that Jesus is the true dawn.

It's old news now: In the election to replace Randy Cunningham, Democrat congressional candidate Francine Busby appears to have told a crowd of supporters that illegal aliens could vote and otherwise aid her campaign against Republican Brian Bilbray.("You don't need papers for voting," she said. "You don't need to be a registered voter to help.") The Washington Post apparently found this too boring to mention in Sunday's Election in California a Cliffhanger by Chris Cillizza on A4.

Busby's comments, circulated in San Diego by radio talk show host Roger Hedgecock, have been widely reported around the blogosphere. Expose the Left posted the news and an audio file on Friday, June 2, as did Michelle Malkin. Many righty blogs linked and commented thereafter, including Wizbang, Powerline, Stop the ACLU and others June 3. The San Diego Union Leader reported the story June 3, including Busby's entertaining explanation that she intended only to say that the under-18 set could work in her campaign. But the Post? Nada. Its story used some of that room instead to falsely describe the Minutemen, in the classic Post Style, as "anti-immigrant." As the old Hertz rent-a-car ads used to say, Not exactly:

Everyone has heard of the "killings at Haditha," even though the military investigation of what happened there is still underway. Has anyone heard of the "killings at St. Lo" in July, 1944? A comparison of the New York Times coverage of those two events is instructive.

A Google News search of Haditha + killings + New York Times yields 891 hits as of Sunday noon. The articles on this subject in the Times are driving the national and international news in all media on this subject. The Times and its reporters are cited in most of these articles.

But what did the Times run about the killings at St. Lo in July, 1944?

It ran no stories, front page or otherwise, on St. Lo when it occurred. (Operation Cobra was intensive bombing by the US Air Force, in support of the effort to break out of St. Lo, and move against the Germans across France.)

You probably didn't know that we're living through historically GOOD times for manufacturing in America. Now you will.

For some reason, the The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) hasn't trumpeted this news, even though the history-making began a couple of months ago when it issued its its March report announcing the 34th consecutive month of manufacturing expansion.

This BizzyBlog post from August of last year had this three-paragraph nugget from a CNN report (bold is mine) that led to my finding (bolds are mine):

(August 1, 2005) The nation's manufacturing sector grew at a faster pace in July (2005), according to a survey of industry executives released Monday that contained lots of good news for Wall Street expectations.

The Institute of Supply Management's survey of executives at goods-producing companies came in at 56.6, the best reading of 2005 and up from the 53.8 reading in June. The closely watched survey, one of the first economic readings for July, had been forecast to rise to 54.5 in July. Any reading above 50 constitutes growth in the sector, so Monday's survey means that manufacturing has grown for 26 straight months, the longest expansion in the sector in more than 16 years, since nearly three years of uninterrupted growth ended in April 1989.

The May 2006 report released last week brought the streak to 36 consecutive months.

The headline reads 'US probe of Ishaqi killings no surprise for Iraqis.' You might have thought the headline and accompanying article were from Al-Jazeera. But no, it's Reuters that wrote the headline that, dripping with skepticism, suggests that the US military inquiry that cleared American soldiers from wrongdoing in connection with the killing of civilians at Ishaqi was a whitewash. That same cynicism persists throughout the article. Consider these excerpts:

• "Isa Khalaf doesn't want cash from the U.S. troops he says massacred his relatives in a March raid. He wants an explanation he may never get now that a U.S. probe has cleared them of any wrongdoing."
• "The U.S. investigation that cleared soldiers of any misconduct in Ishaqi may have allowed the soldiers to move on with their lives. But the farming town will be haunted by memories of the bloodshed."
  
  
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