Jason Smith's blog

Apparently he's broadened his hatred from simply "black people" to now hating an entire generation of children from middle-income families... if you believe the bias in Reuters.

The Bush administration has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for states to extend health coverage to children in middle-income families, The New York Times reported on Monday.

But what's really going on?

The letter from Dennis Smith, the director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations, set a high standard for states that want to raise eligibility for the program above 250 percent of the poverty level, the Times said.

Here are the facts: The federal deficit is "down sharply"...

WASHINGTON - The deficit for the first five months of the budget year is down sharply from a year ago as the growth in government tax collections continues to outpace growth in spending.

...and "down sharply" means more than 25 percent over last year.

The Treasury Department reported that the deficit from October through February totaled $162.2 billion, down 25.5 percent from the same period last year.

The federal deficit was up 0.6 percent to $120 billion in February...

That improvement came even though the deficit in February hit $120 billion, up 0.6 percent from last February's deficit of $119.2 billion.

...but that's normal for this time of year as the numbers get skewed up because the government is sending out more money in the form of tax refunds to earlier tax filers.

One factor that contributes to higher deficits in February are the refund payments the Internal Revenue Service is mailing out during the month to people who have filed early tax returns. The February 2006 imbalance was the largest monthly deficit for that year.

...add this little tidbit to the story:

It's amazing how much better off the world is just knowing that Democrats have won control of Congress, isn't it? They haven't even taken control yet, and in 3 days, look how the prospects in Afghanistan have made an earth-shattering reversal.

Afghanistan on November 6, 2006 - the day before the election:

Poverty, anger with government fueling Taliban support in Afghanistan

...Many in Kandahar say their confidence in the government is falling, and some say that is helping fuel support for the Taliban....

Afghanistan on November 9, 2006 - two days after the election

Poll: Afghans express confidence in country's direction, security

John Kerry shows us that his apology was completely hollow and that his comments about the military being dumb and lazy weren't really a botched joke afterall. Why else would his campaign website have this on the front page?

 Click for larger image

This isn't just a simple case of software picking up a feed with keywords, as the image above shows Kerry's people took the time to design the torn paper image of the key part of the editorial. It's a link to this editorial from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entitled:

Now we know where Robert Novak learned about Valerie Plame. To the Left's dismay, it wasn't some mega-whopper conspiracy of historical proportions aimed at paying back a critic of the administration... instead, it was just a guy who liked Washington gossip, and actually once called Bush, Cheney, et al. a "bunch of jerks".

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."

According to Michael Isikoff, peddling his new book (written with liberal David Corn) in Newsweek:

Armitage's central role as the primary source on Plame is detailed for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war. The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

Oops.

When Harvey Weinstein's company decides to fund a conservative documentary about illegal immigration, the media is eerily silent.

But let Harvey Weinstein's company decide to fund a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and you'll see headlines like, "Dixie Chicks documentary could be election issue".

I'd love to see the statistics on how many Americans have replaced illegal immigration with the Dixie Chicks failed tour on their list of important election issues...

The headline had me laughing before I even read the article:

"Michael Moore says gets lots of Republican hugs"

I'm thinking it must be a slow news day. But then I read the article and realize that the entire article reads like a press release for Moore, himself.

Michael Moore -- gadfly filmmaker, liberal activist and political lightning rod -- says he finds himself being hugged by a lot of Republicans these days.

So who are these Republicans he speaks of? Does the article identify any?

...the Oscar-winning director says he is approached all the time by conservatives ready to make peace.

Ok, so who are they? Names? Descriptions? Anything....?

Some in solidly Republican northern Michigan and elsewhere now believe that they made a "colossal mistake" in initially supporting the war in Iraq, Moore said, and they have let him know it in chance encounters on the streets of Traverse City, a resort town where he has relocated from New York.

The BBC has an article out today claiming they have a “new Iraqi massacre tape“. The most curious thing about this article is not the massacre claim itself, but a line buried 15 paragraphs into the 16 paragraph article:

The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.

That’s like interviewing Hitler for his take on life at a concentration camp. Who needs fact-checking when you have such unbiased and trustworthy sources?

Not only are the sources questionable, but so is the motive for re-running this story now... a story that's several months old. The motive is pretty obvious based on what the BBC chose to include above the fold:

Testing the theory that if you repeat something often enough, it’s bound to become true, AP writer Will Lester offers up another edition in his Cell Phone/Political Polling anthology. This time, he finally tells readers what he’s been dying to say since the first article… that polls are being tilted in favor of conservatives, because cell phone users who are out of reach of pollsters are generally more liberal. Got to give the guy credit, he’s been working on this angle, repeating this same story, for several years now… and he’s finally delivered the dramatic climax.

Cell-Phone-Only Crowd May Alter Polling

Currently, 7.8 percent of adults live in households that have only a cell phone, according to research released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. And that group is growing at about 1 percentage point every six months.

Bill Nichols writes an article in today's USA Today with the headline: "8,000 desert during Iraq war"

Then the author starts citing statistics about the number of soldiers deserting "since the Iraq war began" in an another bogus effort to show that troops disagree with the war and are fleeing in droves. Then the article cites the head of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war group that offers legal aid to deserters, and says

Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service...

Is the war in Iraq really driving more soldiers to question their service? Not if we look at the very statistics cited in this same article.

Since fall 2003, 4,387 Army soldiers, 3,454 Navy sailors and 82 Air Force personnel have deserted. The Marine Corps does not track the number of desertions each year but listed 1,455 Marines in desertion status last September, the end of fiscal 2005

That's 9,296 desertions over 2+ years. But if you look at the stats for just 2001, a single year prior to the start of the Iraq war:

The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001.

There were 9,581 deserters in 2001 alone... 2 years BEFORE the Iraq war began and then 2 years AFTER the start of the war, there were only 3,456.

The AP is breaking another non-story. The headline: "Many Defendants' Cases Kept Secret"

Despite the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of public trials, nearly all records are being kept secret for more than 5,000 defendants who completed their journey through the federal courts over the last three years.

And right on cue, they blame Bush.

The data show a sharp increase in secret case files over time as the Bush administration's well-documented reliance on secrecy in the executive branch has crept into the federal courts through the war on drugs, anti-terrorism efforts and other criminal matters."This follows the pattern of this administration," said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas defense attorney and second vice president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The second most popular anti-Bush meme, behind the "Bush lied" screed, is the "secret government" line. So this story sounds like a big deal, right? The evil Bush administration is secretly locking people up and the Sixth Amendment is getting shredded all to hell.

Of course not. In fact, the story itself shows that this isn't newsworthy information. Here are these two highly relevant items from the article:

• An Associated Press investigation found, and court observers agree, that most of these defendants are cooperating government witnesses
• But the AP investigation found, and court observers agree, that the overwhelming number of these cases sealed for a limited time involve a use of secrecy that draws no criticism.

On top of that, look at the statistics they used to build this case of a "widespread pattern of secrecy in the Bush administration":

Much is being made about the Zogby poll released today that allegedly shows a mutiny of the military in Iraq. Nicholas Kristof has a hard time containing his excitement in The New York Times:

A poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq — and soon.

Editor & Publisher then jumps on the bandwagon and trumpets Kristof's declaration with the headline:

Kristof: Poll Finds U.S. Troops in Iraq Urge Pullout

Overwhelmingly want out soon? Urge pullout? Sounds like a pretty strong indictment on the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. But things may not actually be as they appear... or as Kristof and the Democrats want them to appear.

Apparently George W. Bush was quite the Texas Governor. Aside from completely duping Congress with faulty intelligence that led them to believe Saddam Hussein was a threat years before he moved into the White House, now the London Sunday Times' Simon Jenkins reveals this:

"That Blair and Bush should have discussed bombing the Al-Jazeera building in Qatar is hardly surprising. They agreed to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television during the Kosovo war."

And all while just a Governor.