While surfing last night, my wife and I encountered Nova, on (I assume) PBS, and the narrator described the conrails of jets being caused by (paraphrasing) small particles of pollution. When I exclaimed, "Awww! @#$@%"....the wifey changed the channel. (I rarely care which channel is on marriage happiness lesson # 23. I'm usually doing something else like drinking beer, or doing a crossword, sudoku, or picture puzzle, in case you thing I'm PW. Yes, dear).

I thought contrails were caused by the hot exhaust of engines hitting the cool air of the atmosphere. Is that how far GW has come/gone?

There is a shocking amount of quality software now available for free on the Windows OS. Much if it actually works quite well. So well that I use them instead of "Brand X".

Give them a try . . . you will save yourself a few bucks. Just make sure you read the system requirements & directions before installing. For the non-technical, if you don't understand what something below is, you probably don't want it.

Click on the links to go to the download web page for each listed item:

Live discussion and post-mortem...

Pillars of the news media and foreign policy establishment were scolded Wednesday night on ABC by Jack Keane, a retired four-star General and former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, who asserted both are living “in the past” in their pessimistic warnings about Iraq. Fareed Zakaria, Editor of Newsweek International, had asserted that “the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans.” For World News, anchor Charles Gibson gathered Zakaria, Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Keane to assess the road ahead in Iraq. Zakaria charged: “One of the dirty little secrets about Iraq is that Iraq has increasingly been ethnically cleansed. It's sad to say, but the American Army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans. When people say bad things are going to happen if we leave, bad things have already happened. Where were you for the last four years?” Haass maintained: “We should be realistic. Iraq is likely to be a messy and slightly dysfunctional country for the foreseeable future.”

Keane pounced: “Both of you are really not describing what's happening in Iraq. I mean, you're in the past, to be quite frank about it. The Sunni insurgency has gone through a conversion. They have thrown the towel in. They have now saddled up along side of us...”

I guess Adrian "Wrong Way" Flanagan is less than pleased with the blog posted here yesterday by your humble NewsBusters correspondent. Whilst trapped by arctic ice, Wrong Way has taken time out from his travails to attack Yours Truly on his Alpha Global Expedition Blog entry tenderly titled, Spot the Moron:

After a badly written piece for a French news wire service, a false story has started circulating through the Internet.

Amazing how rapidly inaccurate information can spread.

The first corrections are starting to appear and we liked the postings by Dan Xavier. One is reproduced in full on BSD - The Detector

bsd.firetrench.com

A typical false story can be found at tinyurl.com/3992TQ

Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu, whose many large contributions to Democratic coffers, including Hillary Clinton came from an apparently non-existent source, has jumped bail yet again. As reported by the Associated Press,

Hsu, a Hong Kong native, was also supposed to turn over his passport Wednesday. Hsu's prominent Silicon Valley criminal defense attorney Jim Brosnahan said Hsu failed to give the passport to the legal team on Monday. "Mr. Hsu is not here and we do not know where Mr. Hsu is," Brosnahan said outside court. Brosnahan said that "there was some contact" with Hsu a few hours before the scheduled 9 a.m. court appearance, but he declined to say how and who talked to Hsu. Hsu pleaded no contest in 1991 to a felony count of grand theft, admitting he'd defrauded investors of $1 million after falsely claiming to have contracts to purchase and sell Latex gloves. He was facing up to three years in prison when he skipped town before his 1992 sentencing date.

A lot of you have been reporting problems lately accessing NB. It was apparently triggered by a bug in Internet Explorer 7. After a few days of futzing with the DNS and some of the database backend, I think I've fixed the problem.

Report here if you continue to have trouble.

Scott Johnson at Powerline argues that liberal opinion journal The New Republic really needs a grown-up in charge to clean up the magazine's act:

Although the -- I believe the correct word is "venerable" -- Martin Peretz is nominally the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, the lack of adult supervision at the magazine has become painfully apparent in the course of the magazine's continuing Beauchamp disgrace. When are "the editors" going to render their verdict on their Baghdad Fabulist, anyway?

The lack of adult supervision at the magazine is apparent beyond the Beauchamp disgrace. Here the juvenile TNR staffer Joshua Patashnik does little more than direct sarcasm at the New York Times's relatively favorable review (by Carl Cannon) of Stephen Hayes's book on Vice President Cheney. Unlike Patashnik, Cannon actually shows evidence of having read Hayes's book.

Chicago, like Washington, D.C., has a stringent gun ban. So naturally the move by the District to defend the ban before the Supreme Court will be big news in the Windy City. Yet that doesn't excuse the Chicago Tribune's James Oliphant for breezing over gun rights advocates in his article, "D.C. gun case may hit Chicago."

Oliphant began by telling his readers that gun rights advocates would come gunning for Chicago's gun ban if they succeed before the high Court.:

Check out these opening paragraphs, and guess who's being described.

Looking into [his] eyes is like falling into a swimming pool.

His eyes are deep and blue and comforting and, as person after person will tell you, when his eyes lock onto yours, you feel like you are the only other person in the world.

Margarida Perreira, 48 . . . can stand it no longer.

“Can I give you a kiss?” she asks him.

“Sure you can,” he says.

She hugs him fiercely.

He smiles and thanks her and moves on, his hands in the pockets of his white jeans, his dark ostrich skin boots scuffing along the dirt paths . . .

So, what's your guess? Brad Pitt? Matt Damon? Robert Redford, perhaps? Or might it be fiction -- something from a dime-store bodice-ripper?

The District of Columbia is going to the Supreme Court to protect its 1976 law that effectively disarmed its crime-plagued law-abiding civilian populace. In addition to an editorial cheering on the appeal, Washington's largest broadsheet is all to happy to skew its front-page coverage accordingly.

In their September 5 article "D.C. Case Could Shape Gun Laws," reporters Robert Barnes and David Nakamura quoted from gun ban proponents Mayor Adrian Fenty (D) and D.C. Attorney General Linda Singer as they laid out their arguments for the gun ban. Only one opponent of the gun ban was quoted, and even then his ink was wasted on explaining his next move:

Frustration with CENTCOM's and the military's ability and willingness to get its message out abounded late last year.

Although I'll allow that many things get past me, I have noticed bare improvements at best out of CENTCOM since then.

One blogger in Ohio has now done something about it.

Fortunately, heroic (that IS the right word) onsite milbloggers and others on the ground in Iraq have picked up much of the slack in the meantime. I would attempt to enumerate them here, but I'm sure I'll miss many who don't deserve to be overlooked. Collectively, I believe that they have conferred a degree of balance in the war-related news in two ways.

NBC's "Today" show devoted its entire 7:30am half-hour of its Wednesday morning program to Bill and Hillary Clinton as it invited on the former president to tout his wife's candidacy and his new book. During almost 13 minutes of one-on-one interview time with Clinton, Matt Lauer brought up the issue of too much money in politics but never asked about Bill's or Hillary's fundraising scandals, asked about Republican Larry Craig's sex scandal, but didn't mention Bill's own personal indiscretions and even let Clinton rant about the GOP's "Swift boat tactics" against Hillary.

Bill Clinton promoted his new book "Giving" in the second half-hour of NBC’s Today on Wednesday morning. Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira repeatedly promoted how the idealistic former president would arrive to tell viewers "how you can change the world." (That's a play on the book's subtitle.) To set up the interview, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell compiled a story in a typical story on the Clintons, with no conservative or Republican critics in it, and the toughest, most skeptical expert in the piece was Dee Dee Myers, the former Clinton press secretary. Myers declared that Hillary has the problem that her husband is "a global rock star and one of the most popular people on the face of the planet." Mitchell concluded that the former president is "one of her biggest assets."

New York Times reporter Gretel Kovach reported on the tragic shooting death in Dallas of Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, the keyboard player for Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, in "Musician Is Killed For Banging On a Door." But unwittingly or not, that headline (killed for banging on a door -- talk about harsh Texas justice!) suggested the shooting was an overreaction, and Kovach's article further politicized the issue from the second sentence on.

A Texas rock musician was shot to death here early Monday by a neighbor who fired through a closed door, thinking he was scaring off a burglar.

The incident occurred just three days after a new law took effect strengthening the right of Texans to use deadly force to protect themselves and their property.

More evidence that Al Gore's Live Earth flop was indeed the beginning of the end to the public's fascination with global warming: Leonardo DiCaprio's recently released film on the subject has bombed with moviegoers.

As reported by Fox News's Roger Friedman Wednesday (emphasis added throughout):

His environmental documentary, "The 11th Hour," has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales.

As Friedman pointed out, these are horrible numbers:

Gabriel Resources, a mining company based in Toronto, Canada, has begun to fight back against the lies and war of misinformation being waged against its proposed Romanian gold mine by leftwing billionaire George Soros. As I have written about several times on my own blog, BillHobbs.com, the poverty-stricken place village of Rosia Montana, Romania, is seeing its best-ever chance at economic progress and a better life for its people blocked by environmental groups and NGOs, and by Soros, a wealthy man who doesn't lack for things like indoor plumbing and electricity the way many of the people do in Rosia.

The New York Times, PBS and other media outlets have in recent weeks presented a false picture of the Rosia Montana project, describing it as a small village trying to fend off destruction by a big Canadian mining company. The real picture is much different - the truth is, the people of the village largely support the proposed mine, and want the benefits it will bring, and the opposition is largely non-local and heavily funded by Soros.

On July 12, NewsBusters asked, "Did Live Earth's Flop Reduce Media Interest in Global Warming?"

Two months later, the BBC has scrapped "Planet Relief," a proposed day-long special about climate change, specifically citing the failure of Al Gore's international concerts as one of the reasons for the cancellation.

How delicious.

As reported by England's Times Online Wednesday (h/t NB reader Chris Stacy, emphasis added throughout):

Led by a number of conservative bloggers (including, full disclosure, me), some of Tennessee's news media outlets have begun to report on the connections of convicted felon and big-time Democratic fund-raiser Norman Hsu to the Tennessee Democratic Party and the failed Senate campaign of former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., who now heads the Democratic Leadership Council.

After a few days of reports by blogger Terry Frank, myself and other Tennessee conservative bloggers, and discussion on the popular Steve Gill radio show, following publication of a long list of Hsu's money recipients, the story has begun to appear in the mainstream Tennessee media, including the Nashville City Paper, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, and NashvillePost.com, so far, not in The Tennessean, which serves the capital city of Nashville, or the Memphis Commercial-Appeal.

I've been too busy to do my normal responses lately (I'll get to you eventually, folks!) but since this essay is guaranteed to infuriate almost-everyone, I'm pasting it below (emphasis mine).
JMR

Bill Clinton has a new book out titled Giving (no, it's not free), and the book launch already has loads of media help. Today's Washington Post carries a gooey article from reporter David Segal about a Harlem book launch event and panel discussion in Harlem for Clinton hosted by Tavis Smiley, the nightly PBS chat-show host. The headline on the front of the style section was "Bill Clinton's Got What It Takes for 'Giving.'" Segal can't get over how Clinton consistently sounds like a genius, and how it makes him long for the glory days:

He still has this way of presenting his ideas for reforms as simple, elegant solutions that would all but enact themselves if enough people get behind them or merely get out of their way.

He spoke, at one point, of "whittling down materials to retrofit buildings to combat global warming in Bangladesh, and whatever it means, it sure sounds like a good idea. He said the market for charitable giving was "under-organized" and "