CNN has an article posted this AM about the on-going misery in Myanmar resulting from the recent cyclone that devastated the Irrawaddy delta and has left as many as 100,000 dead. The country's paranoid military dictatorship is hampering aid efforts, and as a result, is no doubt adding to the number of dead and injured.

In writing about the U.S. forces in the area poised to help if the dictatorship will only allow international aid, CNN makes the following curious claim (in bold):

When it comes to the economy, "it's not good. Not good," according to Jon Stewart. "But don't take my word for it. Seriously, I'm actually doing very well."

On May 1, "The Daily Show" host was introducing a segment that made light of doom-and-gloom economic reporting on network and cable news. His mash-up highlighted CBS's own "Grim Reaper," Anthony Mason, ABC's Betsy Stark, NBC's Brian Williams and CNN's senior business correspondent Ali Velshi.

Stewart poked hardest at Velshi, whom he called that "Hairless Prophet of Doom."

"Who is that hairless prophet of doom and how can we appease his anger, please?" Stewart pleaded, "If we give you our hair will you give us back our money? Will you do it, sir? I beg of you - Velshi!"

Velshi responded to Stewart's charge on CNN Friday and in a column on CNN.com.

In a 10:15 EDT post today at CNN.com, producer Bill Mears noted the 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court upholding an Indiana law requiring photo ID in order to vote. Yet Mears left out that Democrats who challenged the law were unable to produce a single voter who could prove he or she was unable to vote due to the law nor did Mears point out mechanisms the Indiana law has in place for provisional balloting and free voter ID cards.

Here's Mears's four-paragraph blog post at the CNN Political Ticker:

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The Supreme Court on Monday backed Indiana's law requiring voters to show photo identification, despite concerns thousands of elderly, poor, and minority voters could be locked out of their right to cast ballots.

The 6-3 vote allows Indiana to require the identification when it holds its statewide primary next month.

And here we go again. I'm all for catchy headlines, but CNN has to be a bit more responsible with its choices when reporting on gasoline prices.

"Gas prices climbing with no end in sight," reads a hyperbolic April 22 CNN.com headline. "No end in sight" might make for great left-wing populist rhetoric, but it's hardly balanced economic reporting.

Indeed, the only thing to justify the "no end" language was citing gasoline analyst Trilby Lundberg as saying "she does not expect the prices to go down anytime soon," hardly a dire "no end in sight" forecast that conjures up notions of never-ending price increases rather than an eventual price plateau.

In a head spinning effort to make McCain the bad guy of a story, CNN has taken the voiced support for Barack Obama by the terrorist organization Hamas and turned it into a finger pointing at Republican John McCain for being mean to Obama. Talk about spin, CNN has really done a doosie here. Taking the words of the terrorists in Hamas and placing them in McCain's mouth is simply unbelievable. But that's exactly what they've done.

CNN's Political Ticker Blog showed us some gymnastics worthy of the Olympics -- or more correctly a contortionist -- to turn the words of a terrorist into those of John McCain in their ridiculously titled post, "McCain camp says Hamas wants Obama."

It's a sad story from New Jersey, where an errant shell fragment killed a little girl's cat. But Bettnet can't believe the verbal incompetence of the Associated Press in describing it. Their headline: "Misfired artillery crashes into girl’s bed."

A piece of artillery that was apparently misfired by the military crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home miles away Friday and injured a young girl's cat, which had to be euthanized, officials said.

Picatinny officials told The Star-Ledger of Newark they were investigating. The base had been conducting tests Friday, and it wasn't immediately clear what type of artillery hit the home.

In a post mockingly titled "Watch out for flying artillery," blogger Domenico Bettinelli mocked the reporter's complete lack of dictionary skills:

E-mail tipster Mike Huggins pointed out to NewsBusters that as of 4:30 p.m. EDT today, he found but one media mention of Obama backer Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.V.) smear of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) among the seven major online news sources he checked. Rockefeller's comment, which he now regrets, is also arguably a smear of U.S. military fighter pilots past and present.

From an April 8 AP wire story (emphasis mine):

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues," Rockefeller said.

Sounds kind of like Bill Maher, doesn't it?

Huggins noted that while he searched the Web sites for the Washington Post, L.A. Times, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABCNews.com, and CBSNews.com, he found but one story on the incident and that on ABC's Web site.

Wall Street saw a 391-point rally on the Dow today, the first day of the second quarter. ABCNews.com saw the development worthy of a "Breaking News" tag towards the top of its Web page and put the story in the top headlines rotation.

But it appears that ABCNews.com was alone among its competitors in trumpeting the news. I checked numerous Web sites shortly after 5:30 and found ABC's to be the only one to give the rally top billing. [see the screencaps below the page break]

Update at bottom of post: Williams responds (18:24 EDT)

I have to hand it to the AP this time. They actually noted the political party affiliation of another Democrat in legal hot water. So did CNN.com and Reuters.

But for some reason, MSNBC's Pete Williams left out the party affiliation of Louisiana's Rep. William Jefferson (D) in this March 31 item at the First Read blog:

In something of a surprise, the U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear an appeal involving the FBI's unprecedented search of the Capitol Hill offices of Congressman William Jefferson.

A federal appeals court ruled that the FBI wrongly used its own agents look through the material seized to determine what might be covered by congressional privilege. This is a considerable victory for Jefferson, largely validating his objections to the search and giving him certain bragging rights. But prosecutors claim they have sufficient evidence independent of the search. The cash in his freezer, for example, was found well before Jefferson's offices were searched.

Color me unsurprised.

The Associated Press, reporting the indictment of Puerto Rico Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila (pictured at right via AFP/Getty Images file photo) failed to note Vila is a Democrat, let alone that he is an Obama superdelegate.

But Vila's party affiliation is hardly a state secret. Indeed, ABC's Jake Tapper noted the Obama connection on his Political Punch blog this morning:

Perhaps it was his attempt at balance, but CNN's Bill Mears cast a cloud over the constitutional right to keep and bear arms by stacking his March 18 article about today's District of Columbia v. Heller case in "personal" terms that focused heavily on the victim of a tragic school shooting. What's more, Mears put the constitutional language about the right to keep and bear arms within the dreaded dismissive quote marks (emphasis mine):

Shelly Parker wants to know why she cannot keep a handgun in her house. As a single woman she has been threatened by neighborhood drug dealers in a city where violent crime rates are on the rise.

"In the event that someone does get in my home, I would have no defense, except maybe throw my paper towels at them," she said. But Parker lives in the nation's capital, which does not allow its residents to possess handguns.

Elilta "Lily" Habtu thinks that is how it should be. She knows about gun violence firsthand, surviving bullets to the head and arm fired by the Virginia Tech University shooter nearly a year ago.

Al Gore has made a lot of money and publicity with his crusade against global warming. I have written in the past how this whole crusade seems to be based on a Big Lie, and its real purpose appears more intended to get global government so the rest of the world (ie. the United Nations) can gain control over the United States' many assets without having to go through the awkward exercise of actually getting a their authority recognized by the US Congress.

However, there has been a backlash against the Gore Warming crusade (fueled partly by Gore's own hypocrisy in using large motorcades, private jets and his lavish lifestyle- none of which are designed to show others that he is serious about the entire issue. Not that the press has bothered to do any real reporting- they have fallen in line with Gore's crusade lock, stock and barrel- refusing to report on critics and making statements equating said critics with Nazis and other undesirables. However, the evidence is mounting that Gore and his global warming friends are no more accurate in their claims than Newsweek was in its new ice age campaign in the 1970s.

A few days before Eliot Spitzer went down in flames, a highly-connected Barack Obama* [Update: Kilpatrick has not committed to Obama] superdelegate was mired in accusations of corruption, bid-rigging and a dead-stripper sex scandal. Usually the media love to report the downfall of party bigwigs, but not in the case of Detroit's youngest mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Much of the media downplayed the mayor's scandals and did not report his party, let alone his status as a Democratic power player who can influence the election.

Kwame, who is the son of Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-MI), is not just any mayor. He was a Democratic rising star, who spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and is the superdelegate to the 2008 convention thanks to his position as Vice President of the Conference of Democratic Mayors.

But now “The First Hip Hop Mayor” is in serious trouble, with members of the city council calling for his resignation. Controversy has engulfed his two terms, and the latest bout involves a report that his wife assaulted a now-dead stripper whose shooting is still unsolved. At the same time, the mayor's longtime pal Bobby Ferguson won at least $45 million in city contracts while reportedly receiving inside information from Kilpatrick and his chief of staff.

In rural parts of the country, it happens from time to time; a person appears uninvited on someone's property, and the landowner tells them that "elsewhere" is a better place to be. Typically these confrontations are benign in nature, even when on occasion either the property owner or the trespasser turns out to be armed.

Such was the case in Texas this past weekend when a Danish reporter wandered into the yard of an elderly Texas woman, and she shooed him off, a gun apparently in hand.

CNN's Ed Henry made quite a big deal out of the incident, promoting it as a near "international incident" writing in the lede that the Dane came "this close to getting shot."

He characterized the confrontation this way:

During the four weeks preceding February 20, New York Times Company stock had been staging a nice comeback.

Lord only knows that the company's long-suffering shareholders, who before then had seen the share price drop more than 70% since June 2002, a point in time that roughly coincides with the onset of the Old Gray Lady's seemingly intractable case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, welcomed any kind of reversal of fortune.

For a while, they had it. From a intra-day low of $14.01 on January 23, the stock rose over 50%, closing at $21.07 last Wednesday.

But on Thursday and Friday, that climb was halted abruptly, and partially reversed. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.4% in those two days, and the S&P 500 dipped 0.5%, NYT stock dove almost 9.7%, closing Friday at $19.03.

Back in 1986, Time and other news organizations attempted to whip up hysteria about a new firearm on the market, the Glock 17, attempting to state that it could pass easily though airport metal detectors, and therefore become a favored weapon for terrorists or hijackers

The manufactured Glock hysteria was of course false; the barrel, slide, sights, and of course the pistol cartridges themselves are made of dense metals, and the promised "new guns made entirely of plastic" have never materialized on the consumer market.

Yesterday I ran across another attempt to create a false hysteria, this time about painted guns. Yes, really. (video below page break)

It's quite interesting how CNN.com words the bios of the various presidential candidates. Interesting in that the Republican candidates have negative comments included, whereas the Democrats do not. Case in point: Here are the GOP candidate bios (my emphasis):

John McCain: The U.S. senator from Arizona ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush.

Mitt Romney: The former Massachusetts governor made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 1994.

Rudy Giuliani: The two-term mayor of New York City once ran for the U.S. Senate, but dropped out in 2000.

Give CNN points for stating the obvious, if points are deserved for such a prosaic report. But, don't forget that by doing so, it is their gleeful kick in the ribs to George W. Bush and that particular aspect was the goal in the first place for reporting that the race for the White House "overshadowed" Bush's State of the Union speech.

From the headline to the last word of the piece, there is little by way of new or prescient "analysis" relayed in a report half of which delights to say how supposedly irrelevant Bush has become. Proclaiming, "Analysis: Bush overshadowed by presidential race," CNN doesn't give us much by way of thoughtful "analysis:"