Rick Moore's blog

The headline has ominous tones: 'Gang of 14' Splintering Over High Court Nominee. Just what does "splintering" really mean?

WASHINGTON - The 14 centrists who averted a Senate breakdown over judicial nominees last spring are showing signs of splintering on President Bush's latest nominee for the Supreme Court.

That is weakening the hand of Democrats opposed to conservative judge Samuel Alito and enhancing his prospects for confirmation.

The unity of the seven Democrats and the seven Republicans in the "Gang of 14" was all that halted a major filibuster fight between GOP leader Bill Frist and Democratic leader Harry Reid earlier this year over Bush's nominees.

The Iraqis have approved their new constitution, but the AP is not real happy about it. Look how quickly they go from good news to bad news in this report:

Draft Constitution Adopted by Iraq Voters

Iraq's constitution was adopted by a majority in a fair vote during the country's Oct. 15 referendum, as Sunni Arab opponents failed to muster enough support to defeat it, election officials said Tuesday. A prominent Sunni politician called the balloting "a farce."

The U.S. military also announced the deaths of two Marines in fighting with insurgents last week in Baghdad, bringing the number of American service members killed in the war to 1,999.

It's almost as though they used the news of the vote as an excuse to rerun the combat death numbers.

The dead tree news media is suffering these days and their readership is aging. This is not a sign of good things to come for the newspaper industry (from the Star Tribune):

Newspaper readership is down. Fewer young people are picking them up, and the average age of a newspaper reader is now 55, according to a Carnegie Corporation study. Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups.

Newspaper profits and the stock prices of the companies that own them were also down during the first half of 2005. The biggest newspapers are cutting staffs, closing foreign bureaus and taking other steps to meet their owners' profit goals.

Most of these dire trends are nothing new. Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction.

Rep. Peter King was interviewed by Hardball's Chris Matthews, and Radioblogger has the blow-by-blow of this very one-sided battle. Decision by a knockout to Rep. King. Here's the final comment by King which ended the match:

"Chris, you won't give me a chance to answer the questions. Just because the president doesn't watch you on television, it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. You know, Franklin Roosevelt wasn't hired to listen to radio accounts of D-Day. You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russert, or any of the others. He is doing his job. Now I agree the military should have been brought in sooner, but that was primarily the fault of the local government not being more responsive, and then the president did the best he could.

Last night I, along with many millions of others, was treated to the live broadcast of an emergency landing by JetBlue flight 292. The flight had departed from Burbank, CA bound for New York City and experienced an unusual problem with it's nose landing gear. The wheels were cocked 90 degrees to the right and wouldn't retract.

After circling near Catalina Island for nearly 3 hours to burn off fuel, the flight finally made its way in to Los Angeles International Airport and made what can only be described as a textbook emergency landing. The pilot greased the main gear on the runway, held the nose up as long as he could, and then eased the plane down onto the damaged nose gear. After some smoke and not just a little bit of flame, the plane came to stop with the damaged nose gear right smack in the middle of the runway's centerline.  Not bad with the nose steering gear ground off.  There was no fire, and after a few minutes, the relieved passengers departed the aircraft without a physical scratch on them. I'm sure some will be shook up a bit after the experience, but they walked away and that's always the best result.

NBC is doing something that you just don't see on network TV these days - promoting a TV show with a Christian theme. The peacock network is making a full-court promotional effort for the show with churches and Christian radio stations (from Newsmax):

An upcoming TV series featuring Christian pop singer Amy Grant will make its debut next Friday, and NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote it.

In "Three Wishes," Amy Grant will visit a different town every week, where, in a gesture of Christian charity, she will seek to fulfill the wishes of needy families and community groups, according to the New York Times.

The show, which Amy Grant describes as "faith in action," is being heavily promoted by NBC, which, the Times reports, has sent more than 7,000 DVDs of the show's first episode to ministers and other clergy members, along with a recorded message to their congregants from Amy Grant.

NBC also has scheduled Grant, who recently released an album of hymns titled "Rock of Ages," for interviews on Christian radio and taken out advertising in small-town newspapers.

For two days now Fox News' Major Garrett has reported on first the Red Cross, and then the Salvation Army, being denied entrance to New Orleans by Louisiana State authorities. According to Garrett and the Red Cross website, officials didn't want the food, water and sanitary supplies to get to the Superdome and Convention Center because it might encourage others to come to those sites rather than evacuate the city. The result of the decision to withhold aid was thousands of New Orleans citizens trying to survive in horrific conditions without much needed supplies. The Louisiana National Guard, which was not tasked with providing survival supplies to evacuees, had to divert their attention from law enforcement and rescue operations to providing aid to the desperate families looking for the basics of life.

The Associated Press posted an article by Barry Schweid detailing hurricane relief aid being sent by a number of other countries. In the process the writer just couldn't help taking a cheap shot at U.S. generosity, which has pumped billions of dollars in foreign aid to others in need. First there was this line which followed a paragraph about Japan's contributions to the disaster relief:

The United States historically has aided victims of disasters, but it is not universally recognized as providing the level of aid expected of a rich nation.

Then, a couple of paragraphs later we have another comment about American aid:

The United States, the world's largest economy, lags behind other rich nations in the percentage of its giving to nations in Africa, the world's poorest continent.

If you're an AOL user and signed on today, the top news item was a photo of President Bush at the wheel of his pick-up truck, and the headline "Should He Be On Vacation, Long Break Stirs Controversy".  Of course, they had the obligatory unscientific "polls" where the AOL users get to express the views.

The poll questions were as loaded as the headline:

1.  Should Bush be on vacation during a war?   Yes/No

2.  How hard does it seem like Bush is working on his vacation?  Very/Somewhat/Not at All

3.  Do you think Bush's vacations make him more effective in the long run?  Yes/No

4.  How would you describe the amount of vacation Bush takes?  Too Much/Just Right/Not Enough

This is at least the second time AOL has run a news item and poll like this since Bush went on vacation.  Given that this info appears under "AOL News", the assumption is that AOL considers this the top news story in the country (this is the same spot where important breaking news appears).

Drudge is reporting that Jonathan Klein, head honcho at CNN, is taking some verbal shots at the folks at Fox News:

"CNN President Jonathan Klein implies ratings news leader FOXNEWS is mired in coverage of "meaningless nonsense," claiming: "Fourteen Americans dead, and they have Natalee Holloway on," Klein says. "And they're supposedly America's news channel."

"It's easy and it's brainless," Klein charges in a telephone interview set for publication at the NEW YORK TIMES, explaining why cable news outlets are gravitating to the Aruba story. "They're looking for an ongoing drama" along the lines of the NBC crime show "Law & Order," he said, adding, "Except 'Law & Order' doesn't do the same plot every night."

The newspaper industry, which relies heavily on advertising, may be taking a big hit from a usually reliable source of advertising dollars - Hollywood (h/t Drudge):

In a surprising role reversal, Hollywood is about to deliver bad news to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and, to a lesser extent, other big-city dailies around the country. Every major movie studio is rethinking its reliably humongous display ad buys in those papers because those newsosaur readers are, to quote one mogul, “older and elitist” compared to younger, low-brow filmgoers — so it makes no sense to waste the dough.

Wait, it gets worse: I’ve learned that at least two Hollywood movie studios have decided to drastically cut their newspaper display ads as soon as possible.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner points out an interesting line in an article in the New York Times regarding Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

"The newspapers circulating in Ethiopia's capital have plenty of room for improvement. Typographical errors occur too frequently. Bias creeps into print regularly."

It's nice to see the NY Times recognize bias, even if in someone else's paper.

The three-ring circus that has opened in Crawford (the first in history in which all of the acts are clowns) is a wonderful example of what happens when you have a bored press corps.  After so many days of standing around in the hot sun interviewing each other, along comes Cindy Sheehan to make all their dreams come true.  They finally have a story, and if it has the potential to make the president look bad, all the better.  The White House press corps loves that kind of stuff.

I first saw this coming last Sunday when I signed on to AOL and the Crawford campout was the lead item on AOL news.  At that point there had been no significant national press coverage of Ms. Sheenan, so I questioned whether this story was worthy of showing up on the front page of every AOL user who signed on that day.  As the week has played out it has become obvious that the story was going to have legs, whether deserved or not.