The New York Times, in its "Freakonomics" section, has run a blog posing the question,

" If You Were A Terrorist, How Would You Attack?"

Apparently, the Undocumented-American community is having a tough time of it.  No, really.

A year after state lawmakers passed what they called the toughest illegal-immigration laws in the nation, there is no proof illegal immigrants have been caught taking advantage of taxpayers. Instead, there are abundant stories of citizens eligible for services who can't prove it because they lack the required ID.

Of one side, the side that wants to prevent illegal aliens from taking our tax dollars, "proof" is demanded.  From the other, anecdotal evidence comprising "abundant stories" is sufficient.  Of course, abundance is also in the eye of the reporter.

Tremendously exaggerating the number of Americans who lack access to health insurance, CBS on Wednesday night trumpeted the cause of an AFL-CIO member who denounced the United States for not providing health insurance coverage for his wife and endorsed the John Edwards plan for universal health care. Anchor Katie Couric previewed the upcoming story: “Presidential candidates hear a dramatic plea for help from one of the millions of Americans with no health insurance and no way to pay for it.” Setting up the tribute to the retiree, Couric asserted that “45 million Americans have no coverage. That includes more than 13 million between the ages of 19 and 29. Many of them don't get coverage from their jobs, and cannot afford to buy it on their own.” Of course, many can afford it and in that age range feel comfortable without insurance. In fact, 17 million of the uninsured earn more than $50,000. Removing those, plus people who are not U.S. citizens, leaves fewer than ten million chronically uninsured.

Reporter Michelle Miller began her CBS Evening News piece by championing how “every once in a while, a moment of truth breaks through a political campaign event. That happened last night when a 60-year-old retired steel worker from Union Township, Indiana, asked a question.” Viewers then saw a clip of Steve Skvara from the AFL-CIO debate shown Tuesday night on MSNBC: “Every day of my life, I sit at the kitchen table across from the woman who devoted 36 years of her life to my family, and I can't afford to pay for her health care. What's wrong with America? And what will you do to change it?” Miller explained that “Skvara says he got the answer he was looking for from his favorite candidate, John Edwards,” who proclaimed: “And we ought to have universal health care in this country!” Skvara agreed: “We need a national health care plan.” Miller wondered: “Now the question is whether a moment in a debate will be the moment that motivates reform.”

Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post had a worthy entry in the category of wishful-thinking opinion-newswriting on page A1 of the Washington Post Wednesday, with her story "Warming Draws Evangelicals Into Environmentalist Fold."

Based on the content of the piece, it might better have been titled, "Assiduous Environmentalist Lobbying Draws a Mere Handful of Evangelicals into Environmentalist Fold," but that doesn't have the pro-environmentalist cheerleading quality the Post goes for in these pieces.

Presumably lacking statistical evidence of mass conversions, Eilperin uses argument-by-anecdote to imply that a significant number of Christian evangelicals are converting into anti-global warming activists:

In the recent past, CNN, to its credit, has highlighted the Democrat-controlled Congress’s reluctance to reform the congressional earmark process. Co-host John Roberts on Tuesday’s "American Morning" brought up the issue of earmarks again during a sympathetic interview to Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. But instead of bringing up the Democrat’s continuing lack of leadership on the issue, the segment instead began with a discussion on the pork-barrel spending project of the former Republican chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

Okay, we’ve all heard that hybrid vehicles are better for the environment. But how do they measure up when it comes to the green in your wallet?

Even starlet Paris Hilton has boarded the hybrid bandwagon, as reported by BPM Magazine.

“I came in a hybrid car because I think that’s the way to go – to save energy and to save our earth from all this – you know pollution so I think if everyone just takes the steps to do it will make a difference,” said Hilton.

However, Hilton probably wouldn’t be as concerned about the cost of owning one of these hybrids as average people.  But you wouldn’t be aware of any higher costs after reading Chris Woodyard’s August 8 USA Today story.

“It’s not just good public relations,” wrote Woodyard. “Since the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases, General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler have joined the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of corporate executives calling for CO2 restrictions.”

It would be even better public relations if hybrids made economic sense, but they don’t. It turns out hybrids cost more to maintain than regular cars.

Inflation? Forget about it. Let the economists and policy wonks worry about it.

The Federal Reserve’s decision not to drop interest rates drew the ire of “CBS Evening News” correspondent Kelly Wallace on August 7. Wallace’s story about the “credit crunch” centered on Amanda Michalko, a 26-year old Michigan resident, who would not benefit from lower monthly payments on her pending mortgage because of the Fed.

CBS seemed to disapprove of the Fed’s ruling.

On Tuesday’s edition of "Nightline," anchor Martin Bashir interviewed businessman Tom Monaghan, founder of a new Catholic university in Florida and also a community called Ave Maria that will be based around Catholic values. Bashir parroted criticism that the town has "been described as a Catholic Jonestown, a kind of Catholic Iran, where individual rights and liberties are curtailed."

Earlier in the segment, Bashir asserted that the community, which will encourage traditional values but be open to all, has "been called a Disney World for Catholics, a country club Christianity."

When Nancy Pelosi rose to be the House Democrats’ leader in 2002, Katie Couric said to NBC colleague Ann Curry: "Is it okay to say, ‘You go girl!’?" That cheerleading spirit continued in her Monday "Katie Couric’s Notebook" commentary (featured at her blog Couric & Co.) lauding the new Democratic Congress: "this new crop worked much harder than the last. A big accomplishment was in challenging executive power with oversight hearings on Iraq, Medicare, the Department of Justice, and global warming." She concluded: "Promises, promises. Sometimes they are kept – even in Washington."

That was certainly not the tone of CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather took toward Speaker Gingrich and the new Republican Congress in 1995: "The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor." Their attempts at oversight were part of a "political carpet-bombing attack."

For those of us "nutballs" who think 9/11 was an inside job, we sure do have the evidence on our side..

Firefighter John Schroeder recounts his experience of 9/11. Explosions throuhout the building, the lobby being destroyed, the elevators blowing up 5 minutes after the plane hit, the stairwells caving in before the towers had even begun to fall.

My oh my. That is pretty incriminating evidence, unless you have your head up your A$$ and dont' care about what really happened that day.

http://video.google....

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R) recently told an Illinois woman that while his grown sons have never served in the military, they are displaying their patriotism by campaigning heavily for their father's nomination for the presidency.

The Politico and USA Today have picked up on the item. USA Today's "On Politics" blog noted in an entry posted at 11:45 Eastern that:

The questioner, 41-year-old Rachel Griffiths of Milan, Ill., told Susan later that she is not a Republican and is in fact a member of a "Progressive Action for the Common Good."

Asked if she was satisfied by Romney's answer, Griffiths said:

So, you want to use corn to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil, huh? Have you thought through all of the ramifications first?

For instance, how are cattle ranchers going to afford to feed their cows, and what might that do to the availability of beef around the country and its price?

Clearly, such issues weren't fully considered before Congress decided to mandate the use of ethanol additives in gasoline as reported by the New York Sun Wednesday (emphasis added):

I received an e-mail message from a global warming skeptic yesterday suggesting that Newsweek's disgraceful article about climate change "deniers" could backfire given the facetious headline "Global Warming Is A Hoax*" on the cover.

The thinking was that since far more people would see the magazine at the newsstands than would actually buy it and read the article, a much larger number of people would think Newsweek was indeed claiming global warming was a hoax, and would never understand the sarcasm.

It seems that one of the editors of Scientific American agrees, and posted his concerns at that magazine's editors' blog Wednesday with a headline "Newsweek Denies the Existence of Global Warming" (emphasis added throughout):

The day after Barry Bonds set a dubious record, CNN's Kyra Phillips [file photo] might have set one of her own. Rather than "Career Home Runs," file this one under "Tasteless and Inappropriate Questions Posed to a Soldier in a War Zone."

At about 3:40 P.M. EDT on this afternoon's CNN Newsroom, co-anchor Phillips was interviewing Lt. General Raymond Odierno, the MNF second-in-command in Iraq.

CNN Anchor Kyra Phillips: You know there's been a lot of shifting around in positions, a lot of positions lost, key positions. Do you think that this job that you've taken on could be career suicide?

Blogger Steven D. Levitt asked his readers to imagine themselves as terrorists today and come up with their own ways of "maximizing terror" at the new home of the Freakonomics blog, The New York Times website. Levitt speaks:

Hearing about these [airline restriction] rules got me thinking about what I would do to maximize terror if I were a terrorist with limited resources. I’d start by thinking about what really inspires fear...Also, I’d want to create the feeling that an army of terrorists exists, which I’d accomplish by pulling off multiple attacks at once, and then following them up with more shortly thereafter.

CBS, the Rathergate network, offered up another misleading report. The August 8 edition of "The Early Show,"at 7:09 AM, edited a Hillary Clinton quote from the August 7 AFL-CIO debate to portray her as a populist.

JOIE CHEN: Front-runner Clinton also came up against sharp elbows with rivals accusing her of cozying up to big-money lobbyists. Before thousands of union members, the New York Senator sought to portray herself as champion of the little guy.

CLINTON: So if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I'm your girl.

What she actually said was in the context of her preference in attacking the Republicans. The full quote is much more divisive than portraying herself "as champion of the little guy."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070807/sc_nm/spain_jellyfish_dc_2

In an article on Yahoo! News, Reuters discusses an epidemic of jellyfish that has inundated Spain's beaches in the first three paragraphs in a very objective manner. Then, in the fourth paragraph, they state:

"The increase in jellyfish, a nuisance for holidaymakers in the Mediterranean in particular, is believed by climate experts to be due to warmer sea temperatures and the reduction in predators such as tuna and turtles."

An interesting development from Google today. Starting now, the search engine is going to allow people who are mentioned in a news story to respond to it and have their responses posted within Google News (h/t Brian Clark):

Here's how the new system will work: people or organizations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments—unedited—alongside the Google News links to those stories.

The new system will at first be deployed only within the U.S., but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well.

This raises a number of questions that the announcement does not attempt to answer, such as how Google will vet the comments to ensure they come from the claimed source (watch this space for the first "Google News punked!" stories in the following weeks).

How do you increase readership at a business magazine? Assume your readers are criminals.

Written by Caroline Waxler, Conde-Nast’s Portfolio magazine has been running a regular ‘How To’ sort of article called the “C.E.O. Survival Guide”, which assumes from the get-go that businessmen and women will ultimately get themselves into trouble—namely criminal activity:

“Just as you got a better house, car, and private plane than the next guy, you’re likely to get a better jail cell too. It’s one of the perks of stealing from shareholders rather than from a 7-Eleven clerk, so make the best of it.”