Seattle Times

Today liberal Senate Democrats failed to garner the 60-vote threshold to end debate on and move to a final passage vote for the DREAM Act.

In covering the story, the news wire credited Republican opposition for "doom[ing]" the legislation, but the math doesn't work out when you look at the breakdown of the votes on the motion to end debate -- also known as invoking cloture. [h/t reader Kevin Davis]

The Seattle Times needs a refresher course on impartial journalism. Staff reporter Lornet Turnbull didn't even try to cover her liberal tracks as she embraced the LGBT agenda in a March 31 article: "Census Will Count Gay Couples Who Check 'Husband or Wife.'"

Turnbull's article about the LGBT community's anger toward the Census Bureau tilted in favor of the homosexual agenda with sources stacked 3-to-1.

Josh Friedes, the executive director of a Seattle LGBT advocacy group, told Turnbull that "even in the absence of federal recognition of our relationships, we have an opportunity to say on an official form that, 'Yes, we are married,' 'Yes, our relationships are every bit as equal to everyone else's.'"

(March 26, 8:30 p.m. -- SEE THE UPDATE at the end of this post.)

People in Cincinnati who follow politics reasonably closely will be scratching their heads wondering what's gotten into the people assembling news stories at the Seattle Times once they learn of what the Times reported in an item that originally went up Wednesday evening and was modified Thursday morning:

A rock was thrown through the window of (1st District Congressman) Driehaus' Cincinnati office Sunday, and a death threat was phoned in to his Washington office a day later, Mulvey said.

Driehaus, who claims to be pro-life but in reality stopped being so when he supported Barack Obama for President in 2008, is one of the members of the Bart Stupak contingent that abandoned their alleged pro-life beliefs to vote for statist health care in the House Sunday night.

Well, perhaps the death threat was real, and of course if it is it demands a thorough investigation.

But there's a "little" problem with the news about that rock throw:

Oops!

It seems that the Seattle Times couldn't be bothered to do even a bit of simple research. If they had, they might have spared themselves from publishing an editorial that got  the facts about American trade with Cuba completely wrong:

SEN. Maria Cantwell calls our attention to a law, signed by President Obama, allowing Cuba to buy U.S. farm produce and pay after the goods are shipped. The law reverses a Treasury ruling during the Bush years that Cuba had to pay in advance — a ruling that stopped the trade altogether.

As Humberto Fontova of the Babalu Blog colorfully pointed out:

$720 million just last year in U.S. exports to Cuba! We're Cuba's BIGGEST food supplier for almost a decade!...and YET..?!

...And YET the editorial staff of an eminently prestigious big-city newspaper was incapable of the ONE Google search that now makes COMPLETE JACKASSES of them ALL!!!

What's become of America when you can't even go to a horror movie without having to endure Obama propaganda?

Unfortunately, such exists in the recent installment of the hit slasher series "Saw VI."

Readers are encouraged to stow fluids, flammables, and sharp objects before proceeding further, for the following review by Los Angeles Times movie critic Robert Abele is sure to elicit bouts of uncontrollable laughter (h/t Big Hollywood):

In a column today, Salon’s Joe Conason drastically downplays the history of illegality that characterizes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. In his revisionist history of the organization, Conason tries to show that ACORN may commit voter registration fraud, intimidate its employees to prevent them from unionizing, and willingly assist in the trafficking of underage sex slaves, but by and large it is a force for good.

For many years the combined forces of the far right and the Republican Party have sought to ruin ACORN, the largest organization of poor and working families in America.

Ah yes, ACORN is supposedly battling for the rights of the working class. But in 1995, the organization sued the State of California for an exemption to the high minimum wage laws in that state on the grounds that higher wages would mean they would have to employ fewer people. Incidentally, this is the exact same argument that every opponent of minimum wage laws employs, and ACORN has always battled for a higher minimum wage.

Isn't this marvelous?

Americans are struggling to keep their jobs and pay their bills; the White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress want to impose a carbon cap-and-trade scheme along with universal healthcare, both destined to dramatically raise taxes from current levels, and; struggling newspapers in Washington state are getting a 40 percent reduction in business taxes!

I guess preserving liberal media is much more important than the best interest of citizens as reported by the Seattle Times Tuesday:

I think it is finally getting to the point that when an Old Media story goes out over the wires without mentioning the party affiliation of troubled politicians, people naturally assume that all the criminal actions in said story are being perpetrated by Democrats. But, that assumption aside, we are still seeing reports nearly every day that omit the "Democrat" in any story involving criminal Democrats. Here is yet another one.

The Associated Press posted a story on the FBI's probe of questionable campaign donations to Senator Patty Murray and Representative Norm Dicks of Washington state. The possibly worrisome donations were from PMA Group, a lobbying firm founded by an aide of Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania. With all these politician's names being thrown around in the AP report, though, it is curious that not a one of them were ever identified as Democrats. Not once.

The Seattle Times compiles what it calls "The Favor Factory," which it calls "A database of lawmakers, earmarks, and campaign giving."

One noteworthy congressman in the Favor Factory is Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA; picture at right is currently at his home page).

Moran's Favors Factory page for 2008 lists 29 earmarks totaling $40.6 million, and over $890,000 in capaign contributions from earmark recipients.

Recall that Nancy Pelosi promised "Fiscal Restraint If Democrats Win" in a July 2006 Wall street Journal interview about the congressional elections that would be taking place four months later (link is to cato.org, which excerpted the now unavailable WSJ report). She also told the Journal:

“Personally, myself, I’d get rid of all of them,” she said. “None of them is worth the skepticism, the cynicism the public has… and the fiscal irresponsibility of it.”

Rep. Moran begged to differ just one month earlier, using language he would hopefully avoid around the second-graders with whom he is pictured above (actual offensive four-letter word is at link), as reported by a local metro DC community newspaper, the Sun Gazette:

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a major error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted today, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Here's how the Stieg research showing supposed warming was received by the mainstream press:

Can you feel the excitement, the energy, the mystical unity our country is taking on since Barack Obama's election? The Seattle Times sure can.

President-elect Obama is bringing America together, and luckily for reporter Sanjay Bhatt, he had the high privilege of dutifully writing a 42-paragraph metro section story about Obama fans Teresa Pelayo, Sam Song and Tabetha Thomas. The Times took the story out of relative obscurity in the paper's local section to rest on the paper's Web site front page.

But wait, it gets better! These three close friends used to be rivals for delegate slots to the 2008 Democratic Convention. Who said Obama can't perform miracles? The Seattle Times sure didn't:

"Garbage piles up, even after snow has melted," reads a December 29 Seattle Post-Intelligencer story posted to the Web site Sunday evening. Yet nowhere in the story by staffers Brad Wong or Eric Nalder was any blame for the garbage glut laid at the doorstep of the city's Democratic chief executive.

Mayor Greg Nickels may be partly to blame for the trash backlog because of his stubborn refusal to salt the roads during the Emerald City's latest snowstorms. Indeed, as the Seattle Times reported, the city's streets were left snow-packed "by design" (h/t Fausta):

To hear the city's spin, Seattle's road crews are making "great progress" in clearing the ice-caked streets.

But it turns out "plowed streets" in Seattle actually means "snow-packed," as in there's snow and ice left on major arterials by design.

Jeff Poor's recent post (picked up by Drudge) reported on the potential return of the Fairness Doctrine under a President Obama--specifically for the purpose of the governing the internet.

He quoted FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell who said the following: 

“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right. I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else. So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

Lest you think McDowell is being alarmist, consider, for a moment, the Seattle Times's pushback efforts against the erosion of MSM control and the future institution of "Net Neutrality."

It's sort of like Linda Douglass but on the local level, I guess. I'll have to ask our Seattle-area readers to note in the comments section if KING's Robert Mak repeatedly displayed a penchant for gauzy coverage of liberal Mayor Greg Nickels (D).

The 10-time local Emmy-winning reporter is leaving TV news for a job that pays $10,000 more a year than his new boss.

From the Seattle Times (emphasis mine):

One of Seattle's best-known political reporters - KING 5's Robert Mak - has been hired as Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' communications director, the mayor's office announced today.

Mak, known to many viewers as host of the public-affairs program "KING 5 News Up Front," said he wasn't looking for another job when Nickels' office approached him a few weeks ago.

In an effort to back up Obama's gaffe that he'll "talk" to anyone, even terrorists, as if diplomacy in and of itself was a cure all, editorial writer Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times has made a gaffe of his own that, in essence, makes the claim that negotiating with Adolf Hitler was perfectly reasonable even as each concession given to him by Europe's prewar powers obviously gave him every reason to be brave enough to start WWII. Ramsey seems to be trying to justify the appeasement of Hitler in order to give Barack Obama the cover he needs to make his inexperience and naiveté seem less detrimental to his presidential ambitions.

Ramsey is worried, he says, about the "continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938." He feels that it was completely reasonable to cave in to Hitler in those days prior to the war.

Imagine for a moment that a Fox News reporter was arrested in Central Park early in the morning with a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals. Do you think this little nuance would be included in press coverage of this bizarre event?

Probably in the headline and the opening paragraph, right?

Well, for some reason, though news outlets did report the odd happenings in NYC Friday morning when CNN's Richard Quest was officially arrested for loitering and drug possession, from what I can tell, only the New York Post included the "kinky" elements in its article Saturday (emphasis added, h/t NBer Gat New York, picture courtesy CNN):

A federal judge on April 1 ordered Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), a veteran liberal legislator and Saddam Hussein stooge, to pay Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) $1 million for an illegally-taped 1996 phone conversation. Even the Associated Press, which we've taken to task numerous times for dropping party labels, noted McDermott's party affiliation. Not so the Seattle Times, McDermott's hometown paper:

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., says Congressman Jim McDermott owes an Ohio congressman $1 million for leaking an illegally taped phone call to the media.

Today's decision may end the dispute that began in 1996 when John Boehner (BAY'-ner) was taped talking about an ethics case involving Newt Gingrich. The tape reached McDermott who gave it two newspapers. He says it's a free speech issue.

Boehner sued and the case has been in the courts for a decade. A federal court ruled McDermott had no right to release the call.

Just days after the Street of Dreams arsons suspected to be at the hands of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a federal jury found one Briana Waters guilty for her role in a 2001 ELF arson that destroyed the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture.

NewsBusters has noted that the Seattle Times has avoided calling ELF a terrorist or eco-terrorist organization, preferring to call the group simply a "radical environmentalist" organization. Today the paper made some progress as staff writer Mike Carter slapped Waters and her co-conspirators with the label "ecosaboteurs."

But the term sabotage, however, lends the impression of activity engaged in to thwart the military or any commercial enterprise essential to equipping national defense. UW academics studying urban agriculture are fundamentally civilian in nature. Here are some definitions of sabotage available at Answers.com.:

Is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer now backing off from labeling the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) an eco-terrorist outfit?

NewsBusters has noted that whereas the Seattle Times has avoided calling the Street of Dreams arsons as suspected eco-terrorist strikes, the P-I has used the term in headlines and in the text of articles themselves. But an article in today's paper by reporter Paul Shukovsky avoids calling ELF a terror group, although the final paragraph informs readers they can call the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force with tips for investigators.

Instead of labeling ELF an eco-terrorist group, Shukovsky opted for "clandestine cell of radical environmentalists."

As we noted yesterday, Seattle P-I "Big Blog" editor Mónica Guzmán found that most P-I readers approve of the paper tagging ELF as an eco-terror group.

Update below.

Neither the Seattle Times nor the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are high on your average conservative's daily to-read list, but at least the latter is not gun-shy about calling recent suspected Earth Liberation Front (ELF) arsons acts of eco-terrorism.

The Times opted for "radical environmentalists" to tag ELF even though it's pretty clear that investigators clearly think the Street of Dreams fires in Snohomish County, Wash., are terroristic in nature. As reporter Steve Miletich noted in paragraph seven of his March 4 article, "Hunt is on: Who torched the Street of Dreams?":

Working with few clues, federal investigators face a daunting task as they try to determine whether a shadowy group of radical environmentalists torched three multimillion-dollar homes along a Street of Dreams in Snohomish County on Monday.

[...]

A pricey Seattle suburb appears to be the recent target of arson at the hands of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a radical environmentalist group that destroys property in the name of protecting the earth. In other words, ELF is an eco-terrorist organization.

Yet when covering the story, Seattle Times reporter Peyton Whitely refused to use any such label for the ELF. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer did, at least in a photo caption and headline for a story running on the paper's Web site today:

Street of Dreams homes burned, eco-terrorists suspected

Photo caption: "Eco-terrorists are suspected in using explosive devises to destroy or damage several Street of Dreams show homes, which burned in Woodinville."

Last Sunday, from the pen of editorial page editor of the Seattle Times James Vesely, we got a pretty good indication of why the new media of the Internet is so swiftly taking over the traditional role of the old, dead tree media. One word describes it; arrogance. It is an arrogance of the assumed supremacy of the old media and the air of entitlement that it holds dear. It is the presumption that what they write is "truth," that newspapers are the arbiters of that truth, and that journalists are "democracy" personified and that without them we are naught but a "banana republic." And it is the sneering, discountenance with which they look upon the reading public as the great unwashed that has finally caught up with them. However, some are beginning to notice it and unless the dead tree media realizes this truth staring them in the face, they truly are a doomed industry.

The ultra-liberal Seattle Times Op-Ed's the usual 21st century media line; the world is going to hell, only journalists can save us, and everything would be fine if it weren't for that darn Craigslist.

"Media companies, especially newspapers, are by default nearly the lone agents of the democratic form of government."

That statement is actually true, if your version of the word "democratic" uses a big D as opposed to a small d. The mainstream media companies you see today is what's left of 50 years of unchallenged "Democratic" mindset. The reason these bastions of liberal thought are failing is that the Internet age has made their bias apparent to people who, thanks to the Internet age, now have other places to get the news.:

Still smarting from his Memogate spanking, disgraced former "CBS Evening News" anchor Dan Rather is trying to reclaim journalistic glory by trumpeting the claims of a supposed Boeing whistleblower. Paul at Wizbang sees an all-too-familiar scenario:

Stop me if you're heard this one....

A has-been anchorman, trying to reclaim past [false] glory tries to destroy a person or an institution by using accusations from a dubious source back-up by documents of dubious credibility. A big blogosphere welcome back to Dan Rather.

This time his target is Boeing but his reportage skills are about the same. Even without benefit of seeing the report (it airs tonight) there are already problems with it.

What problems? Well apparently the Seattle Times has found that the would-be whistleblower, Vince Weldon, has credibility issues:

You knew this was coming: the Seattle office of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has come out against the FBI's release of photos of two men observed acting suspiciously aboard as many as six different Seattle-area ferry routes in recent week.

The Seattle Times - which published the photos at the FBI's request - reported Thursday that CAIR-Washington "resented" the release of the photos, which the FBI released in order to enlist the public in helping identify and locate the men so the FBI could talk to them. (CAIR also has an excerpted version of the Seattle Times story on its website.)

The Seattle Times today has published the photos of two men the FBI wants to locate and talk to in regards to their suspicious behavior aboard several Puget Sound ferries in recent weeks, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer continues to refuse to do so - even though the photos have now been widely published in the Seattle area and nationally via other media outlets and the blogosphere. As we discussed yesterday, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offered a haiku contest related to the case, but refused to help the FBI locate the men by publishing their photos.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is refusing to run the photos of two men the FBI is seeking to question in connection with suspicious behavior aboard a Puget Sound ferry - behavior that could be a precursor to a terror plot, or could be nothing nefarious at all.

The Seattle PI reports the story here and explains its rationalization for not publishing the photos here. And - in a steller example of complete touchy-feely uselessness - the paper is holding a haiku-writing contest for readers to write about how they feel about the FBI alert and the way the paper handled it.

From the report:

As covered by NewsBusters managing editor Ken Shepherd in his post last Wednesday, Seattle Times executive editor David Boardman scolded his staffers for cheering when news of Karl Rove's resignation from the White House was announced. Now one of those cheering staffers has issued an apology...of sorts.  In a column reeking with self-righteousness while at the same time attacking bloggers for bringing down the level of  journalism,  staff columnist Nicole Brodeur writes:

That was me.

I was one of the people who cheered in The Seattle Times news meeting Monday when it was announced that presidential adviser Karl Rove had resigned.

Day Deux of the "MSNBC Booed Bush" controversy, and Joe Scarborough was looking to make up ground . . .

For those who missed the story, in a burst of candor "Morning Joe" host Scarborough mentioned on yesterday's show that members of the MSNBC newsroom had booed President Bush nearly continuously during the 2003 State of the Union.

Today, Scarborough asserted that most of the boo-birds were gone from the network, and claimed for good measure that rival Fox News Channel is "all Republicans." Joe was peeved that Bill O'Reilly had expounded on the booing incident on last evening's O'Reilly Factor.

View video here [that's MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski making sympathetic sounds in the background.]