In a story from Memphis on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King in that city, ABC's Steve Osunsami acknowledged great economic progress for black citizens with “a definable black middle class,” but warned “there are still large disparities.” He then featured a man at the anniversary events who insisted “we're waiting for progress” followed by Jesse Jackson using the solemn occasion to complain about the Iraq war and tax cuts:

We are freer but less equal. To that extent, we spend $3 trillion on the war in Iraq and give tax breaks to the wealthy. You have this body of poverty, growing poverty in our cities. And our response to it is what? First-class jails and second-class schools.

The Reverend Bill Kyle, who was with King when he was murdered, rued that “now that we have the right to go to a school, we need the money to pay the tuition,” before Osunsami concluded by agreeing King's dream of equality remains unfulfilled: “Not quite what Dr. King had dreamed. But some dreams take a mighty long time to realize.”

On the flimsy pretext of this being the season when HS seniors get their college acceptances, a New York Times column has set about asking current college students about their plans for future sexual conquests.

Stephen Dubner handed his 'Freakonomics' column over to his assistant, Nicole Tourtelot, this week. She asked five collegians five questions. Three of them were innocuous: who's paying for your education, how do you view cigarette smoking, what's your dream job?

But then came:

• How many more people do you think you’ll sleep with before you get married?
• How many would you like to?

You’ve seen the Ted Turner quote from the April 1 Charlie Rose show about global warming turning what’s left of us into cannibals, but the point should still be made that PBS and Rose treated him as a statesman and a scholar. The host oozed all over him at the show's end: "You're a remarkable man..I enjoy your company. I think the life you've lived with passion, independence, a sense of great, great, and deep concern about the world we live in is remarkable."

What Turner said in reply was highlighted by Rose at the beginning of the hour: "I love this planet. It's worth saving. I mean, it's worth saving.You know, I know we're the same people that did the Holocaust, but we also did the Mona Lisa and Beethoven`s Fifth Symphony. I mean, there is so much -- this world -- we can't turn it into a cinder. We've got to protect it for ourselves and for our children. And it's worth fighting for. And that's all I'm doing, is trying to fight to help save humanity."

Rose was so indulgent of Turner that he goaded him into singing "Over the Rainbow" and "My Old Kentucky Home" and told him "it was good."

After the cannibalism talk, it was more amusing to see this exchange about his feud with Rupert Murdoch, and how he hasn't been caught saying anything stupid:

Did you know that 574,000 and 1.1 million more Americans had jobs in March than in February and January, respectively?

Seriously, as you can see on the right (data can be retrieved from this BLS page; select the very first "not seasonally adjusted" table).

Now the fact remains, as you can also see, that job growth during the past two months is nowhere near as great as it was during the same two months in 2006 (1.91 million) or 2007 (1.58 million). This goes a long way towards explaining why total employment, when adjusted for seasonality, fell 80,000 during March, and by 232,000 during the first quarter.

There's no denying that the employment situation has been deteriorating for several months, and I'm not trying to minimize that. What I am saying is that the "employees were thrown out on the streets during March" narrative cooked up by Old Media today, including the Associated Press's Jeannine Aversa, is clearly false, either because Old Media reporters and their editors don't understand a concept as basic as seasonality, or they don't want to.

The bulletproof hoodie that has so many in the British press up in arms today is more than likely a cynical fraud by a company that obvious knows how to play up the easily excitable U.K. press, but who doesn't have much of a chance of following through with a product that can do what they claim.

According to the company's web site:

Bladerunner have now created " The Defender Hoodie " which is BULLET PROOF throughout the main body area.

This Hoodie is rugged and tough just like a normal Hoodie but this one has a removable Inner Shell that gives you Balistic Security at Level NIJ STD 0101.04

Number 1: Never trust your "Balistic Security" to a bunch of over-zealous fashion designers that can't spell "ballistic."

Number 2: There is no such thing as "bullet proof," just bullet resistant, a fact that any responsible armor designer will tell you that Bladerunner blows right past in a bit of self-promoting puffery.

Missed a few payments on your mortgage? About to be kicked out of that house you probably couldn't have afforded in the first place?

Don't worry - ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson" has advice for you.

The April 3 "World News" featured a Staten Island family that managed to purchase a $335,000 home, but with only an annual income of $30,000.

"Karen and David Shearon, working people who made less than $30,000 a year at the time, refused to be intimidated and fought foreclosure - claiming the mortgage broker promised them a fixed-rate, low-interest loan on their $335,000 house, despite their income," ABC correspondent Jim Avila said.

. . .intersects right here.  The more you read, the more disturbing questions come to mind.

Note the final quote in particular:  "This is an isolated incident, an aberration. ... We have good kids," Center Principal Angie Coleman told the newspaper.

-PJ

(if this was already posted elsewhere, LMK.  I skimmed the open thread & didn't see it.)

Online gossip blog TMZ.com just doesn't know when to quit. In this April 3 post, the site took time from its busy schedule tracking celebrity train wrecks to condescendingly mock former “Bachelor” reality star Navy Lt. Andy Baldwin yet again for retrieving WWII remains. This is the third time TMZ has knocked Baldwin for “diving for old bones."

The bashing began in a March 20 post that explained Baldwin had been part of a Navy dive team assigned to recover the remains of WWII servicemen from a B-24 crash site in the South Pacific. The staff writers criticized the waste of their tax dollars on “ancient history,” musing “let's talk about why we the taxpayers are footing the bill on such BS” and asking readers if they thought it was a “[r]idiculous waste.” TMZ's staff expressed their disbelief that anyone would bother searching for such an old wreck and then dismissed the importance of recovering the remains, snarking, “At least [Baldwin] got a really good tan" (all bold mine):

What, you ask, were they looking for? A B-24J bomber that went down during the war. Not Iraq. Not Vietnam. No, not Korea. We're talking WWII, as in more than 60 years ago.

Turns out, the military spends $52 million each year to find the remains of missing soldiers -- it's part of the POW/MIA program. That's all well and good depending on the circumstances. But a crash that is ancient history, at a time when the economy sucks and the Federal government is sucking the life out of everyone with taxes??

HDNet anchor Dan Rather gets checked by a U.S. Secret Service special agent prior to boarding a bus to cover Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama D-Ill., Monday, March 31, 2008, in Harrisburg, PA (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

You're going to need a few extra bucks to pay for those corn flakes every morning.

CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi let viewers in on an underreported fact about rising commodities prices: the government mandate for ethanol production is making corn and other agricultural products more expensive-making inflation a top priority for Americans.

"Several years ago, we made some decisions about how corn is going to be used to make ethanol, which is added to our gasoline," said Velshi on "American Morning" April 4. "A number of people think that that was meant to reduce our dependency on crude oil. What is does is it takes what is fundamentally a food source and makes it into a gasoline source. That's caused corn to go up."

In a pointed news release, the White House has punched back at the tendentious “White House Memo” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg that appeared on the front page of Thursday’s News York Times. Headlined “Setting the Record Straight: The New York Times Mistakes Its Own Blindness for Presidential ‘Invisibility’,” the White House press office notes even more factual flaws and omissions than reported yesterday by the NewsBusters contributing editor Clay Waters in his own lengthy TimesWatch critique of the same piece, which portrayed President Bush as detached from the government’s reaction to the current economic slowdown.

Stolberg’s snarky third paragraph cast the President as a neglectful globetrotter while Senators have their sleeves rolled up working on solutions:

CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen, reporting live from in front Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ on Thursday’s "The Situation Room," presented a sympathetic view of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his house of worship as being "under siege" -- from the national media. "Beyond what they say is the hurtful glare of the cameras, church leaders also say parishioners are hounded by reporters and they say the church received bomb threats. A church that feels under siege, now getting national support." Nearly the entire three minute segment, outside of Roesgen’s voice-overs and on-camera reporting, consisted of sound bites of the supporters of the church.

Besides featuring nobody but its supporters, Roesgen also painted the church and its congregations as victims of the controversy and of the news media. "I think they feel angry and they feel used. When they have talked about certain reporters, they were basically talking about reporters who were rude enough to go into the pews and hand out their business cards during the services, something of course CNN would never do."

Over at Media Bistro's fishbowlDC blog Patrick W. Gavin was on hand to live-blog an appearance by News Corp's Rupert Murdoch who visited Georgetown University's Gaston Hall to talk about the shape of today's media landscape. As reported by Gavin, Murdoch had some interesting things to say. Among his comments was that we shouldn't have any fear that the media is becoming less free and.... oh, yeah... he claimed that CNN has "always been extremely liberal." (Gosh, who knew?)

Murdoch also commented on the state of TV and how it can no longer assume it can reach such a "mass audience."

On Friday's "Good Morning America," for the second day in a row, and the third time in a little over a week, the ABC program promoted the story of a transgendered man who is having a baby via artificial insemination. At no time did GMA feature any guest to challenge or question the psychological ramifications for a child who was born from a pregnant "father."

[Audio available here]

During the April 4 segment on the subject, GMA guest news anchor David Muir described Thomas Beatie's decision as "very controversial." One would assume that a controversial decision would have two sides to it. But over the course of three segments, totaling ten minutes and 16 seconds, the closest the network program got was on April 3, when psychologist Jeffrey Gardere mildly advised, "It really is incumbent upon this individual, his wife, to try to give this as much dignity as possible, to not make it a joke, to not make it that something that's cheap [sic]."

Touting a new CBS News/New York Times poll on Friday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Maggie Rodriguez teased an upcoming segment on the poll’s findings: "Is America broken? In a new CBS News poll, 81% of Americans believe this country's on the wrong track. Never has that number been so high."

Co-host Harry Smith later introduced the segment by declaring: "A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows 81% of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. The 14% who think we're on the right track is all -- an all-time low in the 25 years that CBS News has been asking the question." Conveniently, as Smith pointed out, CBS News began asking that question in 1983, during the Reagan Administration, and never asked the poll question during the Carter Administration. If they had, one might suspect that quite a few Americans thought the country was "headed in the wrong direction" at the time.

Smith then highlighted a restaurant owner in New Jersey, Marianne Cuneo-Powell, who "is cutting costs any way she can." Smith went to show how Powell’s situation reflected the poll numbers: "She is among the 78% of Americans who believe the economy is in bad condition... Like Marianne, two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. economy is already in a recession. And they are not encouraged by their leaders in Washington...Only 21% of Americans approve of President Bush's handling of the economy." Of course a recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, not based on what the latest poll numbers say.

As a loyal Clinton campaign email subscriber, rarely a day goes by that I don't hear from Hillary or Bill. It's good to know they're thinking about me. But today brings some very troubling news: Hillary is WAY behind on her fundraising goal for TV airtime in Pennsylvania. [screencap below page break]

The gist of today's message from Hillary is that we supporters are being given a cafeteria list of PA campaign expenditure needs, and get to designate exactly where we want our contribution to go.

I had been torn between door hangers and yard signs, when I decided to check out some of the other options, and . . . YIKES! As you'll see from the image, the budget for TV airtime in Pennsylvania is $2.5 million, but Hillary has raised only $129,947. That works out to only 5.1% of the goal!

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated 40 years ago today.

What were you doing that day, and what do you remember feeling when you heard the awful news? Might race relations have been different today if King was still around?

Why hasn't there been a viable replacement in the last 40 years which have instead produced folks like Farrakhan, Jackson, and Sharpton seemingly much more interested in advancing themselves than those they claim to represent?

WASHINGTON, D.C.- Private conversations, the hushed whispers, the non-reporting by the MSM, the excitement of "what if", the 'possible' endorsement of Colin Powell, the momentum builds. In the past week, I've been listening to a reoccurring discussion at different events around town. The media has been somewhat quiet to the prospect of an Obama/ Powell ticket. It would seem to me with the amount of conversations on the subject someone would have reported something. So, is the "liberal" media sitting on a story that isn't ready for primetime? What's the delay? Waiting for Hillary to call it quits?

Any thoughts? Would Obama, with Powell by his side, have a stronger stance against McCain and his lap dog Libermann (who always seems to be in the background at a McCain photo op)? Will we be witnessing the first African-American President AND Vice President? Interesting scenario. Stay tuned...

Picking up on absurd statements CNN founder Ted Turner made on Tuesday's Charlie Rose show on PBS, comments first reported late that night on NewsBusters, FNC's Bret Baier, filling in for Brit Hume, reported on Thursday's Special Report how “Turner believes that inaction on global warming will lead to cannibalism,” that he “went on to ridicule the U.S. military” and that he described Iraqi insurgents who are killing Americans as “patriots.”

The Drudge Report on Wednesday morning linked to the NewsBusters post and Rush Limbaugh played the “cannibal” clip on his radio show later in the day.