Although the term isn't used, it's clear that the Obama campaign sees itself and their candidate as victims of a vast conspiracy of right-wingers.

Going all the way back to the 1988 presidential election, Obama's "Fight the Smears" chart (featuring the campaign's new sort-of "presidential seal," replacing the one that was "dropped," at the top left) purports to tell us "Who's Behind These Lies."

If the page's historical starting points are any indication, to paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there may not be "a whole lotta smearin' goin' on" among the current "smearing" parties it identifies:

When I was a boy, I just could not sit still in class. I was very
bored and active by nature, so I would rock my chair back, whisper and
write notes to kids, even wander around the classroom until the teacher
yelled, "Martin, sit down!"

That was decades ago. Today, I
suspect I would have been put on Ritalin. But in either case, the blame
is placed on the smart, active boy, rarely on the schools, which claim
to celebrate diversity of learning styles and needs but stop
celebrating when it comes to smart, active boys. Indeed, this decade's
signature domestic policy, No Child Left Behind redirects nearly all
efforts to educate the lowest achievers.

This, of course, is
ironic in that smart kids have the greatest potential to contribute to
society: to cure its diseases, close the racial achievement gap,
develop cost-effective solar power, etc.

The unfair treatment of smart, active boys comes from four factors:

The Palestinians have co-opted the media to score the
Palestinian-Israeli dispute in terms of the number of people killed: 20
Palestinians killed, only 11 Israelis, so we're supposed to believe the
Palestinians have been wronged.

That's
the wrong metric. The right metric is merit. Israelis have done more
for medical science (the highest per-capita # of medical patents in the
world), for democracy, for women, not to mention providing a safe haven
for the millions of Holocaust survivors.

Compare that with the
Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim brethren, a much larger
percentage of whom live as though it were the 14th century, repressing
women, contributing little to science and technology, and condoning
repressive, anti-democratic governments. Their main exports are oil and
terrorism.

The liberal media wants us to believe that all
peoples are the same. We're not. And in the end, championing
meritocracy, not false equivalencies, will much more likely maximize
quality of life for as many of the world's people as possible.

I invite you to watch this You Tube video.
It reveals a side of Israel that the media won't show you. (Side
benefit: Its music is so uplifting, it's a guaranteed anti-depressant,
with no side effects.)

I was watching a PBS panel discussion among four women (nary a man)
about why newly hired women scientists get strong evaluations yet half
of women scientists stop working within the first few years. They
offered only three explanations: machismo, sexual harassment, and
employers not accommodating to employees' motherhood.

Why did none of the panel members mention any of these, which I have heard again and again from my women clients:

• Many women soon tire of the rigors and isolation of scientist work. Indeed recent research finds that women, on average, just aren't interested enough in science to make a long-term career out of it.
• They end up valuing being a mother more than working outside the home.
• They find it easier to be a stay-at-home mom.

As always in the mainstream (read "liberal") media, it's easier to just blame men.

Someone wrote a comment on a previous post that asked, "If the (liberal) media
is so powerful, how did John Kerry and Al Gore not get elected?"

The
reason is that since the 2004 Bush win, the media has increasingly
decided that it will allow itself to be as biased as necessary to get
results it wants.

You protest, "But there is no one media." In
fact, there is. Most people enter the field of journalism because they
"want to make a difference" (as defined in liberals' terms), but in
journalism school were taught that they need to hide their biases.
However, at recent journalist conventions, online discussion groups,
and even in bellwether journalism schools such as U.C. Berkeley,
journalists are increasingly told they can be
biased, invoking flimsy (to me, frightening) rationales such as "bias
is inevitable so stop trying to hide it" or "Liberal views are the
righteous ones, so it's ethical to express your biases."

Articles in the Washington Post (front page) and New York Times report
uncritically, a horribly biased study, which will kill the deserved
concern for boys' badly lagging girls in school and being Ritalinized
en masse.

The media should have gotten the first clue of its
being biased when they noticed who funded it: the American Association
of University Women. If a study on smoking was funded by the tobacco
industry, would you give it much credibility? At minimum, wouldn't you
vet it carefully?

Yet regarding gender issues, the media has a
double standard for how it vets and reports pro woman/minority research
vs pro male (let alone, pro-white) research findings : It censors the
latter and reports the former uncritically and as thought it were fact,
to wit, the title of the article, "No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study
Says."

Here are the problems with the AAUW study:

Following her book, "Are Men Necessary?" I shouldn't have been surprised at Maureen Dowd's most recent New York Times column.

Here are a couple of quotes from it:

"You simply operate on the assumption that no man matures after the age of 11."

“Most marriages that founder do so because of money — she’s thrifty, he’s on his 10th credit card."

That
flips the reality on its head. American Demographic reports that women
control consumer spending by a wide margin in nearly every consumer
category. An Inc.com article states that women make "over 85% of the consumer purchases (in the United States) and influence over 95% of total goods and services."

The column listed criteria for a good husband and concluded that no men met the criteria.

This column is currently the #1 most-emailed New York Times column or article.

You'd think Chris Matthews might wish Howard Wolfson well on the news that the former top aide to Hillary Clinton has joined Fox News as a Dem analyst. Think again.  The Hardball host has ungraciously predicted that the move to Fox could spell the end of Wolfson—and in doing so revealed his own pop-culture roots.

Here was Matthews on this evening's Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Fox News loves presenting itself as the alternative to the other news networks. Roger Ailes, the guy behind the network, figures that the Hillary campaign needs a new home, now that she's out of the race for president. So, abracadabra, Howard Wolfson, the voice of the Hillary campaign, has just been hired by—you guessed it—Fox News. Wolfson has just signed a contract as a regular contributor. He told the New York Times, quote, "it is important to have a strong progressive voice on the network." Well I think it's the beginning of a beautiful relationship.  Reminds me of a movie: it's called Howards End.

View video here.

As was pattern earlier this year and last, ABC's World News is much more willing -- than its CBS and NBC competitors -- to acknowledge good news in the Iraq war. On Tuesday night, ABC's Martha Raddatz cited “some really impressive gains” as she reported the plummeting number of attacks in Baghdad, falling from 1,278 in June of 2007 to 112 last month. The night before, only anchor Charlie Gibson highlighted the “upbeat assessment of security in Iraq today from Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen.”

Neither the CBS Evening News nor NBC Nightly News mentioned Mullen on Monday night while NBC's Jim Miklaszewski only noted less violence in Iraq in contrast to a “record number of Americans killed in Afghanistan last month,” so “if there's any bright side here...it's that the level of violence in Iraq has come down enough” to allow the military to move resources to Afghanistan.

Tuesday night, CBS anchor Katie Couric offered just a clause on violence in Iraq -- “Iraq's national security adviser called today for setting a timetable, a sign Baghdad is growing more confident as the violence decreases” -- before finding a away to deliver depressing news about Iraq: How though Iraqi oil profits “are on the rise,” the “money is not going to one place it's desperately needed.” That would be ill-equipped hospitals.

My colleague Warner Todd Huston was first to report the wire service Reuters publishing a picture of a saintly Barack Obama surrounded by a halo.

Now, the Associated Press has gotten into the act (h/t NBer Roger the Shrubber):

As media members have advanced global warming hysteria by claiming the naturally occurring gas carbon dioxide is going to destroy the planet, one seemingly obvious scientific constant has eluded them: plants love that which people like Nobel Laureate Al Gore want to eliminate.

Truth be told, without carbon dioxide, we'd all die, a scientific fact that has been inexplicably lost in this so-called debate.

Well, as amazing as it may seem, a group of German scientists have discovered what, with all due modesty, has been inherently obvious to yours truly for years.

Believe it or not, Agence France-Press reported Tuesday that crops love all this extra CO2 (emphasis added):

OK, I am wondering here if the hanging of a black Southerner by the KKK in the American south would be reported by the Chicago Tribune in the same kind of vague language of “cultural” murder as a recent Muslim murder in Georgia was treated? More likely, of course, the story would be immediately pegged to the racist, white motives that actually led to the murder. In essence that is how the Chicago Tribune mishandled their reporting of another so-called Islamic "honor killing" that occurred in Georgia this week. They wrote about the "culturally rigid Pakistani" immigrants and said that "honor killings" occur with "other South Asians" without ever once mentioning that this is more often than not a Muslin practice. Instead of pegging this murder to Muslim "culture" the Tribune makes it a vague and nondescript "culture" so that the reader is unaware of the connection with Islam.

A report on the economic policies of John McCain and Barack Obama by correspondent Chip Reid on Monday’s CBS "Evening News" suggested that Obama’s supposed middle class tax cut would be more beneficial for American families: "Obama's plan is to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and use the savings for a middle-class tax cut...A recent study by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center says Obama's plan would give a cut of more than a thousand dollars to families making between $37,000 and $66,000 a year. Under McCain's plan, they'd get just $319."

The "non-partisan" Tax Policy Center is actually a product of the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Urban Institute. Reid went on to explain that: "On spending, Obama wants to jump start the economy with another round of stimulus checks for taxpayers to the tune of $50 billion." After outlining McCain’s policies on taxes and spending, Reid observed: "McCain also now supports extending the Bush income tax cuts, even though he once opposed them as too generous to the wealthy. Barack Obama says McCain's switch is more evidence that a McCain presidency would be more of the same. "

At the end of the segment, Reid mentioned the candidates’ proposals on gas prices: "As for the price of gas, both candidates have elaborate plans for bringing it down in the long run but neither one offers much in the way of short-term relief." Apparently Reid forgot about McCain’s support for a temporary gas tax holiday. While the effectiveness of that policy can be debated, it certainly would qualify as "short-term relief."

On this afternoon's CNN Newsroom, anchor Don Lemon interviewed Carolyn Lochhead, the San Francisco Chronicle's Washington correspondent. The topic was "Obamacans," conservative Republicans who support Barack Obama for president.

Lochhead wrote a recent article on the phenomenon and was brought on to discuss the mythical beast:

Conservatives across America mourned at the news of the death of Senator Jesse Helms, a man credited with impeccable conservative credentials in the U.S. Senate, a conscience of a movement devoted to the defeat of communism abroad and the defense of liberty at home. He was the staunchest of social conservatives as well, unflinching in his opposition to the abortion lobby and the gay agenda.

To liberals he was "Senator No," which meant only that he would strongly oppose everything they wanted to impose on America. Their badly disguised loathing of Helms, well-expressed over the decades, only endeared him to conservatives all the more.

Jesse Helms relished that opposition. In 1990, the media declared him politically dead, his re-election an utter impossibility. On election night, a thousand cheering supporters were made to wait before their man finally emerged to declare victory, 20 minutes late. He opened his remarks by apologizing for his tardiness. "Ah was up in mah room," he explained, "ah had to watch the grievin’ face of Dan Rathuh when he had to say we’d won agin." The crowd went wild.

When Chicago instituted a city wide smoking ban in 2005 it was met with mixed reaction; some hated the idea and others loved it with little middle ground. When R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. took advantage of a loophole in the Chicago ordinance and opened up a legal smoking lounge the Washington Post treated the company as if they skirted the law and published a critical story in its nation section under the headline "Tobacco Lounge Blows Smoke in The Face of Chicago's New Ban".

Now that an unintended consequence of Chicago's smoking ban is affecting the expression of art it is being treated as an infringement of an artist's 1st Amendment right. An indirect casualty of Chicago's smoking ban is the Chicago production of Jersey Boys. As a result historically accurate depictions of Frankie Valli and The Four Season smoking cigarettes have been replaced with toothpicks and shticks with finicky lighters. This latest rewrite on history is courtesy of the same city council that gave Chicago its much reviled and short lived foie gras ban.

Funny how it takes an absurd twist of events to get people riled up about nanny state politics after the fact.

They make Reverend Wright and Trinity United disappear

The Media, Lining it Up

And for their next trick, the media will stuff Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s liberalism back into his hat.

On Sunday, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman gave us a 1,152 word news-ish story entitled “Obama Addresses His Faith”, which was a glowingly open forum for Obama to deliver “a highly personal account of his spiritual journey” and in which he proffered “a promise that he will make ‘faith-based’ social service ‘a moral center of (his) administration.’”

It’s hard to read the word “faith” in the same sentence as the name “Barack Obama” without thinking of the racist, anti-American radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who for twenty years served as the Senator’s pastor, and (as Obama described him) his “spiritual advisor” and “mentor”, in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. It cannot be accidental that the Washington Post made no mention whatsoever of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United in a piece dedicated exclusively to the Senator’s religion.

After the Supreme Court decided that a resident of Washington D.C. has a Constitutional right to own a firearm for self-defense in the home, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California stated: "I believe the people of this great country will be less safe because of it." 1

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is one of the country's leading gun control organizations. Brady's President Paul Helmke had this to say after the Supreme Court decision: "Our fight to enact sensible gun laws will be undiminished by the Supreme Court's decision in the Heller case." 2

But what exactly qualifies as "sensible," according to Helmke? And is there any way to determine whether reduced restrictions on gun ownership makes us less safe?

For many years, the Brady Campaign has released an annual "report card," grading each state on its level of "sensible" gun laws. States with higher grades (e.g. "A") were obviously more "sensible," according to Brady; states rated "F" were apparently considered &