Is offending someone's religion or religious beliefs a sign of having a conscience?

Apparently it is to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences which is going to give an award to the highly controversial CNN miniseries "God's Warriors" for being "Television With a Conscience."

I kid you not.

As reported by the Academy Thursday (emphasis added, h/t TVNewser):

We better hope there are some big-time technological advances in the science of home air conditioning by the year 2040. According to the outlook offered by Dr. James Lovelock in the March 22 issue of The Daily Mail (U.K.), we're in for some dire consequences.

Sarah Sands of The Daily Mail (U.K.) (h/t Marc Morano of The Inhofe EPW Press Blog) reported Lovelock is forecasting the end of humanity due to global warming ... again.

"By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine," Sands wrote. "The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain. We will, he says, have to set up encampments in this country, like those established for the hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the conflict in East Africa. Lovelock believes the subsequent ethnic tensions could lead to civil war."

i have created a sweet 16 group at yahoo sports all are invited to join

 

Group id #:   3143

Group name:  NB

password:      botg

nows the time to pick we have 5 days to completely fill our brackets

The Washington Post is aligning its Fact Checker with Rich Noyes of NewsBusters. On Saturday's front page, the Inside box reads: "Four Pinocchios! Hillary Clinton has talked of coming under sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia. Our Fact Checker shoots that tale down." In the Michael Dobbs "Fact Checker" feature, four Pinocchios means not just fact-shading or exaggerating, but "Real whoppers." (It wasn't prominently featured on the washingtonpost.com home page.) 

Dobbs wrote on Saturday that "Clinton's tale of landing at the Tuzla airport "under sniper fire" simply is not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival ceremony, complete with contemporaneous news reports, tell a very different story. MRC offered up the evidence out of our cavernous video archive. Dobbs offered up his own journalistic travels and other Post reporters in casting grave doubts on her story:

A recent AP story about 50-year-olds moving back into their parents homes because the economy is so bad is one of the best examples of taking anecdotal evidence and stretching it into a universal truth that I have seen for a while. Filled with the sadly common "many say" and all based on the tale of one person who moved back home at 52, the AP magically discerned a national trend. This is the sort of shoddy reporting that is geared for one thing and one thing only: to promulgate a political agenda.

AP business writer Emily Fredrix gives us the sensationally titled, "Last Hope in a Weak Economy? Mom and Dad," in which she nicely sums up her unsupported claim in the third paragraph.

Taking shelter with parents isn't uncommon for young people in their 20s, especially when the job market is poor. But now the slumping economy and the credit crunch are forcing some children to do so later in life -- even in middle age.

Hollywood is about to release a remake of the science fiction classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

This time, rather than coming to earth to warn us about our dangerous foray into the nuclear age, Klaatu and Gort have returned to caution us about -- wait for it -- global warming!

Honestly, you can't possibly make this stuff up!

As marvelously reported Friday by Vic Holtreman of Screen Rant (his delicious picture to the right, emphasis added):

Despite the more hysterical predictions we've heard of late, the evidence continues to mount that if the earth was warming, it stopped quite some time ago.

Of course, don't expect this fact to be widely reported, if it indeed even makes it into any U.S. newspapers or television broadcasts.

Read the entire interview from The Australian, but a couple of admissions are quite striking:

A fairly common media meme during the past year or so has been that the continually declining value of the dollar is driving up oil and gas prices (image courtesy Slate).

In the past three months alone, there have been over 100 stories involving this very subject, including this March 10 piece from U.S. News & World Report entitled "Why Gas Prices Rise as the Dollar Falls (emphasis added):

Here's one of those complex economic truisms the financial press assumes everybody understands: A big reason oil and gas prices are hitting record highs is that the dollar is hitting record lows.

The beauty of this "truism" is that it allows media outlets to blame oil and gas price rises on the Bush administration, as everybody knows that the lower dollar is all their fault (wink, wink...nudge, nudge).

Of course, an examination of oil and Dollar Index charts does show an inverse correlation, meaning that as oil prices rise, the dollar drops and vice versa (charts provided by TradingCharts.com):

In his latest culture column, Brent Bozell welcomes the Supreme Court's decision to take up the case of whether "fleeting" profanities on television can lead to fines for the networks that air them without using the five-second delay button. Brent contends that Hollywood doesn't merely want to escape fines for unexpected outbursts of profanity. It wants the inalienable right to air them without any public or governmental action:  

The point is: Hollywood wants to air them. To them, it’s all a waste of money to spare the benighted rabble in the little villages who haven’t learned to stop worrying and love the F-bomb.

Out in America, voters still have the common sense to believe that profanities aren’t the kind of speech that you wave the flag over, as if “fleeting” profanity was a cause as American as apple pie. Most Americans think that the quality of entertainment is in steep decline.

Well, sports fans, I suggested yesterday that in the past few years, the first Friday of the NCAA tournament has typically provided some of the best games and the most exciting upsets. March 21, 2008, certainly did not disappoint!

Regardless of how they may have screwed up your brackets, if you weren't fired up and knocked off of your couch by Davidson, West Kentucky, San Diego, Siena, and Villanova, I suggest quite strongly you go visit your doctor!

So, what's going to happen today? Where will the big upsets occur?

My choice for upset of the day is Duke, which should come as a great surprise to many of you that know me to be a Blue Devil fan. I just think there's something wrong with this team right now. They lack spunk, and WVU will be fired up.

I also think Marquette can beat Stanford, with the game of the day being MSU against Pitt. That'll be old-fashioned college basketball at its finest. Thoughts?

Update 12:13. This post was incorrect. My apologies to Brian Kilmeade and "Fox and Friends" for not getting the joke.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: security breach at the State Department:

Two companies that provide workers for the State Department say they fired or otherwise punished those who improperly accessed the passport records of the three major presidential candidates. The security breaches touched off demands for a congressional investigation.

Oddly, one of the people involved has ties to Obama (paragraph break removed):

The third employee, who has not been fired, worked for The Analysis Corporation (TAC), which is headed by John O. Brennan, a former CIA agent who is an adviser to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign on intelligence and foreign policy. The TAC employee is the only individual to have accessed both Mr. Obama's and Mr. McCain's passport information without proper authorization, a State Department spokesman said.

What's going on here? Any thoughts?

Yesterday, Gateway Pundit noticed what he called an "Uh-Oh... This wasn't supposed to happen" event for presidential candidate Barack Obama:

An amazing article appeared in the mainstream news today. McClatchy actually reported that Obama's church merges Marxism and Christian Gospel and preaches that the white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.

That they did. But how did they headline it, and how many McClatchy newspapers actually ran the story?

Margaret Talev's Thursday, March 20 description of the fundamental doctrines of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) does get right to the point. Talev even goes so far as to question the candidate's motivations for his involvement with the church.

Most importantly, which I why I've bolded the related text, Talev notes that while TUCC's radical and racist philosophies will survive the Rev. Wright's retirement, their continued presence will not deter Obama from continuing to attend:

Next time, maybe Bill Richardson should consider text messaging. Something along these lines, perhaps:

I M not 4 U. Me & BHO: BFF. CUL8R

Of course we can only imagine how Hillary's reply would have read. But Richardson did have the moxie to make one of the world's tougher phone calls: informing Hillary Clinton that despite having been appointed by her husband to two cabinet positions, he was endorsing Barack Obama. Richardson has now let it be known that his conversation with Hillary got "a little bit heated."

Kidding aside, consider what it says about Hillary's personality that so much press attention has focused on the call. Imagine if Richardson had instead decided to endorse Clinton. Not many people would be wondering about the atmospherics of his conversation with Obama. Richardson appeared on this morning's Today, and weekend co-anchor Lester Holt wasted absolutely no time: his very first question to the NM governor was about that dreaded phone call.