New York Post

We report when they get it wrong, and now we can report when they get it right...

And it's about time some American news source describes how well most of Iraq is doing since the US led overthrow of Saddam's regime. It is a fact that escapes too many in the western media who's only goal seems to be to attack America in general and George W. Bush n particular.

THE BOOM OUTSIDE BAGHDAD

WHILE the American political elite is using Iraq as an excuse for fighting internal political wars, a different reality is taking shape in parts of this war-torn nation. Wherever some measure of security is assured - that is to say in more than 80 percent of Iraq - towns and villages long left to die a slow death are creeping back to life.

Nowhere is this slow but steady return to life more startling than in Um Qasr, in the southeast extremity of Iraq on the Persian Gulf. Four years ago, this was a jumble of rusting quays, abandoned houses and gutted buildings. By the spring of 2003, its population had dwindled to a few dozen, along with hundreds of stray dogs. There was even talk of abandoning it altogether.

Yesterday, I noted here the pride of place 'Today' accorded Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, to trumpet his abjectly bleak view of Iraq. Haas confirmed Meredith Vieira's assessment of his position: "You do not believe that there is anything about the situation that is winnable, I take it." He added that Iraq would be seen as a "colossal foreign policy failure."

All this sets the stage nicely for the forthcoming, much-leaked recommendations of the Baker Study Group, which effectively will be calling for a slow-motion retreat and surrender.

Enter John Podhoretz. In his NY Post column of today, Podhoretz excoriates both the Study Group's members and its recommendations. Excerpts:

If anyone says Rupert Murdoch's media outlets go easy on conservatives, his New York Post has been willing to run plagiarism challenges brought against Ann Coulter by former University of California, Berkeley professor John Barrie.

Universal Press Syndicate, through which Coulter's columns appear in more than 100 newspapers, said it wants to review a report that detailed instances in which passages of her columns appeared to be lifted from other authors. A plagiarism-detecting software system called iThenticate produced the findings.

"We take allegations of plagiarism seriously. It's something we'd like to investigate further," Universal spokeswoman Kathie Kerr said.

"We'd like to see a copy of the report. We'd like to start looking into it."

Over the course of the past few weeks – and much to the delight of many conservative new media journalists – no less than seven major news outlets have published rather derogatory articles about Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the highly-successful proprietor of the überleft-leaning blog Daily Kos.

Conspicuously at the same time, most media avoided or downplayed the recently revealed stock fraud allegations surrounding Zuniga’s colleague and co-author Jerome Armstrong – the man that helped Howard Dean’s presidential campaign back in 2004, and is now working for 2008 Democrat presidential candidate Mark Warner.

As this negative media focus came soon after Zuniga’s much-heralded liberal bloggers’ convention, The Yearly Kos, in Las Vegas – where the usual media suspects were writing great praise for the event as well as for Kos himself – some awkward and so far unspoken questions arise:

There's a lot of buzz today on the burgeoning scandal over whether or not DailyKos blogger Markos Moulitsas and his partner, Jerome Armstrong, have been scamming Democrats by taking money from them on the sly and then promoting them to blog readers as straightforward endorsements. Lots of good stuff from Donkey Cons, Outside the Beltway, Flopping Aces, Hot Air, PJM, Ace of Spades, and Riehl World View.

The original source of the whole blogger investigation was an article printed in New York Times blog (disclosing how Armstrong was found by the SEC to have promoted junk stocks and bonds on the web) which never appeared in the print edition and is unreadable without a paid subscription to the web site. After the story came out, The New York Post printed its own story, and in the process taking the scoop. It's starting to seem as though NYT blogger Chris Suellentrop's editors did not deem newsworthy a story which reflected badly on the left-wing blogosphere despite devoting mucho coverage to it this month.

Big tip to Politburo Diktat for the graphic above.

In a stunning example of politics making strange bedfellows, conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Fox News and the New York Post, is rumored to be about to host a fundraising event for Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY). As reported by the Financial Times: “The decision underlines an incongruous thawing of relations between Mr Murdoch and Mrs Clinton, who in 1998 coined the phrase ‘vast rightwing conspiracy’ to denounce critics of her husband, such as Fox News, the conservative cable channel owned by Mr Murdoch’s News Corporation.”

The article made it clear that this is about Hillary's senatorial ambitions and not those for the White House: